the sailors' insurrection. The document was authored by someone using the name "Anti-Nautikus". It subsequently emerged that Anti-Nautikus was a pseudonym used by Sachse himself. On any suspected culpability regarding the naval mutiny, Sachse maintained that he had already been expelled from the navy and suffered five year's loss of civic rights, and was in any case the beneficiary of the judicial amnesty of 12 November 1918. On 22 January 1927 Willy Sachse was set free from his prison cell. It was presumably the same text by "Anti-Nautikus" that was published under the title "Germany's Revolutionary Sailors" ("Deutschlands revolutionäre Matrosen") during 1925, with a foreword added by Ernst Thälmann, a party leader. In January 1926 the publication was confiscated. Despite being in prison, from May 1926 Sachse was listed as the Arts and Supplement editor ("Kultur- und Feuilletonredakteur") on the Leipzig-based "Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung" ("Saxony Workers' Newspaper"), then published on behalf of the party under the editorial direction of Paul Böttcher. Meanwhile, despite his release from prison at the start of 1927, he continued to face questioning from the Parliamentary Committee of Investigation into the Maritime Mutiny of 1917. It was only on 2 April 1928 that the investigation concluded with an acquittal, due to insufficiency of the evidence against him ("mangels genügender Beweise"). The Communist Party of Germany was closely linked to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at this time, and the increasingly savage tensions in Moscow between Stalin and those whom he suspected (not necessarily without cause) of wishing to replace him were reflected in growing internal party divisions in Berlin. Willy Sachse was identified by the party leadership as a supporter of August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler. Sachse had been having his own differences with the party leadership since at least as far back as 1923, and when, at the end of 1928, Thalheimer and Brandler were expelled from the party, Sachse was among those removed at the same time. Those expelled set up an alternative communist party, known as the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition) ("Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Opposition) " / KPDO). Sachse joined the KPDO in Leipzig, although he left it again in 1932 or 1933. but in most respects he appears to have withdrawn from political engagement before 1933. During the early 1930s he also worked briefly as an employee with Willi Münzenberg's media conglomerate. Starting in 1934, writing under several different names