Heinrich Held

German Protestant theologian, posthumously honoured with the title Righteous Among the Nations, an honorific used by the State of Israel to describe non-Jews who risked their lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination by the Nazis. Together with Gustav Heinemann and the 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, and also brought them food that was essential for survival even after 17 September 1944, the day on which "the last Jews" had been deported from Essen and Essen was officially considered "Jew-free". In 1925 Heinrich Held married Hildegard Röhrig (1901-1978) from Elberfeld. The marriage produced six children. His son Heinz Joachim Held (b. 1928) was president of the church office of the EKD from 1975 to 1993. After returning from a meeting of the Lutheran World Federation in Minneapolis, Heinrich Held died of pulmonary embolism on 19 September 1957 in Düsseldorf, six days before his sixtieth birthday. Link to Wikipedia biography (German)