Dipper Theodor & Hildegard

Dipper, Theodor Dipper, Hildegard Max Krakauer and his wife Ines lived in Berlin. When the last Jews of the city were deported in February 1943, they decided to go into hiding. Like many other clandestine Jews, they were often forced to move often from one place to the other. The Krakauers first stayed in Pomerania. From November 1943, they were saved by a network of Protestant pastors in the German state of Baden-Wuertemberg, who belonged to the Brüderverein (Brotherly Association) of the Confessing Church that was opposed to the Nazi regime. This rescue was initiated by Pastor Moerike*. One of the pastors who gave refuge and assistance to the Krakauers was Pastor Theodor Dipper, together with his wife, Hildegard. In the spring of 1944, the Krakauers hid at Dipper’s home in Reichenbach for three-and-a-half weeks. They returned for a second time between December 1944 and January 1945. In between, Pastor Dipper helped them find other hiding places. This was despite the fact that Pastor Dipper himself was suspected of opposition to the regime. In 1938 he had been sent to concentration camp for several weeks, and the Gestapo forbade him to preach in church. In a memoir published in 1947, Max Krakauer described the wartime events, portraying Pastor Dipper as a central figure in their survival: “Pastor Dipper, a young-looking man, was to help us a lot, because together with his colleague Moerike, he took it upon himself to find us places to stay and supplied us with food. Both these tasks became more difficult from one week to the next, because state control, especially regarding the supervision of strangers, became stricter as time went on. Several pastors, who before had agreed to hide us, changed their mind when they thought about the possible consequences of our capture…” In a book he wrote after the war about the Brüderverin, Pastor Dipper described the difficulty of helping Jews against the backdrop of German society that followed the official line.He stated that although they were able to help some Jews, by no means did it alleviate the terrible guilt of the period. On December 10, 2008 Yad Vashem recognized Theodor and Hildegard Dipper as Righteous Among the Nations.