Otto Heinrich Greve (30 January 1908 inRostock,Mecklenburg-Schwerin,Germany – 11 June 1968 inAscona,Ticino,Switzerland) was a German lawyer by profession and a politician of theGerman Democratic Party (DDP) and its successorGerman State Party (DStP; 1926 to 1933, when the Nazis banned that party), theFree Democratic Party (F.D.P.; 1945 to 1947) andSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD; since 1948) and a member of the GermanBundestag.^[1]

Greve, born the only child to Rostock's politically activeliberal chief postmaster Heinrich Greve (1868–1936), grew up in the liberal merchant circles of Rostock and developed a childhood friendship with Herbert Samuel (1907–1992), son ofMax Samuel, a close friend of Greve's father Heinrich Greve. After finishing Rostock'sGroße Stadtschule grammar school he studied law at theuniversities of Munich,Nancy,Paris andRostock.

In 1926 Otto Heinrich Greve joined theGerman Democratic Party and was elected a member of the German central board of theYoung Democrats (DDP's youth wing)^[2] and speaker of Rostock'sGeneral Students Committee.^[3] He was also active in theReichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, a cross-party alliance of activists for developing and defending democracy. All this ended with the Nazis' government take-over when they banned democratic parties, their youth wings and other civil society activities.

As a graduate of law Greve joined theMecklenburg state prosecution department, while his friend and fellow law-graduate Herbert Samuel was denied to practise at all as a lawyer because the new Nazi government banned him as a Jew from doing so. So Samuel prepared for emigration and left to Britain in 1934. The Nazis as dictators newly having access to every governmental authority suspiciously eyed Greve because he had exposed himself as a democrat before 1933.

Greve graduated with a doctorate in law on an unpolitical subject, published by him in 1936.^[4] In September 1937 Greve visited Samuel in London,^[5] delivering important company documents ofMax Samuel'sEMSA Werke company on the verge of relocating its production from Germany to Britain.

On 31 July 1938, Greve was dismissed asassessor from the public prosecution department after he had rejected the call of superiors to join theNazi party.^[2] His friends helped him to find a job, so on 1 September 1938 theEMSA-Werke company hired him as a clerk, but he had to leave again by the end of September 1939,^[6] after'Aryanisers' had taken over the company.

Greve then found a job as a general counsel with an industrial company inMiddle Germany and married Helene Greve fromGreiz. He left his work close before the German defeat to live with his parents-in-law. By the end of the Second World War the liberating US occupiers appointed Greve the first post-Nazi era county commissioner (Landrat) of theGreiz District inThuringia, however, when in July 1945 the area was handed over to theSoviet occupation zone in Germany the new Soviet occupiers dismissed him as county commissioner and he, his wife and their three daughters, took refuge inWagenfeld, meanwhile in theBritish occupation zone in Germany. Living in Wagenfeld he received the legal mandate of his exiled co-sister-in-law, member of the displaced Heilbrunn family of textile industrialists, to reclaim their assets there from the Aryanisers in which he succeeded already in 1945 – with ranks of German authorities still interspersed with more or less identifiable supporters and former members of the Nazi party.

He soon moved toHanover, then capital of the newLower Saxony, and opened a law office and stood up again as a democrat in Germany becoming a founding member of the DDP's successor party, theFree Democratic Party (F.D.P.), and being elected into its British zonal party executive board. However, he quit the F.D.P. by the end of 1947 when he remained without sufficient support among his fellow board members to take action against too lax a practice in admitting former Nazis as new party members. In 1948 he joined theSocial Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

Greve was a member of thestate parliament of Lower Saxony from 1947 to 1951. He later, as a lawyer and Lower Saxon delegate to theParliamentary Council, the West German constituent assembly, was thus one of the "parents ofthe Basic Law" who co-authored that West German constitution. He was then elected a member of the GermanBundestag from the first post-World War Two general elections in 1949 to 1961.^[7] He was always directly elected in the then constituency of Nienburg - Schaumburg-Lippe.

Greve was strongly advocating West GermanWiedergutmachung in parliamentary legislation and practice as a lawyer.^[8] He also helped many clients getting recompense by way of West Germany'sLastenausgleich for assets expropriated and/or withheld in German territory under communist rule (theSoviet sector of Berlin, the Soviet zone in Middle Germany and thePolish- and Soviet-annexed Eastern Germany) for undeniable foregoing the use of those assets, else – as maintained by the West German legal situation – to be restituted once communism would be over.

• Herbst, Ludolf; Jahn, Bruno (2002). Vierhaus, Rudolf (ed.).Biographisches Handbuch der Mitglieder des Deutschen Bundestages. 1949–2002 [Biographical Handbook of the Members of the German Bundestag. 1949–2002] (in German). München: De Gruyter - De Gruyter Saur. p. 1715.ISBN 978-3-11-184511-1.
• Heiko Holste, „Im Profil: Wider den Geist der Rosenburg – Vor 50 Jahren starb der Rechtsanwalt und Rechtspolitiker Otto Heinrich Greve“, in:Neue Juristische Wochenschrift, Beilage 'NJW-aktuell', No. 51 (2017), pp. 18seq.
• Heiko Holste, „Jurist im Porträt: Otto Heinrich Greve (1908–1968): Anwalt für die Wiedergutmachung und gegen die Renazifizierung der Nachkriegsjustiz“, in:Recht und Politik, No. 2 (vol. 54, 2018), pp. 220–231.

• 1908 births
• Politicians from Rostock
• 1968 deaths
• German Democratic Party politicians
• Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni
• University of Paris alumni
• Nancy-Université alumni
• University of Rostock alumni
• 20th-century German lawyers
• Free Democratic Party (Germany) politicians
• Members of the Bundestag for Lower Saxony
• Members of the Bundestag 1957–1961
• Members of the Bundestag 1953–1957
• Members of the Bundestag 1949–1953
• Members of the Bundestag for the Social Democratic Party of Germany
• Members of the Landtag of Lower Saxony
• Members of Parlamentarischer Rat
• German expatriates in France

• CS1 German-language sources (de)
• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata