Hildegard Hamm-Brücher (born 1921) was a prominent liberal politician in Germany. She held state secretary positions from 1969 to 1972 and from 1977 to 1982. In 1993 she became the Free Democratic Party's candidate for the federal presidency elections to be held the following year.

Born on May 11, 1921, in Essen in the heart of the Ruhr district, Hildegard Hamm-Brücher grew up with four siblings in a nonpolitical bourgeois family. Her father was director of an electric firm; her mother maintained the household. Unexpectedly, her parents died within a year of each other when she was only ten and eleven years old. Her widowed grandmother, residing in Dresden, brought up young Hamm-Brücher and several of her siblings. The grandmother came from an industrial family whose ancestors had converted from Judaism to Protestantism. In the early 1930s young Hamm- Brücher made the acquaintance of Pastor Martin Niemö...