Gerd Bucerius

Bucerius was born in Westphalia, and studied law in Hamburg. Upon completion of his studies, he was named a judge in Kiel and Flensburg. With the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933, he was unable to continue his work as a judge. His first wife, a Jew, took refuge in the United Kingdom. Bucerius remained a lawyer, defending numerous Jewish clients and others who were targeted under the Nazi regime.

With the Allied victory in World War II, Bucerius became a politician and journalist. He was a founding member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) in 1945. The British tasked him with the reorganization of the senate in Hamburg; in 1949 he was elected as a deputy to the first post-war Bundestag as a member of the CDU. He retained his seat until 1962. In 1946, with Lovis H. Lorenz, Richard Tüngel, and Ewald Schmidt di Simoni he created Die Zeit, with which they hoped to found a great newspaper for the north of Germany. Even though the emblem of Bremen was placed on its cover by way of a logo, the newspaper's city of origin was Hamburg. Hamburg refused the use of its city arms for the publication, and so those of another nearby municipality were used instead.

Bucerius's villa overlooking Lake Maggiore in Switzerland, the Ebelin Bucerius House, was designed by the modernist architect Richard Neutra, and named for Bucerius's second wife, Ebelin. It was constructed between 1962 and 1966.