During the 1920s she worked for the post office in Hamburg as a telegrapher and became a political activist (KPD), serving at least three prison terms during the twelve Nazi years because of her resistance to the régime.
Despite her obvious intelligence, she received only basic schooling before moving on to train for clerical work in the dispatches department of the Hamburg Telegraph Union.
By the later 1920s she had found a clear purpose in the need to resist the seemingly unstoppable rise of populist demagoguery, which her journalistic contributions enabled her to fulfill.
On 12 September 1933 Voegt was released from her job with the post office as a consequence of the recently enacted "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" ("Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums"), a law designed to remove from public service those individuals whom the régime deemed unreliable for reasons of race and / or politics.
Hedwig Voegt's eightieth birthday was marked by a tribute characteristic of the time and place, which appeared in the Leipzig University party newspaper.
The tribute quoted Dr. Werner Fuchs, First Secretary of the party's sectional leadership (Kreisleitung): She was arrested again in December 1934 and sentenced a few months later, to a two-year jail term for "preparing high treason" (Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat).
Voegt resumed her political work and became a member of the party leadership team in the Wasserkante (Waterside) region (which included Hamburg).
[1] Having come to her academic career relatively late in life, Voegt was bewildered that when she reached her sixtieth birthday in 1963 she was nevertheless required to retire from her university teaching post.
From here she continued to publish on her literary areas of expertise: late eighteenth century authors on whom she published books included Johann Heinrich Voß, Georg Friedrich Rebmann [de], Johann Heinrich Merck, Georg Kerner [de] and Adolph Freiherr Knigge.