much about this letter that remains a mystery but, regardless of why and how, the authorities commuted Sachse's death sentence, substituting a 15-year jail term, while the lifetime loss of citizen's rights was replaced with a finite five year deprivation. In the context of the November revolution Sachse was freed from the prison at Rendsburg at the end of 1918. According to one version he was physically extracted by revolutionary sailors: another version indicates simply that he was a beneficiary of a judicial amnesty on 12 November 1918. Both versions agree that the prison was stormed, and that the subsequent amnesty was no more than a pragmatic judicial acceptance of something the authorities had been unable to prevent. Once at liberty (unless he had already done so) Sachse joined recently newly formed Independent Social Democratic Party ("Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / USPD) which had broken away from the mainstream Social Democratic Party in 1917 as the result of increasingly fevered disagreement within the party over whether or not to back parliamentary votes to fund the war. During the postwar revolutionary period Sachse was a member of the Soldiers' and Workers' Council in Leipzig. As the USPD itself split apart, at the end of 1920, Sachse was part of the majority that switched to the recently launched Communist Party of Germany. The next year he was one of the leaders of the short-lived March Action (workers' revolt) in central Germany. In 1922 he became a party official, listed as the full-time party secretary for the party's Bitterfeld subregion ("Unterbezirk Bitterfeld"). At the seventh party congress, held in Jena in 1921, and again at the eighth party congress, held in Leipzig in 1924, Sachse was elected to the party Central Committee ("Zentralausschuß"). In February 1923 he succeeded Georg Schumann as policy chief for the party's Halle-Merseburg region. In 1924 the party leadership may have sent him to Frankfurt am Main to take over as policy chief for the party's Hessen region. Confusingly, in Frankfurt he undertook his party work using the pseudonym "Schumann". Later he was transferred to Hamburg where, now using the party pseudonym "Willy Halle", in October 1925 he was appointed policy chief (later organisation chief) for the party's Wasserkant ("Waterside") region. It is often hard to determine just what tasks the position of an active party official actually involved. Sources seeking to build up a comrade's revolutionary credentials may