Biography
Susanne Engelmann (the donor's aunt) was raised in Berlin. She was the daughter of Martha (Heimann) Engelmann, a German Jew. Susanne received her doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. Her course of study had included one year at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia. During the interwar period Susanne served as the principal of a large public high school for girls in Berlin until her dismissal as a "non-Aryan" in April 1933. In 1934 Susanne joined the German Confessing Church and became a member of the small Protestant congregation in Berlin-Dahlem led by Pastor Martin Niemoeller. In 1939 she left Germany with her ailing mother to join her brother, Konrad, and his family, who were living in exile in Istanbul, Turkey. Her mother died the following year, in June 1940. Shortly thereafter Susanne was able to immigrate to the United States via China and Japan. She settled first in San Francisco and later in Northampton, MA, where she joined the faculty of Smith college. Through her connections with the American Friends Service Committee, Susanne was able to bring her family to the U.S. from Turkey after the war.
Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984), German theologian and founder of the Bekennende Kirche (the Confessing Church). Born in Lippstadt, Germany, Niemoeller served as a U-boat commander in World War I before beginning his theological studies in Muenster. In 1931, he became a pastor in Berlin-Dahlem. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the new regime attempted to purge the German Evangelical Church of converted Jews and to make the church subservient to the state. In protest, Niemoeller helped found the Pastor's Emergency League, an organization that fought against Nazi interference in church affairs and the discrimination of Christians of Jewish origin. A year later at the Synod of Barmen (May 1934), Niemoeller helped found a new protestant church in Germany, called the Bekennende Kirche, that proclaimed itself to be the true Protestant Church in Germany. Niemoeller traveled around Germany preaching against the Nazis, which resulted in his brief imprisonment by the Gestapo in 1937. He was arrested again in 1938 and sent first to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau. In 1945 he was transferred to the Tyrol, where he was liberated by the Allies. After his release Niemoeller became president of the Evangelical Church in Hesse-Nassau and founded a cooperative council of all German churches in 1948. He served as one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968.
