After completing high school with an Abitur in 1923, he studied jurisprudence at the University of Tübingen, earning a Doctor of Law in 1928.
[3] Having been at the least critical towards the Nazi regime[4] and not belonging to any party, he was installed as Lord Mayor of Stuttgart by the French military administration after the war.
In 1948, he was the initiator of a city partnership between Stuttgart and St Helens, the first post-war twinning to take place between Britain and Germany.
His role in dealing with the reconstruction of the large portions of the city destroyed by the Allied bombing of Stuttgart in World War II was controversial, as in most cases he preferred and succeeded to completely demolish buildings that weren't completely damaged and to not rebuild them in the original style, so that not much of pre-war Stuttgart is left in the city's current architecture.
The most prominent example of this was the demolition of the old Gothic Revival style town hall, that was replaced by a modern building, built 1953–1956.