[1][2][3][4][5][6] Helga Marianne Freda Hackmann was born into a liberally minded family in Dölau on the edge of Halle in Saxony.
[3] Helga Hackmann grew up in Lüneburg, where she and her younger sister Erdmuthe attended their father's school, the Johanneum (Gymnasium) in the city centre.
She was taught and powerfully influenced by the politician-professor Gustav Radbruch, a former Justice Minister, and one of the intellectual heavy-weights of the Social Democratic Party.
In the context of the 1930s, long before the reform of penal institutions and acceptance on the part of government and society of the rehabilitative function of the prison system, many of the ideas she shared with Radbruch must have seemed more than Utopian, but they would remain an important strand in Helga Hackmann's professional life for more than half a century during which some of them came to be seen as progressively less outlandish.
Legislation passed in 1933 meant that Helga Einsele was not permitted to work in the discipline for which she was qualified, and during the mid-1930s the couple were obliged to focus their energies on making ends meet.
During 1938 Wilhelm and Helga left Konstanz and settled in a remote Mountain village in Austria, which remained a separate country till March 1938.
[14] After the war ended in 1945, Helga Einsele returned with her daughter to Germany, making her home in the American occupation zone at Frankfurt am Main.
Wilhelm Einsele remained in Austria, where he had established a small research institute of his own at Kreuzstein (Mondsee), and was building a reputation for his scholarly insights into inland fisheries management.
It was partly thanks to the contacts and recommendations of these two former law professors that in 1947 Helga Einsele found herself faced with two competing job offers in Frankfurt am Main.
She had, according to one source, already been picked out for it by Georg-August Zinn, who had emerged from an American prisoner of war camp, a respected and experienced legal academic untainted by Nazism, to be appointed in October 1945 as Justice Minister for the newly established (and soon to be renamed) Greater Hesse region.
[5] It was largely as a result of statistical evidence correlating Einsele's reforms with reduced recidivism rates, that interest in her ideas extended both throughout Hesse and far beyond the state boundaries.
[21] That was only one of a number of awards and other marks of esteem that Einsele received because of her efforts, over many years, to create a humane prisons system in West Germany.
[23] Helga Einsele retired from her position with the prisons service in 1975, having reached the age of 65 and was appointed that same year to an honorary professorship in Criminology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt.
She remained a campaigner, delivering speeches in support of "points of contact for women who have fallen foul of the criminal justice system" and many other, mainly human, issues with links to criminology.
Although, as one affectionate obituarist recalled, she loved to discuss over a cup of tea with those who came to visit her, she also found time to complete her autobiography, "Mein Leben mit Frauen in Haft" (loosely, "My life with imprisoned women"), which was published in 1995.
[6][13] She herself told an interviewer in 1970 that she had been "kicked out of the judiciary by the Nazis" ("von den Nazis 1935 aus dem Justizdienst geworfen") because of her membership of the "Sozialistischer Studentenbund", which appears to have been one of a number of locally organised social democrat student group with close links to the (since 1933 outlawed) Social Democratic Party.
After nearly eight years in the making, a new programme was presented to a special meeting of party activist members, held in the town hall at Bad Godesberg during three days in November 1959.
[3] A burning political issue of the time involved West German rearmament and the positioning (and/or use) in Germany of nuclear weapons.
[c] It turned out that Wiedemann's letter had been a standard text sent to a number of party colleagues: Helga Einsele was in good company.
Other recipients included Wolfgang Abendroth, Helmut Gollwitzer, Ossip K. Flechtheim, Fritz Lamm, Walter Fabian and Heinz Brakemeier.
She was tried and convicted under a charge of Coercion ("Nötigung"), but avoided the headline-grabbing indignity of a prison sentence in the state institution of which, till five year before, she had been the director.
[3] Another issue in respect of which the eighty-year old was often to be found marching alongside street demonstrators one or several generations her junior was Paragraph 218 of the country's penal code (Strafgesetzbuch).