Both her Jewishness and her increasingly immoderate politics made Hilde Kirchheimer vulnerable to the methods of the post-democratic German state, and as the arrests started she lost her permit to work in her profession and emigrated, in April 1933, to Paris.
During 1935/36, at the invitation of the Workers International Relief organisation, Hilde Kirchheimer made a study of the Soviet justice system, and in 1936 she belatedly became a member of the German Communist Party.
Her husband, from whom she had already been separated for several years, emigrated to the United States in November 1937, probably with their daughter, Hanna:[4] Hilde remained in Paris, working for International Red Aid till 1939.
Between these two events Hilde Kirchheimer found herself identified as an enemy alien and interned for approximately a month in the concentration camp at Rieucros, close to the border with Spain.
From June 1944 she was also a member of the executive of the Heinrich Heine Club, an organization intended to provide a cultural focus for the many German political exiles who had ended up in Mexico.
[1] Early in 1947 Hilde Neumann returned to what remained of Germany, where a large area of the country surrounding Berlin was now being administered as the Soviet occupation zone.
She joined the newly formed Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / SED) and the Democratic Women's League (Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands / DFD), one of the political mass organisations being created under the ultimate control of the SED in compliance with the elaborately crafted Leninist power structure mandated by the occupation zone's Soviet sponsors.
In 1950 she was appointed Berlin's "Director for Justice", a position she held during the critical years till 1953, and one which enabled her to play a central role in the prosecution of Nazis.
In 1953 she was appointed Party secretary of the "International Committee of Democratic Jurists", an organization on which she worked with the Pro-Soviet London lawyer Denis Pritt.