Johan Kõpp

Johan Kõpp (9 November 1874, Holdre, Kreis Fellin – 21 October 1970, Stockholm) was an Estonian bishop and head of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church 1939–1944.

Biography Kõpp went to high school at the Hugo Treffner Gymnasium in Tartu and then studied theology at the University of Tartu. He graduated from university in 1906. After his studies he initially worked as a high school teacher in Pärnu but from 1909 to 1922 was pastor in Laiuse. Already in 1916 he had however taken up a teaching position at the University of Tartu as one of the first ethnic Estonians to do so after the Estonian Declaration of Independence.

Kõpp was instrumental in organising and setting up the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church in 1917 and in 1939 he was elevated to the position of bishop and leader of the church. During the first Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940 following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Kõpp stayed in Estonia. The situation for the church however became strenuous, as most Baltic German priests (who constituted one fifth of the priests in the country) were "repatriated" to Nazi Germany and as the church was harassed by Soviet authorities. Among other things, land owned by the church was confiscated and the printing of religious books banned. During the following German occupation, things became somewhat easier for the church as most of the pre-war rights of the church were restored. However, the relationship with the German occupational authorities were also not without conflict; for example, the Germans confiscated and melted down church bells to use the materials in the war effort. In 1944, when the Red Army re-occupied Estonia and drove out the Germans, Johan Kõpp fled to Sweden. Half of the active priests in Estonia at the time made the same decision to flee.