Goerdeler was born into a family of Prussian civil servants in Schneidemühl (now Piła), in the Prussian Province of Posen of Germany (in present-day Poland). Goerdeler's parents supported the Free Conservative Party, and Goerdeler's father served in the Prussian Landtag as a member of that party after 1899. Goerdeler's biographer and friend Gerhard Ritter described his upbringing as one of a large, loving middle-class family that was cultured, devoutly Lutheran, nationalist and conservative. As a young man, the deeply religious Goerdeler chose as his motto to live by: "omnia restaurare in Christo" (to restore everything in Christ). Goerdeler studied economics and law at the University of Tübingen between 1902 and 1905. From 1911, Goerdeler worked as a civil servant for the municipal government of Solingen in the Prussian Rhine Province. The same year, Goerdeler married Anneliese Ulrich, by whom he would have five children.Goerdeler's own career had been both impressive and idiosyncratic. He came of conservative Prussian stock with a strong sense of duty and service to the State; his father had been a district judge. His upbringing had been happy, but sternly intellectual and moral; his legal training had pointed to a career in local administration and economics...He was a born organiser, an able, voluble speaker and writer, tough and highly individual; in politics, he became a right-wing liberal. Although at heart a very humane man, Goerderler's frigid, spartan belief in hard work and his austere, puritanical morality—he would not tolerate a divorced man or woman in his house—lacked warmth and comradeship. He was, in fact, an autocrat by nature and his commanding personality, combined with his utter belief in the rightness of his point of view, enabled him to persuade weak or uncertain men over-easily to accept his own particular point of view while he was with them