An Easter Miracle

The Fellowship  |  April 17, 2019

Hanning Schroeder

(1896-1987)

Hanning Schroeder was a renowned German musician living in Germany during World War II. Schroeder was also a Christian married to a Jewish woman. Perhaps this was one reason he selflessly gave shelter to a Jewish couple he had never met before.

On Easter of 1944, the Jewish couple, Werner and Ilse Rewald, had run out of places to hide from the Nazis. Death in the concentration camps was surely their fate. But then a Jewish friend referred them to Hanning and Cornelia Schroeder.

The Schroeders themselves were in a precarious situation because of Cornelia’s Jewish faith. But despite the added danger, they gladly took the Rewalds into their home and allowed them to stay until the war was over. When snooping Nazis came around, Hanning explained that the Rewalds were simply German neighbors whose home had been destroyed in an air raid.

Hanning’s string quartet, In Memoriam Lied der Moorsoldaten, commemorated the Holocaust and earned him well-deserved recognition after the war. So, too, did his heroic deed during the war — he was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem on April 16, 1978, in the ceremony shown above. Hanning Schroeder lived to old age, passing away in his native Berlin in 1987.