When she was 15 she moved to Leipzig and entered domestic service, developing an acute awareness of the great disparity between the life opportunities of the poor and those of the ruling classes.

While living as a housewife and young mother she was able to progress her political education through careful reading of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, a socialist daily paper, and of the women's magazine Die Gleichheit ("Equality"), and became increasingly committed to socialist politics and the extension of women's rights, trusted by SPD party comrades in Saxe-Altenburg, at that stage still a relatively autonomous territory within Germany.

She involved herself in setting up women's groups in the SPD and on local committees for the Workers' Welfare ("Arbeiterwohlfahrt"/ AWO) movement.

In 1929/30 she took on chairmanship if the Worker's Welfare group for Greater Thüringia and made it her objective to ease the financial burdens on working families.

During the increasingly frenzied final years of the Weimar period she spoke out against national rearmament and the dismantling of social welfare structures.

At the AWO regional conference of 1930 the movement adopted a resolution protesting in the sharpest terms against the threatened institutional destruction in the areas of social and welfare policy which the fascist structures proposed for Thüringia incorporated.

[1] She was rearrested in August 1944, in the context of the mass round-up of those who had been politically involved before 1933 that the government implemented following the unsuccessful assassination attempt against the country's leader.

[3][2] In the concentration camp she met the communist former Reichstag deputy Johanna Himmler [de]: the two formed what became a lifelong friendship.

In Berlin, on 15 June 1945 Emma Sachse took part in the (re-)founding of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the establishment of the Free German Trade Union Federation ("Freier Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund " / FDGB).

On 1 July 1945 US troops withdrew and the Red army moved in: Altenburg, like the rest of Thuringia, was to be administered under the Soviet Union.