Hugo Willrich was born on August 20, 1867, in Kummerow in Landkreis Regenwalde in Pomerania, then part of the North German Confederation.
[1] He took a teaching examination in 1890 and performed military service; afterward, Willrich received his doctorate in 1893.
In 1914, Willrich's military status was reactivated as a reserve lieutenant for service in World War I; he was wounded in Flanders in 1914.
She worked as a public school teacher but refused to take the Hitler Oath required for all civil servants, and was dismissed from her position without entitlement to a pension in December 1934.
Willrich became a fierce anti-Semite later in his life who criticized Jews as the source of Germany's troubles and advocated for antisemitic government policies.
In 1919, reeling after Germany's defeat, he founded the Verband zur Befreiung vom Judenjoch in Göttingen ("Association for the Liberation from the Jewish Yoke"), which performed activities such as compiling lists of Jewish-owned shops in Göttingen and urging a boycott of them.
The organization was largely successful; by the early 1930s, several Jewish shops in Göttingen were obliged to sell to non-Jews, and students were radicalized into passing pamphlets and notes urging citizens not to buy from Jews.
He was also involved with compiling the "Archiv für berufsständische Rassenstatistik", an attempt that began in 1925 to document which Germans citizens were of Jewish descent.