remove not working here are no devices in this ring, or all devices have been deleted

[schermannr]

Due a missconfiguration of my rings I tried to removed the ring swift-ring-builder account.builder remove <ip_addr>. Then I tried to trigger the rebalance cmd:
An error has occurred during ring validation. Common
causes of failure are rings that are empty or do not
have enough devices to accommodate the replica count.
Original exception message:
 There are no devices in this ring, or all devices have been deleted

If I list my account.builder they are still in the list with a flag DEL. So I cannot add them again, if I do so I will get following error msg:
Device 0 already uses <ip addr>:<port>/sdc.
The on-disk ring builder is unchanged.