Jurists from Berlin

Hilde Neumann (born Hilde Martha Betty Rosenfeld: 13 April 1905, in Berlin-Karlshorst – 11 September 1959, in Berlin) was a German lawyer.She was politically leftwing and of Jewish provenance: she spent the Nazi years in exile. In 1947 she returned to Berlin and resumed her political focus, becoming a senior legal official in the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED), which by 1949 had become the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) which was formally established in October of that year. She also served as editor in chief of "Neue Justiz", an East German monthly specialist journal concerned with legal matters.

Hans Bernd von Haeften (18 December 1905 – 15 August 1944) was a German jurist during the Nazi era. A member of the German Resistance against Adolf Hitler, he was arrested and executed in the aftermath of the failed 20 July plot.

Theodor Hermann Sternberg (5 January 1878 – 18 April 1950) was a German legal philosopher serving as a foreign advisor in Meiji period Japan, where he was an important contributor to the development of civil law in Japan.

Bernhard Weiss (30 July 1880 – 29 July 1951) was a German lawyer and Vice President of the Berlin police during the Weimar Republic. A member of the liberal Deutsche Demokratische Partei, Weiss was known as a key player in the political tensions during the Weimar Republic and a staunch defender of parliamentary democracy against extremists on the left and right.

Martha Mosse (29 May 1884 in Berlin — 2 September 1977 in Berlin) was a German lawyer who was Prussia's first female teacher at the Berlin Police Headquarters. Because of her Jewish origin, she was given a professional ban during Germany's period under Nazi government and deported in 1943 to the ghetto Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now Terezín in the Czech Republic). Mosse survived the Holocaust and was a witness in the Nuremberg trials.She left the "German Center for Youth Welfare" in 1916 and initially attended law lectures in Heidelberg and Berlin as a guest student. However, since she had not taken the Abitur, she was unable to obtain a regular degree. Nevertheless, she was allowed to obtain a doctorate in law in Heidelberg in August 1920 with her dissertation Erziehungsanspruch des Kindes. Subsequently, with special permission, she was able to intern at the Berlin-Schöneberg District Court in the capacity of a legal clerk for six months and was then employed as a legal assistant at the Prussian Ministry of Welfare.She worked for the Berlin Criminal Police and the Traffic Department at police headquarters from August 1948 until her retirement in 1953. After that, she was still involved with the Berlin Women's Association until the 1970s, and was deputy chairwoman for a time. There she devoted herself in particular to the Women's Movement's Committee on Aid to the Aged. Her "Memoirs," appendix: The Jewish Community of Berlin 1934-1943, was published in July 1958.

Franz Kaufmann (5 January 1886 – 17 February 1944) was a German jurist murdered in the Holocaust. His role helping underground Jews survive in hiding in Berlin and his execution are documented in The Forger, the memoirs of Cioma Schönhaus.Kaufmann was born to Jewish parents on 5 January 1886 and baptized a Protestant. He served in the first World War in the 10th Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment receiving, among other medals, the Iron Cross. After being wounded he was discharged from the army in 1918 as a reserve lieutenant. He obtained a doctorate in law and political science and in 1922 was appointed to a specialist post in government finances in the Prussian ministry of the interior. He later became chief secretary of the Reich Public Accounts Office, in the finance ministry.In 1936, because of his Jewish origins, he was dismissed from his post as chief secretary. When World War II broke out in 1939, he volunteered for the Red Cross but was refused, again due to his Jewish origins. He continued to enjoy privileged status due his then so-called racially mixed marriage to an Aryan-classified woman and because he brought up his daughter as a Christian.Kaufmann joined a bible study group with The Confessing Church at Berlin-Dahlem in 1940, and—with other members of the church—began to supply post-office identity cards to on-the-run Jews. Ultimately he headed an underground group that created and supplied all manner of fake documents to underground Jews, including certificates of Aryan descent, driving licenses, and food ration cards. These documents were essential to the survival of many Berlin Jews.He was arrested in August 1943. No charges were laid against him, since as a Jew in Nazi Germany he was subject not to German law but to police power. On 17 February 1944 he was taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and shot.

Margarete Berent (July 9, 1887, in Berlin – June 23, 1965, in New York), also known as Margareth Berent or Grete Berent in the United States, was the first woman lawyer in Prussia. She was the co-founder of the Association of Women Jurists and Association of German Women Academicians. As a Jew, she suffered from persecution during the Nazi Regime and fled via Switzerland, Italy, and Chile to the United States, where she finally arrived in 1940. After studying American law, she opened her second own law firm, now in the US, in 1951.

Ernst Heilmann (13 April 1881 – 3 April 1940) was a German jurist and politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Born in Berlin, then in Prussia, Heilmann attended the University of Berlin and majored in law and political science.
During the First World War, Heilmann was a proponent of the German party truce (Burgfriedenspolitik). He gained a seat in the Reichstag in the 1928 German federal election. Not long after Hitler and the Nazis seized power (Machtergreifung), Heilmann was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the first of a series of concentration camps in which he was to spend nearly seven years.From February 1937, Heilmann was kept in Dachau concentration camp until he was transferred in September 1938 to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was executed in April 1940.

Julius Rudolph Ottomar Freiherr von Minutoli (30 August 1804, in Berlin – 5 November 1860, in Khaneh Zanian Caravanserai, near Shiraz, Persia) was a Prussian chief of police, diplomat, scientist, and author, as well as a gifted draughtsman.