Hebe Charlotte Kohlbrugge

Hebe Charlotte Kohlbrugge 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.