Jacobs was the secretary to a Jewish patent attorney and (from 1934 onwards) a member of the Confessing Church.

She joined a group centred on the lawyer Franz Herbert Kaufmann which, from 1940 onwards, hid Jews fleeing Nazi persecution and helped them to escape from Germany.

Jacobs hid some Jews in her own house out of a Christian-Socialist motivation, until she was denounced in 1943 and subsequently convicted to two and a half years' imprisonment in a zuchthaus or penitentiary.

Jacobs was a member of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation since its foundation in 1949 and was honoured by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

The antisemitic Nuremberg Laws (1935), that arbitrarily excluded a section of the population from citizenship, especially got under my skin.