The legal action failed, but the West German prosecuting authorities launched an investigation against Reinefarth which lasted several years: the accumulating weight of accusations and suspicion forced the former SS-officer to abandon the post-war political career on which he had by this time embarked.

It was now at the invitation of Franz Beyerle, who moved to Frankfurt in 1931, that Thieme also transferred to the west, receiving his Habilitation (higher postgraduate degree) from the Goethe University.

To those who followed current affairs it quickly became apparent that antisemitism, hitherto a source of shrill mantras for populist street politicians, had become a core underpinning of government strategy.

1933 was also the year in which Hans Thieme passed his Level II State Law Exams, meaning that in professional terms he was fully qualified to work as a lawyer if necessary.

[1] There are suggestions that Thieme's lack of obvious enthusiasm for the Nation Socialists and the number of Jews among his associates counted against his career progression at Frankfurt.

The Breslau position became vacant through the dismissal of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who by the end of 1933 had emigrated to North America, having secured a teaching post at Harvard.

Their marriage was solemnised in 1937, conducted by the pastor of the Confessing Church at Rosenbach (Eulengebirge), a village in the mountains on the southern rim of western Silesia.

[4][14] A friend of the couple later recalled Ursel as "a courageous woman who towards the end of the war [by which time her husband had been conscripted for military service] walked with her children and a perambulator all the way from Stettin to Switzerland and safety".

The transfer to Leipzig appears to have represented a promotion to a more all-encompassing professorship at a more prestigious university, located close to his childhood home.

Although outside the parameters of the rest of his published work, Thieme's recollections of the Warsaw uprising of August 1944, for some of which he was present in the city, have attracted the interest of historians.

Among colleagues and students in the faculty he would be warmly remembered for the "Thieme-Seminar" teaching group which he created and which became known for the diverse range of challenging and stimulating topics which it addressed.

[2] It was a Belgian legal historian who wrote of his having "acted as a cultural ambassador of his country" after 1945, keen that Germany - or at least the western part of it in which he had made his home following partition - should be speedily and unreservedly readmitted to the "community of nations".

He engaged actively as an executive committee member of the Paris-based "Société Jean Bodin" and the "Association internationale d’Histoire du Droit", and frequently delivered guest-lectures on both sides of the Rhine in German, French or English, according to his audience.

[3] It was a mark both of the esteem in which he was held by colleagues and of the effectiveness of his international networking that during his years as a Freiburg professor Hans Thieme also acquired honorary doctorates from the universities of Granada, Montpellier, Basel and Paris.

[1] For many years, between 1954 and 1977, Thieme was a co-editor of the (at that time) Vienna-based "Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte", described as "one of the oldest legal journals in the world".

In 1976 Yitzhak Nebenzahl, in his capacity as State Comptroller of Israel, planted 70 trees in the "Jerusalem Forest of Martyrs" (Ya'ar HaKdoshim), reportedly in Thieme's honour.