Poelchau Harald & Dorothee

Poelchau, Harald Poelchau, Dorothea Born in Potsdam, in 1903, Harald Poelchau grew up in Brauchitsch, a small Silesian village, as the well-educated and relatively well-to-do son of a Protestant parson. In 1922 Harald began to study theology at Bethel. After a time the young Peolchau pursued his studies in Marburg, Berlin, Tübingen, and Breslau. The decisive intellectual and spiritual influence on his adult life was Paul Tillich, the founding father of Religious Socialism. Soon after finishing his doctoral studies, in the autumn of 1932, he applied for the post of prison chaplain in Berlin-Tegel. As prison chaplain under the Third Reich, Poelchau was obliged, despite deep inner revulsion, to be present at an ever-growing number of executions. Until Hitler’s reign came to an end, he had to accompany to the gallows no less than 1,000 people, many of them political opponents of the regime. Among the condemned were the plotters of the July 20, 1944, attempted assassination of Hitler. Unknown to the Gestapo, since 1941, Poelchau himself had belonged to the circle of anti-Nazi resisters gathered round Count von Moltke -- the “Kreisauer Kreis” -- and had participated in their first meeting. After the onset of the deportations, Poelchau was often called upon to provide accommodations and help to Jews who went into hiding. His position as prison chaplain and secret connection to the resistance movement made it all the more perilous for him. One of the most dramatic incidents occurred in the last months of the war, when Rita and Ralph Neumann suddenly appeared in the Poelchau apartment at midnight, just as the pastor and his wife were preparing to go to bed after a prolonged and excruciating stay in the air-raid shelter. The Jewish brother and sister had been living illegally in Berlin for several months, assisted by the Wendland* family, when, in February 1945, Ralph was arrested by a military patrol and handed over to the Gestapo as he had been discovered to be aJew. Subjected to severe torture, the 17-year-old gave away the names of his sister and his benefactors. After their interrogation, the Gestapo decided to incarcerate the Jewish brother and sister, pending their deportation to the East. They were held in a makeshift concentration camp in the Schulstrasse, not far from the Jewish hospital in the Iranische Strasse, when an air raid severely damaged the building, enabling them to escape. That night the two escapees ran for two and a half hours without stopping, until they stood at the doorway of the Poelchaus’ home, pale, worn out, and out of breath. Ralph knew the place because of the errands he had performed for the pastor and his wife at the time that he was still hiding with the Wendlands. Both youngsters were in a state of shock; the boy in particular had been badly bruised by the clothesline with which they had slid from the building. Poelchau and his wife, Dorothea, admitted them joyously, sharing in the triumph of their escape. They fed them, invited a doctor to treat Ralph’s wounds, and accommodated the two in their two-and-a-half-room apartment -- at great personal risk -- until the end of the war. On November 30, 1971, Yad Vashem recognized Harald and Dorothea Poelchau as Righteous Among the Nations.