Born: February 9, 1895 in Gräfenroda
died: June 22, 1959 in Wiesbaden

Born into a social democratic family, the primary school teacher, who had volunteered for the First World War and then joined the USPD, served as a member of the Gotha state assembly from March 1919 to May 1920. He then served the state government in Thuringia in various functions, such as Ministerial Director in the Ministry of the Interior and State Councillor for the Gotha region, as a member of the State Court and the Service Criminal Court, both in Jena.

After being placed on hold as a political civil servant in 1924, he studied at the University of Jena until 1927 without completing his regular A-levels and obtained his doctorate in law there in 1929. From 1927 to 1933, he worked as a permanent guest lecturer for constitutional and administrative law at the Heimvolkshochschule at Tinz Castle near Gera. In 1932, he was briefly a member of the German Reichstag. The following year, disappointed by his party's passive attitude towards the NSDAP, he left the SPD and resigned from the chairmanship of the Thuringian parliamentary group and his seat. From the late autumn of 1933 until his move to the Reich capital the following year, he was involved in the Thuringian provincial structure of the resistance organization "Neu Beginnen", which operated throughout the Reich from Berlin.

Together with Otto Brass and a few others, Brill founded the "German People's Front" at the end of 1936, which was conceived as an alliance of liberal, democratic, socialist and communist opposition groups. Arrested in the fall of 1938, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison by the "People's Court" in the summer of 1939 for "preparation for high treason". At the end of 1943, he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he served as chairman of a non-party Popular Front Committee that was soon formed there as well.

Immediately after the liberation of the concentration camp, Brill and a few like-minded friends formulated the famous Buchenwald Manifesto of the short-lived League of Democratic Socialists in mid-April 1945. Following the transfer of occupation rule there from the Americans to the Soviets, he was removed from his position as Thuringian government president. At the end of 1945, the state chairman of the Thuringian SPD fled to the West to escape the Stalinists.

From the summer of 1946, Brill worked in Wiesbaden for three years as State Secretary and Head of the State Chancellery. From 1948, he taught public law as an honorary professor at Frankfurt's Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, and in 1950/51 also as a lecturer at the Academy of Labor there. From 1951 to 1955, he held an honorary professorship for comparative political science and constitutional history at the University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer. After playing a decisive role in the preparation of the Basic Law in 1948 as a member of the Constitutional Convention on Herrenchiemsee, he then became a member of the first German Bundestag.

From 1951 until his death, he served as an academic advisor to Prime Minister Georg August Zinn. His innovative, often groundbreaking ideas were reflected in numerous political and legal publications. His grave is located in the North Cemetery. A street in Wiesbaden is named after Hermann Brill. The Wiesbaden City Archive has a collection of material about him.