Early Life
Schlegelberger was born into a Protestant salesman's family in Königsberg. His father worked in cereal trade sales.
His forebears (among them Balthasar Schlögelberger) had been among the Protestants expelled from Salzburg, Austria in 1731–32 and given refuge in East Prussia.
Schlegelberger went to the old-town Gymnasium in Königsberg, where he did his school-leaving examination in 1894. He studied law beginning in 1894 in Königsberg and from 1895 to 1896 in Berlin. In 1897 he sat the state legal examination scoring fairly well.
At the University of Königsberg — or according to documents from his trial the University of Leipzig — on 1 December 1899 came his graduation to Doctor of Law with the theme "May government representatives be placed at our disposal as officials because of their voting?"
On 9 December 1901 Schlegelberger wrote the great state law examination, passing with a mark of "good". On 21 December 1901 he became a court Assessor at the Königsberg local court, and on 17 March 1902 assistant judge at the Königsberg State Court. On 16 September 1904 he became a judge at the State Court in Lyck (now Ełk). In early May 1908, he went to the Berlin State Court and in the same year was appointed assistant judge at the Berlin Court of Appeals (Kammergericht). In 1914 he was appointed to the Kammergericht Council (Kammergerichtsrat) in Berlin, where he stayed until 1918.
On 1 April 1918 Schlegelberger became an associate at the Reich Justice Office. On 1 October of that year, he was appointed to the Secret Government Court and Executive Council. In 1927, he was appointed as Ministerial Director in the RMJ. Schlegelberger had been teaching in the Faculty of Law at the University of Berlin as an honorary professor since 1922. On 10 October 1931 Schlegelberger was appointed State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice under Justice Minister Franz Gürtner and kept this job until Gürtner's death in 1941. On 30 January 1938 Schlegelberger joined the Nazi Party on Adolf Hitler's orders.
Read more about this topic: Franz Schlegelberger
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