She is noted for her starring roles in then controversial stage plays and films produced during Germany's Weimar Republic and the early years of the Third Reich.

In 1931, she was given the lead role in Gestern und heute, the film adaptation of a play she had done there, but now called Mädchen in Uniform, a tale set in a Prussian boarding school for girls.

During one meeting with propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who advised Thiele to "familiarise" herself with National Socialism, she replied "I don't blow with the wind each time it changes directions".

Toward the end of her life, Western feminists researching the history of Mädchen in Uniform sought her out, and she enjoyed a small measure of renewed cult celebrity before she died in 1984.

In 1998, German film historians Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramman noted "her acting success may well have been based upon her image which met the homo-erotic desires of both men and women, though perhaps more those of women", and that Hertha Thiele "told us she would have liked to have played a 'proper love scene' with a man, once in her life: her image, moulded by men, didn't allow her the expression of this desire".