Schäffer was born in Munich as the son of a post office clerk and received a humanist education at secondary schools in Neuburg an der Donau and Munich. After his graduation, he studied law and political science in Munich, sitting the first state examination in 1911 and the second in 1916. In 1914, he signed up as a war volunteer and was assigned to the Royal Bavarian Infantry Leib Regiment and the 15th Royal Bavarian Infantry Regiment ‘King Friedrich August of Saxony’. In 1917, he was discharged as unfit and returned to judicial service.
Schäffer worked at the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Education and Culture. He was a member of the Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) from 1918 until 1933, representing them in the Bavarian Parliament from 1920 until 1933 and serving as their chairman from 1929. When the Nazi Party came to power, he was dismissed as a civil servant and imprisoned for almost two weeks, although as a politician, he had repeatedly considered coalitions with the Nazi Party. He subsequently worked as an attorney. After the attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, Schäffer was again detained as part of a larger wave of arrests and imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp for one-and-a-half months.
In 1945, Schäffer co-founded the CSU and became its chairman in Munich. That same year, the Americans appointed him as the first Bavarian State Premier at the recommendation of Cardinal Faulhaber; he held this office from May 28, 1945 until September 28, 1945 and served as Minister of Finance at the same time. After falling out of favor with the American military government due to the insufficient denazification of the civil service, he was banned from any kind of political activity between 1946 and 1948.
In 1948, he became chairman of the Upper Bavarian CSU, but left the party in September that year due to internal disputes. Schäffer’s attempt at a rapprochement with the Bavaria Party failed (he had even considered having the local CSU association for Upper Bavaria join the Bavaria Party), and he rejoined the CSU in 1949.
From 1949 to 1961, he directly represented the Passau constituency as a member of the Bundestag. From 1949 until 1957, he served as Minister of Finance under Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and made a name for himself with his policy of iron-fisted austerity. The greatest source of controversy was his dilatory handling of the restitution program for victims of the Nazi regime; in contrast, pensions and allowances for employees of the Nazi state were paid much more quickly from taxpayers’ money. He served as the Federal Republic of Germany’s Minister of Justice from 1957 until 1961 and subsequently retired from politics.
