Curt Rothenberger

Curt Ferdinand Rothenberger (30 June 1896 – 1 September 1959) was a German lawyer, judge and Nazi legal theorist who rose to become the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice in Nazi Germany.

Rothenberger studied law at Humboldt, Kiel and Hamburg universities, and saw action on the Western Front during the First World War. Steadily working his way up through the Hamburg courts, he became chief presiding judge at the Landesgericht in 1932. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933, shortly after the Nazi seizure of power.

Along with a group of lawyers within the party, Rothenberger played a major role in imposing the Nazi ideology on the German legal system. He was made president of the Hamburg Higher Regional Court in 1935. Rothenberger installed party loyalists in leading judicial positions, purged Jewish judges, and advocated for continuing reforms well into the Second World War. In 1942, he was appointed State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice. His radical proposals drew the ire of high-ranking party members including Martin Bormann, who arranged for his removal a year later, after which he worked as a notary in Hamburg.

Rothenberger was arrested by British troops at the end of the war. He was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Judges' Trial at Nuremberg in 1947 and was sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Released in 1950, he resumed life in the legal profession until inquiries into his past arose publicly once again in early 1959, and he committed suicide shortly after.