Hilde Lange was born in Bernburg, Anhalt, and grew up in Berlin, in to a middle class and liberal minded Protestant family,[5] the daughter of the engineer Heinz Lange and his wife, Adele.[6] 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.[7] 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.
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 PergolenwegEhrengrab section of Berlin's Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.
Andrea Feth, Hilde Benjamin – Eine Biographie, Berlin 1995 ISBN3-87061-609-1
Marianne Brentzel, Die Machtfrau Hilde Benjamin 1902–1989, Berlin 1997 ISBN3-86153-139-9
Heike Wagner, Hilde Benjamin und die Stalinisierung der DDR-Justiz, Aachen 1999 ISBN3-8265-5855-3
Heike Amos, Kommunistische Personalpolitik in der Justizverwaltung der SBZ/DDR (1945–1953) : Vom liberalen Justizfachmann Eugen Schiffer über den Parteifunktionär Max Fechner zur kommunistischen Juristin Hilde Benjamin, in: Gerd Bender, Recht im Sozialismus : Analysen zur Normdurchsetzung in osteuropäischen Nachkriegsgesellschaften (1944/45-1989), Frankfurt am Main 1999, Seiten 109–145. ISBN3-465-02797-3
Zwischen Recht und Unrecht – Lebensläufe deutscher Juristen, Justizministerium NRW 2004, S. 144–146
^Rudi Beckert: Die erste und die letzte Instanz. Schau- und Geheimprozesse vor dem Obersten Gericht der DDR, Keip Verlag, Goldbach 1995, ISBN3-8051-0243-7, S. 42
^Andrea Feth (16 January 2002). "Hilde Benjamin (1902–1989)"(PDF). Neue Justiz: Zeitschrift für Rechtsentwicklung und Rechtsprechung in den Neuen Ländern. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, Baden-Baden. p. 64. ISSN0028-3231. Retrieved 13 February 2017.