[1] She worked with the powerful Party Central Committee of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) though she was never herself a member of it.
[n 1] Régime change arrived in January 1933 and the new government lost little time in imposing one-party dictatorship, one effect of which was to make political activity (except in support of the Nazi party) illegal.
She herself was arrested later in 1933 for "illegal party-political activity", and in 1934 sentenced to six years in prison for "preparing high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat").
[1] By 1941 the country was at war, and Emmi Thomas was transferred directly from the correctional institution to Ravensbrück concentration camp[1] where fellow inmates recruited her to work in the infirmary.
The release was conditional, however, on working as a domestic servant at the home of the concentration camp doctor, the Baron von Bodmann.
The SED itself was founded in April 1946 as a more broadly based replacement, at least within the Soviet occupation zone, for the Communist Party.
[4] It was in the course of her work for the Central Committee that Emmi Thoma came across Georg Handke whom she had last seen in September 1934 when the two of them were among those arrested for participating in an illegal political meeting.
The next year she became a member of the secretariat of the Berlin branch of the Democratic Women's League ("Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands" / DFD).
Seats in the legislature were allocated after general elections according to a predetermined quota to candidates acceptable to the ruling party.