Hoeffner Joseph ; Sister: Hesseler Helene (Hoeffner)

Höffner, Joseph Hesseler-Höffner, Helene Joseph Höffner, later cardinal and archbishop of Cologne, was born on December 24, 1906 in Horhausen, Westerwald, the first of seven children. From his earliest years at school, he proved himself an outstandingly gifted student. After graduating from high school in Trier in 1926, he studied at the Pontifical Gregoriana University in Rome, where in 1929 he was awarded the first of four doctoral degrees. In 1932, he was consecrated as a priest in Rome, and two years later he concluded his studies there with a doctoral dissertation about “social justice and social love”. After returning to Germany, he first became a curate in Saarbrücken. In 1937, he continued his theological studies at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau, concluding them in 1938 with a further theological doctoral dissertation. From 1939 to 1943 Höffner was a priest in Kail on Mosel; in April 1943 he was posted to Trier. In the introduction to his 1938 dissertation, Höffner expressed his fundamental opposition to National Socialist racial doctrine: “Amidst the races and peoples which come and go, the Church knows that it is free and independent, for its deepest essence is neither Jewish nor Roman nor Greek; it is not Aryan, not Mongolian, not African: it is divine.” However, he was not content with only intellectual opposition. The Berlin children who came to Kail in 1942 in the framework of a Kinderlandverschickung (evacuation of children from Germany’s big cities) included an eight-year-old Jewish girl named Esther Meyerowitz, who concealed her identity under the alias of Christa Koch. Höffner saw to the child in person. Initially he hid Christa with his sister, Maria Höffner, who was housekeeper at the church house, but did not inform her of the child’s true identity. When Höffner was due to be transferred to Trier in the spring of 1943, he could not take the child with him without arousing suspicion. He therefore housed Christa with the Heucher familyof farmers in Kail, but again without revealing her true identity. She survived the war there without being discovered. In October 1945, Höffner personally applied to the American military government in Trier for an interzone pass to Berlin for Esther-Christa and a companion. As a result, she was able to be reunited with her mother, who had also survived. Shortly after that, mother and daughter immigrated to America. In another case, Höffner asked his sister Helene Höffner-Hesseler, b.1912, to house at the Höffner home in Horhausen, Dr. Edith Nowak, a Jewish woman from Berlin, and her non-Jewish husband Dr. Hans Nowak. The couple was able to hide out there in 1943 for six months, safe from the clutches of the Gestapo. In a letter of thanks dated June 24, 1946, Edith Nowak wrote to Joseph Höffner: “The difficulties that your family was already having with the Nazi regime in the District at the time did not prevent you from assuming this risk; there would have been dire consequences for you and yours had it been known that you were hiding a Jewish woman in your home.” After the war, Höffner did not speak about the courageous help he gave to persecuted Jews. Only many years later did this become known. On August 25, 2003, Yad Vashem recognized Joseph Höffner and his sister Helene Höffner-Hesseler as Righteous Among the Nations.