Hans Schönfeld (theologian)

Hans Schönfeld (born January 25, 1900 in Fehrbellin ; † September 1, 1954 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German theologian and economist who worked in Geneva during the Second World War .

Life

Schönfeld studied Protestant theology and economics in Berlin, Greifswald, Tübingen, Rostock and Frankfurt am Main. In 1926 he became an assistant to the study commission of the Reich Chamber of Commerce. In 1929 he was sent to Geneva by the German Evangelical Church Federation to work at the Institute for Social Ethics. After taking over the institute as the research department of the World Council, he was its first director from 1931 to 1946. From 1948 to 1950 he worked as senior consistorial advisor in the EKD's external church office in Frankfurt am Main. In 1951 he was retired due to illness.

During the Second World War, Schönfeld, who was a close friend of Eugen Gerstenmaier , developed into an important middleman between the resistance movement, especially the Kreisau Circle , and the international ecumenical movement. In this role he met the British Bishop George Bell in Stockholm in 1942 and gave him a memorandum on the German resistance, which the British government was supposed to make available. Because of his official employment by the Church Foreign Office under Theodor Heckel , the ecumenical interlocutors remained far more skeptical of him than Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the entry of Hans Schönfeld's matriculation in the Rostock matriculation portal

literature

• Lexicon of persons on German Protestantism 1919–1949. Compiled and edited by Hannelore Braun and Gertraud Grünzinger. Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-55761-2 .