Wilhelm Bünger
German judge and politician (1870-1937)

Wilhelm Rudolf Ferdinand Bünger (1870–1937) was a German politician and attorney who served as the Minister-President of Saxony from 1929 to 1930.
Biography
Bünger was born on 8 October 1870 in Elsterwerda, Prussia, North German Confederation (present-day Brandenburg, Germany). He was a member of the German People's Party (DVP) from 1920 to 1930 while a member of the German Bundestag. From 1924 to 1927, Bünger was Minister of Justice, 1928 Minister of Education, and from 26 June 1929 to 18 February 1930, Minister-President of Saxony. He was married to Doris Hertwig-Bünger, also a state representative in Parliament, and lived with her in the Landhaus Carp Schampel, in the Saxon town of Radebeul. He died on 21 March 1937 in Leipzig, Saxony, Germany.
Bünger was the presiding judge at the Reichstag fire trial. He acquitted the accused with the exception of Marinus van der Lubbe. However, he found that the "Reichstag fire was no act of individual terror but an act of mass terror which was designed to be the overture to a general strike and a revolutionary movement," placing the blame on a Communist conspiracy.
“Wilhelm Bünger” enters the record as german judge and politician (1870-1937). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wilhelm, Bünger and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Wilhelm Bünger” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Wilhelm, Bünger and German provides the most credible route into that argument.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q99459. VIAF identifies the subject as 57798555. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1870, 1937, 1929 and 1930.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wilhelm Bünger” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.