Hebe Charlotte Kohlbrugge

Hebe Charlotte Kohlbrugge (8 April 1914 – 13 December 2016) was a Dutch Protestant theologian and Second World War resistance member. She was a member of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church for eleven months and assisted the reverend Günther Harder in Fehrbellin. Kohlbrugge was involved in spiritual resistance against Nazi Germany through the secret distribution of a pamphlet in the Netherlands and Switzerland during the Second World War. After the war, she worked as the secretary of the Germany Commission in the Council for Church and Government of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1947, holding responsibility for restoring ties with churches alongside Arend van Leeuwen in the Soviet-occupied East Germany and other Iron Curtain nations until 1989. Kohlbrugge gave students post-war ideology and enable Dutch students understand socialist ideals, sending theology students to Central Eastern Europe nations and more than 80 Dutch students spent one or two years studying. She was a recipient of the Bronze Lion and the American Medal of Freedom with the Silver Palm.

Biography On 8 April 1914, Kohlbrugge was born in Utrecht. She was the daughter of the chemist and teacher Hermann Kohlbrugge and the Lutheran Johanna Elisabeth Barner; She was of German descent through her parents. she went on a one-year nursing course before moving to Norway to teach German (which she learnt by her family taking in German children during the First World War) to children. Kobhbrugge became available to the Confessing Church for eleven months, Kohlbrugge also worked in other countries behind the Iron Curtain, she continued working in Eastern Europe until 1989. She was admitted to the in December 2016 with heart problems and died on the night of 13 to 14 December. Kohlbrugge did not marry. On 21 December, she was interred in the family grave in Amerongen. On 30 October 1975, she received the from the former West German president Gustav Heinemann in Münster "as a recognition for her pioneering work in bringing people and nations together." She was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology from the Charles University in Prague in May 1991 and from the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in 1995. In 2019, Utrecht City Council directed its Street Naming Committee to name a street in the city after Kohlbrugge in an diversification street naming project and did so in February 2021 in the Merwedekanaalzone neighbourhood.