Greve then found a job as a general counsel with an industrial company in Middle Germany and married Helene Greve from Greiz. He left his work close before the German defeat to live with his parents-in-law. By the end of the Second World War the liberating US occupiers appointed Greve the first post-Nazi era county commissioner (Landrat) of the Greiz District in Thuringia, however, when in July 1945 the area was handed over to the Soviet occupation zone in Germany the new Soviet occupiers dismissed him as county commissioner and he, his wife and their three daughters, took refuge in Wagenfeld, meanwhile in the British occupation zone in Germany. Living in Wagenfeld he received the legal mandate of his exiled co-sister-in-law, member of the displaced Heilbrunn family of textile industrialists, to reclaim their assets there from the Aryanisers in which he succeeded already in 1945 – with ranks of German authorities still interspersed with more or less identifiable supporters and former members of the Nazi party.
