The Reichsgericht began its work on 1 October 1879, the date on which the Reichsjustizgesetze [de] (Imperial Judiciary Acts) came into effect.

They included the conviction of Karl Liebknecht for high treason in 1907, the lenient treatment of the men charged in the 1920 Kapp Putsch and support of the Nazi's antisemitic racial laws.

As vested competencies, the Reichsgericht decided on civil appeals of final judgments and complaints against orders of Higher Regional Courts (Oberlandesgerichte).

[4] With the exception of its jurisdiction in matters of treason, the Reichsgericht was purely an appellate court during the era of the German Empire.

[6] In its verdict of 12 October 1907 in the high treason trial against Karl Liebknecht, the Reichsgericht stated that the unconditional obedience of soldiers to the emperor was a central provision of the Constitution of the German Empire.

Many cases were dropped, and of the few convictions, the verdicts against two members of the navy for sinking an English hospital ship were later secretly overturned.

[10] On 23 November 1931, Carl von Ossietzky was sentenced to 18 months in prison for espionage in the Weltbühne trial because an article published in his magazine had revealed the secret and illegal rearmament of the Reichswehr.

[14][page needed] After Adolf Hitler came to power, the Law on Admission to the Bar forced Jewish and Social Democratic judges (including Senate President Alfons David [de] and Reichsgericht justice Hermann Grossmann [de]) to resign, and Jewish lawyers at the Reichsgericht were prevented from continuing their work.

[16] The acquittal of the other four defendants was one of the reasons why the Reichsgericht was stripped of its jurisdiction in matters of treason in 1934 by the law that established the People's Court.

[17] Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938 led to the dissolution of the Supreme Court of Justice in Vienna and the transfer of its jurisdiction to the Reichsgericht.

In 1935, the Reichsgericht wrote: The court is in agreement with the verdict that, given the fundamental importance of the racial question in the National Socialist state, the education of young people of Aryan descent to become members of the national community conscious of their kind and race, forms an integral part of the educational process and that this education is not guaranteed if the foster mother but not the foster father is of Aryan descent.In 1935, in a further development of the law, the Reichsgericht recognised even before the Nuremberg Laws were passed that if a marriage partner was Jewish, it was grounds for annulling the marriage, although a formal legal basis for such terminations was not created until the Marriage Act enacted in 1938.

[22] With the ruling, the Reichsgericht adopted the racist subversion of the private law system that was developed by the German legal scholarship of the time, especially by the Kiel School [de] (Kieler Schule).

[25] Beginning on 25 August 1945, 39 judges of the Reichsgericht (more than one third of the total staff) were arrested by the NKVD (the Soviet secret service).

[citation needed] Located in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany, the building (Reichsgerichtsgebäude) was designed by Ludwig Hoffmann and Peter Dybwad, and construction was completed in 1895.