Leiser noted that "this official does not resign his position or leave Germany because he feels that he can best fight the regime by keeping eyes and ears open as to who is in prison and why, so far as any one person can become so informed, and by treating the people in his charge with as much decency as he can 'get away with.

'"[10] One of Leiser's goals in Nazi Germany was to collect information on the family members of political prisoners;[11] in 1940, she translated, edited, and published Refugee, the autobiographical account by Hilde Koch.

The German anti-Nazi activist met Leiser, introduced by a friend, after she had experienced that her husband, F. Koch, was imprisoned in Sonnenburg concentration camp and was released;[11] he later fled to the United States.

[a][11] Refugee contained an "intense" recollection of the Nazi coup and the events of January 30, 1933, in what scholar Anna Iuso saw as a tragic mood; at that time, such autobiographical accounts were popular, but anonymously, with the origin masked.

[13] When she learned of the execution of her friend Mildred Harnack by the Nazis in 1943, she wrote a poem of 18 pages, "To and from the guillotine", remembering and imagining stations of her life and death in detail.