Walter Neye

Walther Neye (24 July 1901 – 12 August 1989) was a German lawyer. Between 1952 and 1957 he was the rector of Berlin's Humboldt University.

Life

Early years Walther Eduard Hermann Neye was born, the youngest of three children, at the start of the twentieth century in Arnsberg, a prosperous mid-sized town in central western Germany. His father was a company secretary. Neye successfully completed his school leaving exams in Potsdam in 1919. After that, during the confused year of political and social turbulence that for Germany followed national defeat in the First World War, he briefly joined the "Upper Silesian Border Force" , a freelance quasi-military body set up by the Council of the People's Deputies (interim government) to guard Germany's south-eastern border with the newly re-created Polish state in a region where many districts were of mixed ethnicity and national identity.

In autumn 1919 he returned to Berlin and started a period of legal study at the Frederick William University (as the Humboldt was then known), graduating successfully in 1923. In 1924, he received his doctorate from Breslau University,