As a young woman she moved to Berlin where she worked as a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company, and danced for productions of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.
Despite their Jewish ancestry, Sacher-Masoch and her mother were afforded a degree of protection from the Nazis due to Artur's World War I military record and his status as a well-regarded Austrian writer (under the pseudonym Michael Zorn).
Having opposed Hitler since the Anschluss, and witnessing atrocities against Jews in the streets of Vienna, Sacher-Masoch and her parents used their home to conceal Socialist pamphlets, narrowly evading detection by the Gestapo.
When the British arrived to occupy part of the liberated city, Sacher-Masoch fell in love with Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, a British Army officer and spy who called on the family to inform them that Alexander von Sacher-Masoch was alive.
She also spent some time as a dance teacher at "Bylands", Stratfield Turgis, near Basingstoke, Hampshire, a boarding school for maladjusted children.