Rüdiger Schleicher

After working in the Württemberg government service and the German-American Arbitration Committee at the Foreign Office in Berlin, he became an official in the Reich Ministry of Transport in 1927.

On 14 August 1939, less than three weeks before the war broke out, Schleicher was removed as leader of the legal department and given a job as a consultant in the General Air Office.

In 1939, as an added responsibility, Schleicher took on the leadership of the Institute for Aviation Law at the Frederick William University of Berlin and the publication of the magazine Archiv für Luftrecht.

After the plot to assassinate the Führer at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia failed, Schleicher explained during interrogation that he opposed the Nazi régime.

After several months in Gestapo custody, Rüdiger Schleicher was shot on the night of 22–23 April, along with twelve fellow prisoners, among them his own brother-in-law Klaus Bonhoeffer and his assistant Hans John, by a special Reich Security Main Office squad on the former exhibition grounds near Lehrter Straße prison in Moabit, as Red Army troops were already entering Berlin.