The French military claimed Dix as a prisoner of war and sent him to a camp in Alsace in 1945. According to Peters, one officer, an art enthusiast, recognized him, commissioning private portraits and an altarpiece. One of the paintings from this time, Portrait of a Prisoner (1945), depicts a melancholic bald man against a backdrop of thorny trees. The satire of Dix’s earlier work has disappeared in this image, replaced with serious gloom. In 1946, the French released Dix. He returned to Germany and continued painting there until he died in 1969.

Dix’s varied oeuvre is, ultimately, a record of a nation in flux. The trajectory of his subjects—from the horrors of war to vibrant Weimar characters and back to battlefield angst—reflects Germany’s moral decline. But his paintings remain disturbingly poignant today not because they capture specific moments in history, but because they exude a timeless sense of cultural malaise. The Nazis labeled Dix a “degenerate,” but the term is better applied to the society he depicted—cannibalizing itself and hurtling toward destruction.