Kirsten Goetze studied law in Berlin and Freiburg and passed her first state examination in 1989 and her second state examination in 1992. From April 1993, she worked as a judge in the district court of Stendal before being seconded to the Central Office in Ludwigsburg in December 2007, where she prepared the final report on the Demjanjuk trial, among other things. In May 2014, she was honoured with the Rule of Law Award from the Virginia Holocaust Museum and the Virginia Law Association. In the same year, she was a Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with the topic "Eichmann as a Source". From 2015 to 2022, she worked as a public prosecutor at the Karlsruhe Public Prosecutor's Office.
In her dissertation project, Kirsten Goetze uses the person and work of Herbert Jäger (1928–2014) to analyze his influence on the legal-political transformation process in West Germany from 1945 to 1993.
