Rüdiger Schleicher

Rüdiger Schleicher (14 January 1895 – 23 April 1945) was a German legal academic and resistance fighter against the Nazi régime.

Born in Stuttgart, Württemberg, Schleicher was married to Ursula Bonhoeffer (1902–1983), Karl Bonhoeffer's daughter and Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer's sister. His daughter Renate married Dietrich Bonhoeffer's friend and fellow theologian, Eberhard Bethge. Schleicher studied law in Tübingen and obtained his doctorate in 1923 with a dissertation on "International Air Travel Law."

After working in the Württemberg government service and the German-American Arbitration Committee at the Foreign Office in Berlin, he became an official in the Reich Ministry of Transport in 1927. Upon the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he was posted to the newly established Ministry of Aviation under Hermann Göring. There, beginning in 1935, he headed the legal department as a ministerial adviser.

On 14 August 1939, less than three weeks before the war broke out, Schleicher was removed as leader of the legal department and given a job as a consultant in the General Air Office. His advocacy, in publications and presentations, of international law, the war renunciation pact (Kellogg-Briand Pact, 1928), and the Hague Conventions did not sit well with the government. In 1939, as an added responsibility, Schleicher took on the leadership of the Institute for Aviation Law at the Frederick William University of Berlin and the publication of the magazine Archiv für Luftrecht. The Institute was later used for conspiratorial resistance meetings.

...
Wikipedia