Schaeder Hildegard

Schaeder, Hildegard Hildegard Schaeder, a pioneer in Orthodox Church studies, was born in Kiel 1902, the fourth of five children. Her father was Erich Schaeder, a renowned professor of theology. After graduating from high school in 1921, she studied classical philology and Slavic languages at the universities of Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland) and Hamburg. She wrote her doctorate under a Jewish professor, Richard Salomon, with a study of the Russian-Orthodox Church, gaining her Ph.D. in Hamburg in 1927. From March 1935 onwards, Schaeder worked for the publications division of the Prussian Secret State Archive in Berlin. She joined the Jesus Christ Congregation in Berlin’s Dahlem neighborhood close to her office. The Congregation, whose pastor was Martin Niemöller, became in the first years of Nazi rule, a center of the Confessional Church. In this setting, Schaeder stood up for persecuted “non-Aryan” Christians as well as for professing Jews (Konfessionsjuden). After 1938, she helped Jewish deportees from Germany in Poland – and also Jews who had gone underground in Berlin - providing them with food and other assistance. Because of these activities, like other “Jew-helpers”, she came under Gestapo scrutiny. On the morning of September 14, 1943, she was arrested by two Gestapo officials in her mother’s Wannsee apartment in Berlin, and taken to Berlin’s Alexanderplatz police jail. The reason for her arrest was given as “aiding absconding Jews.” After six months in solitary confinement, she was transferred in the spring of 1944 to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Despite the terrible conditions and her own physical frailty, she survived incarceration. On May 15, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Hildegard Schaeder as Righteous Among the Nations.