Friedrich Adam von Trott zu Solz (9 August 1909 – 26 August 1944) was a German lawyer and diplomat who was involved in the conservative resistance to Nazism. A declared opponent of the Nazi regime from the beginning, he actively participated in the Kreisau Circle of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg. Together with Claus von Stauffenberg and Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, he conspired in the 20 July plot and was supposed to have been appointed Secretary of State in the German Foreign Office and lead negotiator with the Western Allies if the plot had succeeded.

Trott was born in Potsdam, Brandenburg, into the Protestant Trott zu Solz dynasty, members of the Hessian Uradel nobility. He was the fifth child of the Prussian Culture Minister August von Trott zu Solz (1855–1938) and his wife Emilie Eleonore von Schweinitz (1875–1948), whose father served as German ambassador in Vienna and Saint Petersburg. By her mother, Anna Jay, Emilie Eleonore was a great-great granddaughter of John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and the first Chief Justice of the United States.

Trott was first raised in Berlin and from 1915 was sent to the Französisches Gymnasium preschool. When his father resigned from office in 1917, the family moved to Kassel, where Trott attended the Friedrichsgymnasium. From 1922, he lived in Hann. Münden and temporarily joined the German Youth Movement. He obtained his Abitur school leaving certificate in 1927 and went on to study law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the University of Göttingen.

Trott developed a strong interest in international politics during a stay in Geneva, seat of the League of Nations, for several weeks in Autumn 1928. He spent Hilary term of 1929 in Oxford, studying theology at Mansfield College, Oxford, when he became a friend of the historian A. L. Rowse. Trott returned to Oxford in 1931 on a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Balliol College, where he gained a number of close friends including David Astor and Diana Hopkinson (née Hubback), whose memoirs and letters would later become key documents of Trott's life in Nazi Germany, and with whom he possibly engaged in a love affair. He also made the acquaintance of the eminent philosopher R. G. Collingwood. Rowse, a homosexual, developed an intense infatuation with the heterosexual Trott and called him one of the most beautiful, intelligent and charming men he had ever met. In his 1961 book All Souls and Appeasement, which was published when active homosexuality was still a crime in Britain, Rowse wrote about Trott's "beautiful head" with an "immensely lofty forehead, deep-violet eyes, nobility and sadness in the expression even when young, infinitely sensitive and understanding". He wrote, "I had never met anything like it". Rowse called his relationship with Trott an "ideal platonic" relationship and said that Trott was a man he could never forget. Rowse, who was active in the Labour Party, claimed to have introduced Trott to socialism and noted that Trott had translated parts of Rowse's book Politics and the Younger Generation into German when they were published in Neue Blätter für den Sozialismus. Following his studies at Oxford, Trott spent six months in the United States.

Deeply influenced by the theories of Hegel, Trott believed that the most pressing issue raised by the Great Depression would be how to seek a synthesis of conservatism and socialism, which he believed to be the only solution to the Great Depression. For Trott, the Great Depression proved the failure of capitalism as an economic system, but at the same time, he was unwilling to accept communism as an alternative, which led him to seek a "third way" between capitalism and communism, arguing in a 1933 letter to his father that the "right to work" had replaced Hegel's "right to a free will" as the most pressing issue of the modern age. In the same letter, Trott argued that what was needed was an economic system that guaranteed every man a job, and that he considered the individual freedom to count for nothing if one was unemployed. Somewhat to the shock of his conservative father, in the early 1930s Trott was willing to exchange ideas with Social Democrats as he set about developing a sort of socialist conservatism. Trott told his father in February 1933 that "the positive rights of the individual" could be secured if the rights of the "masses" were "held sacred", which he believed the new government of Adolf Hitler and Franz von Papen had no intention of doing.

In 1937, Trott was posted to China as a research fellow for the Institute of Pacific Relations under a research grant from the Auswärtiges Amt. He took advantage of his travels to try to raise support outside Germany for the internal resistance against the Nazis. At the time there was an informal alliance between China and Germany, with a German military mission training the Chinese National Revolutionary Army, which was largely armed with German weapons, and German businesses being favored with investments in China in exchange for China helping German rearmament by selling the Reich certain strategic raw materials at below cost. Given the closeness in relations between China and Germany, as a German citizen, Trott enjoyed a certain privileged status in China, as Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had often described Nazi Germany as a model for China.

A Sinophile, Trott had gone to China to study Confucian philosophy and learn Mandarin, as he put it that he was hoping to find in "China's ancient wisdom" a solution to the spiritual malaise of the West. Trott believed that modern Western civilization had lost any sense of the spiritual, which he believed still existed in China. The British historian D. C. Watt rather dismissively wrote that Trott was an impractical idealist who spent much of 1937 and 1938 in China looking for the answers to the problems of modern life by studying Confucianism and Taoism. The Confucian ideal of rule by enlightened and philosophical mandarins also appealed to Trott as an inspiration for a political system. The Confucian principle that mandarins should not serve an unjust emperor and that it was better to suffer and die rather than serve a tyrant influenced Trott's political thinking. Together with his Chinese teacher who served as his translator, Trott traveled several times to Beijing to talk to various Confucian scholars living in that city, hoping to find the spirituality that he believed the West was lacking and needed so desperately. During the Sino-Japanese War, which began in July 1937, Trott's sympathies were entirely with China. During his time in China, Trott got to know the head of the German military mission, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, very well, and as both men were disillusioned by the pro-Japanese line taken by the Auswärtiges Amt after the very pro-Japanese and anti-Chinese Joachim von Ribbentrop became Foreign Minister in February 1938, they bonded over their shared disapproval of Ribbentrop and his anti-Chinese foreign policy line. In June 1938, the German military mission in China was ordered to return to the Reich and Germany ceased its arm sales to China as Ribbentrop swung German foreign policy decisively behind Japan, causing a rapid chill to set in over the once warm relations between Nanking and Berlin. Trott decided to leave China at the same time that the German military mission was recalled.

One of Trott's closest friends was the British journalist Shiela Grant Duff who, however, passionately disagreed with him over the issue of Czechoslovakia, a country that she admired and loved as much he hated it. The nationalist Trott made no secret of his dislike of Czechoslovakia as an "artificial state" created by the Treaty of Versailles and believed that Germany had the right to annex the Sudetenland region, meaning that essentially Trott supported Hitler's foreign policy regarding Czechoslovakia in 1938. The Chinese historian Liang Hsi-Huey wrote there was a certain dichotomy in Trott's thinking between his dislike of the Nazis and his support for Germany's great power ambitions, which made for an ambivalent attitude towards Nazi foreign policy. Liang, whose father Liang Lone was the Chinese minister in Prague between 1933 and 1939, wrote that people like Trott, conservative nationalists opposed to Hitler who sympathised with China in its struggle against Japan, had much difficulty accepting the thesis that nations like Czechoslovakia had the right to exist. Liang wrote that there was a striking contrast between Trott's views towards China, which he argued had the right to determine its own future and should not be dominated by Japan, versus his views towards Czechoslovakia, which he saw as an "artificial state" that was occupying land that rightfully belonged to Germany. The British historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who knew most of the men involved in the plots against Hitler between 1938 and 1944 personally, wrote that these men were all nationalists whose views towards Czechoslovakia and Poland were essentially the same as Hitler's – namely that Eastern Europe was Germany's rightful sphere of influence and the Reich had the right to take whatever it wanted in the region. After the Munich Agreement Trott, in a letter to his friend Lord Lothian, praised "Mr. Chamberlain's courageous lead" in ensuring that the Sudetenland was allowed to join Germany without a war and disparaged Winston Churchill as a "warmonger".