People of the Revolution and the USSR

East Germany Communism 1892–1973 ○ Natural death

First East German justice minister, dismissed and imprisoned in 1953 after opposing the prosecution of striking workers

A toolmaker from Berlin, he joined the SPD in 1910 and sat in the Prussian Landtag from 1928 to 1933. Under the Nazis he took part in a resistance group and was twice imprisoned. After the war he supported the forced merger of the SPD and KPD, sat on the SED’s Central Committee, and in October 1949 became the GDR’s first Minister of Justice. In the trial of the Gladow gang he had adult criminal law applied unlawfully so that a death sentence was possible. In an interview with Neues Deutschland on 30 June 1953 he said that members of the 17 June strike leadership would not be punished on mere suspicion; denounced as an “enemy of the state and the party”, he was dismissed, expelled and arrested, and sentenced to eight years. Released and pardoned in 1956, readmitted to the party in 1958, he died in 1973.

East Germany Communism 1902–1989 ○ Natural death

East German jurist who succeeded Fechner as justice minister after the 1953 uprising and led its harsh political trials

Born into a liberal middle-class family in Bernburg, Anhalt, she was among the first women to study law in Germany. A Social Democrat, she married the physician Georg Benjamin, brother of Walter Benjamin, in 1926 and joined the KPD in 1927. Barred from practising law under the Nazis, she lost her husband in Mauthausen in 1942. After the war she worked in the justice administration of the Soviet zone, and as vice-president of the GDR Supreme Court presided over show trials of political undesirables and Jehovah’s Witnesses. On 15 July 1953 she succeeded Max Fechner, who had opposed prosecuting the striking workers, as minister of justice, and her heavy sentences against those arrested in June earned her the names “Red Hilde” and “the Red Freisler”. Ulbricht forced her to resign in 1967. She died in East Berlin in 1989.