Nikolaus von Halem

Nicholas Christoph von Halem (15 March 1905 – 9 October 1944) was a German lawyer, businessman, and resistance fighter against Nazism.

Halem was born in Schwetz in West Prussia (present-day Świecie, Poland). He was the fourth child of Gustav Adolf von Halem (1870–1932), a Prussian district administrator, and his wife Hertha von Halem, née von Tiedemann (1879–1957). During the First World War, the family moved to Berlin.

As a child Halem was first educated at home, later he attended a gymnasium in Schwetz. After his family moved to Berlin, he attended the Protestant monastery school in Roßleben, Thuringia. Having finished high school, in March 1922, he studied law at the University of Göttingen, in Leipzig, Munich, and Heidelberg. During Halem's time at the university he belonged to the Corps Saxo-Borussia Heidelberg student fraternity, but was excluded for intoxication.

From 1931 he did his legal clerkship. In the same year he married Marie (Mariechen) Garbe, with whom he had two sons.

After his studies Halem initially joined far-right Black Reichswehr paramilitary troops and became involved in Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch and the Nazis' march on the Munich Feldherrenhalle on 9 November 1923. Later, however, he distanced himself from the rising Nazi Party. From about 1930, he became active in the conservative Catholic circles around scholar Carl von Jordans in Berlin, whose goal was to keep the Nazi movement from power. Through these groups and his legal training he established close contacts with other opponents of the Nazis like Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg and Henning von Tresckow.

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