Bruno Benfey

Bruno Benfey (born September 4, 1891 in Rösrath ; † June 28, 1962 in St. Stephan BE ) was a Lutheran clergyman.

Life

Benfey was the result of the marriage of two members of a Jewish family in Göttingen who had converted to Christianity. He attended the Ratsgymnasium in Hanover and studied Protestant theology in Göttingen and Berlin. In 1913 he passed the first and in 1915 the second theological examination. After his ordination on September 15, 1915 in Hanover , he was initially employed as a parish cooperator in Harburg and Bremervörde . From 1918 to 1925 he was in the service of the Evangelical Church of Westphalia and was employed, among other things, as a youth pastor in the Westphalian industrial area. In 1925 he became pastor in Mulsum , in 1927 at the St. Marien Church in Göttingen .

Even against his appointment to the pastorate in Göttingen, resistance arose in the community because of his Jewish origins. An objection to the appeal was rejected by the church authorities. Benfey was particularly dedicated to youth work and ecumenism. The ecumenical working group he founded was one of the first of its kind in Germany.

In the course of filling the first pastor's position at St. Marien with Pastor Runte, who was a member of the SA, a conflict arose and a disciplinary procedure applied for by Benfey himself, in which he was only punished with a reprimand. The regional church office saw no reason for the removal from office, which was driven by the Nazi-dominated church council. In November 1936, anti-Semitic rallies were held in front of the church at two services held by Benfey. After the service on the Day of Repentance and Prayer, he was arrested in the church and held for three days. In 1937 he was put on hold. Expelled from the Hildesheim administrative district , he found a job with a denominational community in Wernigerode. During the "Reichskristallnacht" he was arrested again and then taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp . On the mediation of his son he was released and was initially able to emigrate to the Netherlands, where from 1939 he took over pastoral care of the “non-Aryan” Christians living in and around Amsterdam on behalf of the World Council of Churches . With the help of a German pastor, he himself escaped deportation after the German occupation of the country.

In May 1946, Benfey returned to Göttingen as pastor at St. Marien, against the resistance of the church council. He received support from professors, among others, from canon lawyer Rudolf Smend as a member of the EKD Council. On January 1, 1962, Benfey retired. In the same year he died of a heart attack in Switzerland during a community holiday.

After the death of his first wife in 1932, Benfey was married to the theologian Sophie Kunert for the second time since 1934 .

Fonts

• Two years of youth evangelism in Westphalia. In: The People's Mission. Monthly for evangelism, apologetics and deepening Christian folk life, 1920 [the author is mistakenly called Gustav by his middle name ]
• The Church's Youth Work as Evangelism , 1927

literature

• Ecclesiastical gazette for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover 13/1962, p. 100
• Uta Schäfer-Richter, Jörg Klein: The Jewish citizens in the Göttingen district. 1933-1945 . Göttingen, Hann. Münden, Duderstadt 1992, p. 35 f.
• Hartmut Ludwig and Eberhard Röhm : Baptized Evangelically - persecuted as "Jews" . Calwer Verlag Stuttgart 2014, pp. 48–49.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Franklin Kopitzsch , Daniel Tilgner (ed.): Hamburg Lexikon. 4th, updated and expanded special edition. Ellert & Richter, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8319-0373-3 , p. 419.