Childhood and education

Hilde Lange was born in Bernburg, Anhalt, and grew up in Berlin, in to a middle class and liberal minded Protestant family,^[6] the daughter of the engineer Heinz Lange and his wife, Adele.^[7] Growing up in the culturally inclined liberal ambience of a middle-class family awakened in her an early interest in classical music and German literature: this would stay with her throughout her life.^[8] In 1921 she successfully completed her school career at the Fichtenberg High School in Steglitz on the south side of Berlin.

She was among the first women to study the law of Germany, which she did at Berlin, Heidelberg, and Hamburg from 1921 to 1924.

Politics and early career

Afterwards, she worked as a practicing attorney in Berlin-Wedding for the Rote Hilfe, a Communist aid organization. In 1926 she married the medical doctor, Georg Benjamin, the brother of writer Walter Benjamin and of her friend, the academic Dora Benjamin. Georg and Hilde's son, Michael was born at the end of 1932.

In 1926 she quit the moderate left-wing SPD and in 1927 joined her husband in the Communist Party. Because of her political convictions, she was forbidden to practice law after 1933. Briefly jobless, with her husband removed to a concentration camp (from which, on this occasion, he was released later in the year) directly after the Reichstag fire, she returned for a time to live with her parents along with her small son: she then obtained a position providing legal advice for the Soviet trade association in Berlin. During World War II, she was forced to work in a factory from 1939–45. Her Jewish husband was killed at the KZ Mauthausen in 1942.

Post war in the German Democratic Republic

After the war, she joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in 1946 and was vice president of the Supreme Court of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1949 to 1953. In that capacity, she assisted with the Waldheim Trials and presided over a series of show trials against those identified as political undesirables, such as Johann Burianek and Wolfgang Kaiser, as well as against Jehovah's Witnesses.^[9] Her behavior and statements from the bench and regular death sentences earned Hilde Benjamin the nicknames, "Red Hilde", "The Red Freisler," and, "The Red Guillotine."^[10]

From 1949 to 1967 she was a member of the Volkskammer and from 1954 to 1989, a member of the Central Committee of the SED. In 1953, she succeeded Max Fechner as Minister of Justice. GDR leader Walter Ulbricht asked her to resign in 1967, ostensibly for health reasons.

Benjamin was instrumental in authoring the penal code and the code of penal procedure of the GDR and played a decisive role in the reorganization of the country's legal system. From 1967 to her death, she held the chair for the history of the judiciary at the Deutsche Akademie für Staats- und Rechtswissenschaft in Potsdam-Babelsberg. She died in East Berlin in April 1989. She was cremated and honoured with burial in the Pergolenweg Ehrengrab section of Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.