Heinrich Held (theologian)

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Heinrich Held (1934)

Heinrich Karl Ewald Held (born September 25, 1897 in St. Johann , Saar , † September 19, 1957 in Düsseldorf ) was a German Protestant theologian.

Life

Held, son of a tailor and head of a private tailoring school in Cologne , attended the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Trier and then the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Cologne. There he passed the secondary school diploma in 1915 - already as a recruit . From 1915 to 1918 he took part in the First World War as a volunteer ( Iron Cross, 2nd class). After the war, Held studied at the University of Bonn , where he joined the Rheno-Germania Bonn fraternity in the Schwarzburgbund , and at the University of Tübingen , where his teachers included Adolf Schlatter , Protestant theology. After graduating, he was vicar in Cologne and then attended the seminary in Wittenberg for a year . From 1924 he was assistant preacher (today: pastor for employment) in Wesseling for the evangelical congregation in Brühl . In 1925 he married Hildegard Röhrig, a pastor's daughter from Elberfeld . In 1930 he was elected pastor in Essen-Rüttenscheid .

Shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power , Held protested on behalf of the Essen pastor in a telegram to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior against the illegal appointment of state commissioners in the Protestant church. Thereupon he was imprisoned as the first Protestant pastor. As one of the leading figures in the ecclesiastical resistance, Held was banned from speaking across the empire . He was one of the founders of the Rhenish section of the Pastors' Emergency Association around Martin Niemöller . Heinrich Held was a co-initiator of the Confessing Church in the Rhineland, a member of the Old Prussian Brother Council and the Barmen Confession Synod . Together with Gustav Heinemann and pastors Friedrich Graeber and Johannes Böttcher, he saved the lives of 50 to 60 Jews who had been hiding in the cellars of bombed-out Essen houses until the end of the war by bringing them the food they needed for survival, and that too even after September 17, 1944, the day on which "the last Jews" were deported from Essen and Essen was officially considered "Jew-free". The necessary food stamps were collected by the three pastors and donated by members of the Confessing Church, who accepted hunger in solidarity with the persecuted Jews, "for needy parishioners". After the Second World War he participated in the church unification work of the Württemberg state bishop Theophil Wurm .

In May 1945 Heinrich Held was elected superintendent of the Essen church district. In October 1945 he was one of the signatories of the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt . In 1946 he was appointed to the senior church council as a member of the leadership of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland . In 1947 he became chairman of the Brother Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and in January 1949 was elected the first President of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland. In 1956 he was confirmed in this office by the Rhenish Synod. Between 1949 and 1954 he was also a member of the EKD Council . 1952–1954 he was chairman of the council of the Evangelical Church of the Union . He co-founded the aid organization of the EKD and the German Evangelical Church Congress . Held made a decisive contribution to the external and internal reconstruction of the Rhenish Church after the Second World War.

Together with the Westphalian President Karl Koch , he represented the Protestant Church in the deliberations on the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany . Since 1925 Heinrich Held was married to Hildegard Röhrig (1901–1978) from Elberfeld. The marriage had six children. His son Heinz Joachim Held (* 1928) was President of the EKD Church Office from 1975 to 1993.

After returning from a meeting of the Lutheran World Federation in Minneapolis , Heinrich Held succumbed to a pulmonary embolism six days before his sixtieth birthday .

Honors

The Protestant theological faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn awarded Heinrich Held an honorary doctorate in 1948.

The cities of Essen and Meisenheim have named traffic areas after Heinrich Held (or Preses Held). Furthermore, old people's homes in Essen, the "Heinrich-Held-Haus" (2008), and from 2010/11 the old people's home of Diakonie Michaelshoven (Cologne) in Wesseling, the Preses-Held-Haus, bear his name. The topping-out ceremony was on July 16, 2010.

On September 16, 2003 Heinrich Held was posthumously honored together with his Essen official brother Johannes Böttcher and his wife Käthe with the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations . The Holocaust -Gedenkstätte Yad Vashem in Jerusalem gives this award to non-Jewish people by the Nazis during risked their lives Jews from persecution and murder Nazis saved.

literature

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Held  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ to Saarl. Biographies ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Exhibition boards on the 50th anniversary of death at archiv-ekir.de (accessed December 2015)
  3. ^ HH in Saarl. Biographies ( Memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ^ Georg Grosser: Evangelical community life in the Cologne region. Verlag der Löwe, Cologne 1958, p. 60f (with incorrect year information for election in Rüttenscheid)
  5. ↑ after H.-J. hero
  6. ↑ from here Heinrich Held in Rüttenscheid at ekir.de
personal data
SURNAME Hero, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Held, Heinrich Karl Ewald (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant theologian
DATE OF BIRTH September 25, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Johann , Saar
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1957
Place of death Dusseldorf