Hildegard Schaeder (13 April 1902 – 11 April 1984) was a German church historian. In 2000, she was posthumously honoured as Righteous Among the Nations.
Life
Born in Kiel, Schaeder was the fourth child of the professor of systematic theology Erich Schaeder and his wife Anna née Sellschopp (1867–1948). Her brothers were the orientalist Hans Heinrich Schaeder, the economist Reinhard Schaeder and the physicist and brain researcher Johann Albrecht Schaeder. She attended a private grammar school first in Kiel and later, after her father had accepted a call from the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University, in Breslau, where she took the Abitur as an external student in 1920. She then completed studies in classical and slavic philology, Eastern European history, Byzantine studies and philosophy at the University of Breslau and the University of Hamburg. At the University of Hamburg, she received her doctorate in 1927 under Richard Salomon with the thesis "Moskau, das dritte Rom – Studien zur Geschichte der politischen Theorien in der slavischen Welt". In 1935, she began working as a research assistant in the Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem [de] of the Prussian Privy State Archives in Berlin.
Schaeder became a member of the Confessing Church in 1934, and from 1935 also worked actively in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche Dahlem [de], which was ministered by Martin Niemöller. A special focus of her parish work was the care of Jews who had been deported to the Lublin Ghetto. After a denunciation, Schaeder was taken into protective custody (Schutzhaft) on 14 September 1943 for "favouring fugitive Jews". She was imprisoned at the Polizeipräsidium Alexanderplatz [de]. In spring 1944, she was transferred as a political prisoner to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was liberated in 1945.
She then worked in a parish in Mecklenburg, but moved to Göttingen, where her mother and siblings already lived after World War II. From 1948 to 1970, she worked as a consultant for the Eastern Orthodox Church in the foreign office of the Protestant church in Germany, based in Frankfurt. In addition, she taught as an honorary professor for the history of the Eastern Churches at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main from 1965 to 1978.
Schaeder died in Freiburg im Breisgau at the age of 81. She was buried at the Waldfriedhof Oberrad [de] in Frankfurt.[1] A street in the Oberrad district of Frankfurt is named after Schaeder[2]
