He used his position in the Abwehr to help Jews escape Germany, worked with German resistance against the Nazi régime, and after the failed 20 July Plot, he was accused of being the "spiritual leader" of the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, and executed by the SS in 1945.

As an adviser to Franz Gürtner from 1934 to 1938, Dohnányi became acquainted with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring.

[1] Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Hans Oster called Dohnányi into the Abwehr of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.

[2] In 1942, Dohnányi made it possible for two Jewish lawyers from Berlin, Friedrich Arnold and Julius Fliess [de], to flee with their loved ones to Switzerland, disguised as Abwehr agents.

[2] On 5 April 1943, Dohnányi was arrested at his office by the Gestapo[1] on charges of alleged breach of foreign currency violations: he had transferred funds to a Swiss bank on behalf of the Jews he had saved.

After the fall of the Nazi régime, the chairman of the drumhead court, Otto Thorbeck, and the prosecutor, Walter Huppenkothen, were accused in West Germany of being accessories to murder.

After the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) had at first quashed a lower court's two acquittals, it changed its mind in 1956 during the third revision of the case, quashed Thorbeck's and Huppenkothen's sentences, and acquitted them of the charges of being accessories to murder by their participation in the drumhead trial on grounds that the court had been duly constituted and the sentence had been imposed according to the law then in force, without either of the accused having perverted justice.

[5] Hirsch said the 1956 ruling was shameful because as a result, not a single one of the Nazi-era judges who sentenced 50,000 Nazi opponents to their deaths was found guilty after the war.