A method is disclosed to protect a power converter arrangement with a power converter that has a DC side that is connected to a DC intermediate circuit, an AC side, and controllable switches that can be controllably switched at a high frequency to invert the DC voltage of the DC intermediate circuit into an AC voltage. A protective device that can be activated and deactivated is provided to protect the power converter from overload by connecting an external thyristor rectifier bridge with a brake resistor (R b ext ) to the AC side of the power converter. If a predetermined error situation is detected (51), the external thyristors are triggered to turn on, to activate the protective device (52). If it is detected that the predetermined error situation has disappeared (53), the external thyristors are turned off (54) by ending the triggering of the thyristors and actively controlling the power converter switches to produce a sequence of voltage pulses of suitable polarity and amplitude to serve as a thyristor turn-off sequence that is applied to the protective device to force commutation of the current from the protective device to the power converter, to deactivate the protective device. A power converter arrangement with a device to protect against overload is also disclosed.