Holm Putzke has held a professorship in criminal law at the University of Passau since 2010, has been an extraordinary professor of criminal law, criminal procedural law, and economic criminal law at the EBS University for Business and Law in Wiesbaden since 2016, and a visiting professor at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul since 2023.

Professor Putzke studied law at Ruhr University Bochum and completed his first state examination in law in 1997. After his legal clerkship and the second state examination in law in 2002, he received his doctorate from Ruhr University in 2003. Following a study abroad in Poland in 2003, Jagiellonian University in Krakow awarded him the academic degree of Legum Magister (LL.M.) in 2009.

Holm Putzke regularly publishes on various topics of criminal and criminal procedural law and is the author of several books. He has worked as a consultant for the EU and OSCE in Estonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kazakhstan and as an expert for the German Bundestag and the Bavarian State Parliament, among others. Research and teaching stays have taken him to Poland, Russia, Hungary, the USA, Turkey, and China.

His areas of focus include criminal and criminal procedural law, economic criminal law, medical law, sports criminal law, juvenile criminal law, and disciplinary law for civil servants. In addition to his work as a university lecturer, Professor Putzke is active as a criminal defense lawyer. He is also a judge and deputy chairman of the Federal Sports and Arbitration Court at the Bund Deutscher Radfahrer e.V.