Hans Hilmar Staudte

Hans-Hilmar Staudte (* 18 January 1911 in Kaldenkirchen; † 21 January 1979 in Münster) was a German lawyer and chess master and composer.

Private and professional life
Staudte studied law and received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg in 1940 with a dissertation entitled "Nichtzumutbarkeit und strafrechtlicher Pflichtbegriff".

During the Second World War, Staudte became deputy head of the Lebensborn legal department. According to his own information, he was a judge at the NSDAP court in Munich and SS-Obersturmführer, was married and had a child who died at an early age.

After the end of the war, he was in Allied custody. Staudte testified as a defence witness at the Nuremberg Trial of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office.

He later worked as a ministerial councillor at the Federal Ministry of Finance in Bonn until his retirement at the age of 65. He ended his tournament chess activities in favour of his professional career. He died in 1979 after a long illness.

Tournament chess
Staudte first began playing tournament chess. In 1925, he became a member of the Aachener Schachverein 1856. In 1935, he came second in the championship of the Lower Rhine Chess Association. In 1941, he won one of three parallel championship tournaments in Starnberg as part of the Bavarian Chess Congress, which enabled him to advance to the master tournament. In 1950, he and Bogoljubow shared 2nd place behind Unzicker at the German championship in Bad Pyrmont. In the same year he came third with the German national team at the 1950 Chess Olympiad in Dubrovnik, and with his result of 7.5 points from 12 games he also achieved the third-best result of the reserve players[3].

His best historical Elo rating was 2620, which he achieved in June 1950.

Official
Staudte was secretary of the German Chess Federation from 1955 to 1961.

Chess composition
Staudte was intensively involved in endgame studies. He composed his own studies, which were published in magazines and FIDE albums.

For decades, he edited the study section of the magazine Schach-Echo and was also in demand as a judge. For decades he was responsible for the weekly problem section of the Aachener Anzeiger (later Aachener Nachrichten).

In 1962 he was appointed international adjudicator for chess composition.

In addition to his compositional work in the field of study, Hans-Hilmar Staudte was also involved in fairytale chess and published numerous auxiliary mate and self-mate problems. 

Publications
From the world of chess study, Loeffler, Bad Nauheim 1961
with Kurt Richter: Richtig und falsch. Praktische Endspielkunde, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1962, (2nd ed. 1978, ISBN 3-11-007428-1)
with Milu Milescu: The 1×1 of the endgame. Ein Lehr- und Lesebuch der Endspielkunst, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1965 (2nd ed. 1981, ISBN 3-11-007431-1)

Die Schwalbe (magazine for chess composition) reports in Issue 247, February 2011:

"At my first Schwalbe meetings in the late 1970s, I met Hans Hilmar Staudte (18.1.1911-21.1.1979) - although the "meeting" was somewhat one-sided, because apart from a brief greeting, I cannot remember any direct contact. It was more that Staudte struck me as a particularly lively participant who stood out for his intense, penetrating way of talking to other problemists. From my pre-problemist days, I knew his little book, From the World of Chess Studies, published in 1961, which I had studied with great pleasure at the time, and so his name was one of the few that I was already familiar with at the time. Staudte, who was born 100 years ago and whose death in 1979 came as a great surprise, was extremely versatile in chess. In the post-war years he was very successful as a game player, taking second place (behind Unzicker) in the 1950 German championship together with Bogoljubow and coming third with the German team in the Chess Olympiad in the same year. He later gave up tournament chess for professional reasons (he was a lawyer in the Federal Ministry of Finance) and then devoted himself solely to chess composition. He composed studies and published two more books (together with Kurt Richter and with Milu Milescu). For decades he edited the study corner in the Schach-Echo, and his problem column in the Aachener Nachrichten, which he also edited for a very long time (and which was then lost to problem chess after his death), enjoyed an excellent international reputation."

Source: de.wikipedia.org