Background
Kurt Scharf was born in Landsberg an der Warthe in the Prussian Province of Brandenburg (now Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland).
Kurt Scharf was born in Landsberg an der Warthe in the Prussian Province of Brandenburg (now Gorzów Wielkopolski in Poland).
In the 1930s he worked as a pastor for the Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union in Sachsenhausen, a locality of Oranienburg and as such had occasional opportunities to tend to the inmates of the homonymous concentration camp there. In 1945 he was appointed provost and leader of the consistory of the old-Prussian March of Brandenburg ecclesiastical province. In 1952 he was given an honorary doctorate by the Faculty of Theology at Humboldt University.
From 1966 to 1976 he was the elected bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg (new name of the March of Brandenburg ecclesiastical province after it assumed independence in 1948), although since 1961 the bishop"s area of responsibility and influence had been restricted to West Berlin.
As a result of this he functioned as the bishop of the Western regional synod from 1972. On March 28, 1990 he died en route to Schlachtensee hospital in Berlin.
Scharf contributed to the Ostdenkschrift of the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, the first recognition (in 1965) by a significant German organisation of the Oder–Neisse line. He was awarded the Copernicus Medal of the People"s Republic of Poland in 1973 for his support for German reconciliation with Poland, as well as an honorary doctorate from the Christian Academy of the University of Warsaw.
As vice-president of the United World Bible Societies he was a strong advocate of spreading the Bible throughout the world.
He was a Christian pacifist and opposed the production and placement of nuclear weapons on German soil.
Scharf also took on many difficult cases of providing spiritual welfare to prisoners, for example to Germans imprisoned for war crimes and to imprisoned members of the Baader-Meinhof Group.