Eduard Hamm came from a bourgeois-liberal family of lawyers. After attending the humanist secondary school, he was accepted into the Maximilianeum Academic Scholarship Foundation, studied law in Munich, and graduated with the best results of his year group in Bavaria for the bar examination. During his studies, he gravitated toward liberal associations, joined Munich's Academic Choral Society (AGV), the youth liberal movement, and the Naumann Circle, although Bavarian civil servants were still prohibited from engaging in political activity at that point in time. After holding various administrative positions, initially as legal counsel for the city of Lindau, then in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and, from 1916 onward, in the War Office of Food, he ended up working as a legation councilor in the Bavarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
After the end of the First World War, he was one of the cofounders of the Deutschen Demokratischen Partei (German Democratic Party) in Bavaria, on behalf of which he took over the State Ministry for Trade, Industry and Commerce from May 1919 onward and a Reichstag mandate from 1920 to 1924. He took up an unpopular mediating role in the conflicts between Bavaria and the Reich over Bavaria's local citizens’ militias and the Laws for the Protection of the Republic, and made a substantial contribution to the resolution of these conflicts. The Republic was a matter close to his heart, as he stated in the Reichstag on July 12, 1922. Following his resignation as Bavarian Minister in the summer of 1922, he worked in the Cuno government as State Secretary in the Reich Chancellery and vigorously defended the Republic against the efforts of right-wing and left-wing radicals.
He was Reich Minister for Economics from December 1923, straight after inflation ceased, until January 1925. He was subsequently appointed First Executive Presidential Member of the Deutschen Industrie- und Handelstag (Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce), where he vigorously represented its moderate domestic and foreign policy course. As an expert on economics, Hamm was closely involved in the Nazi Party's economic program and was critical of it, describing it in the Deutsche Wirtschaftszeitung in 1932 as backward and populist, for instance.
Once the Nazis came to power, he refused to join the Nazi Party and stepped down from office in May 1933. From then on he worked as a lawyer in Munich. Within the circle of people critical of the regime centered on the former staff officer and envoy in Berlin Franz Sperr, he socialized with like-minded people in the Bavarian business community and regional government and with members of the bourgeois-aristocratic resistance to the Reich, in particular with the 'Kreisau Circle' and with Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, discussing with them urgent measures as well as constitutional, economic, and staffing issues presented by the anticipated collapse of the Nazi regime. Following the arrest of Sperr and Goerdeler in the wake of the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, Hamm became another of the Gestapo's targets. He was arrested at his farm in Reit im Winkl on September 2, 1944. Eduard Hamm died in unexplained circumstances while held in Gestapo custody in the Lehrter Straße prison in Berlin.
