Hasse was born in Kassel, Province of Hesse-Nassau,[2] the son of Judge Paul Reinhard Hasse, also written Haße (12 April 1868 – 1 June 1940,[3] son of Friedrich Ernst Hasse and his wife Anna Von Reinhard) and his wife Margarethe Louise Adolphine Quentin (born 5 July 1872 in Milwaukee, daughter of retail toy merchant[4] Adolph Quentin (b.

[6] After serving in the Imperial German Navy in World War I, he studied at the University of Göttingen, and then at the University of Marburg under Kurt Hensel, writing a dissertation in 1921 containing the Hasse–Minkowski theorem, as it is now called, on quadratic forms over number fields.

[7] In 1933 Hasse had signed the Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State.

Politically, he applied for membership in the Nazi Party in 1937, but this was denied to him allegedly due to his remote Jewish ancestry.

He collaborated with many mathematicians, in particular with Emmy Noether and Richard Brauer on simple algebras, and with Harold Davenport on Gauss sums (Hasse–Davenport relations), and with Cahit Arf on the Hasse–Arf theorem.