The background to the amnesties was the conviction of political extremists in the wake of the Revolutionary period of 1918-1919 that had followed military defeat in the First World War.
During the 1920s the political emergency subsided and democratic government began to take root in Germany.
[1] Grounds for the amnesties included a very widespread belief that the extent of the trials and convictions that had followed in the wake of economic and political collapse at the end of the war had simply overwhelmed the judicial system, which continued to lack the capacity, in terms of qualified judges and court staff, to redress the accumulation of judicial wrongs on a case-by-case basis.
Inevitably the process also came to be seen increasingly as a political exercise whereby extremist parties that were now gaining some measure of acceptance with the political establishment could extract their own leaders from jails.
High-profile beneficiaries of the Hindenburg Amnesties who later became key figures in the political establishment included Hermann Göring, Martin Bormann and Rudolf Höß.