Father Hubert Schiffer, (1915 - March 27, 1982) was one of eight German Jesuits who survived the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. He was only eight blocks away from ground zero when the explosion occurred. Some Catholics believe the survival of the priests to have been a miracle. Skeptics counter that people inside Nagasaki's Urakami Cathedral were afforded no special protection, and that there were non-Catholic survivors even closer to the center of the blast in Hiroshima. Eiko Taoka and nine other people survived in a streetcar which was 750 meters from ground zero. One survivor, Akiko Takakura, was in a bank 300 meters away from the blast. Eizo Nomura survived just 170 meters away from the blast, in the basement of the Hiroshima Prefecture Fuel Rationing Union.
Schiffer (left) with Enola Gay co-pilot Robert A. Lewis in 1951
Father Hubert F. Schiffer, S.J. (1915 in Gütersloh – March 27, 1982 in Frankfurt, West Germany) was a German Jesuit who survived the atomic bomb "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima.
Hiroshima bombing
Schiffer was one of several Jesuit priests who were at their mission compound, less than 1 mile (1.6 km) from ground zero when the explosion occurred.
- Jesuits and their location
Many retellings of the event state there were eight Jesuit priests (or missionaries), who were eight blocks from ground zero. John Hersey, in his contemporary 1946 account Hiroshima, lists four Jesuit priests (Father Superior LaSalle [sic], Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Father Cieslik, and Father Schiffer) and places them 1,400 yards (1,300 m) "from the center." Schiffer himself states there were four Jesuit priests — "Father Hugo Lassalle, Superior of the whole Jesuit Mission in Japan, and Fathers Kleinsorge, Cieslik, and Schiffer" — and describes his own location as "within the most deadly one-mile radius." Schiffer also notes the name of their church — "the Jesuit Church of Our Lady's Assumption."
- Explosion
According to the 1946 account of Jesuit priest Father John Siemes, who had been on the outskirts of the city:
They were in their rooms at the Parish House—it was a quarter after eight, exactly the time when we had heard the explosion in Nagatsuke—when came the intense light and immediately thereafter the sound of breaking windows, walls and furniture. They were showered with glass splinters and fragments of wreckage. Father Schiffer was buried beneath a portion of a wall and suffered a severe head injury. The Father Superior received most of the splinters in his back and lower extremity from which he bled copiously. Everything was thrown about in the rooms themselves, but the wooden framework of the house remained intact.
Schiffer's own account describes the explosion:
Suddenly, a terrific explosion filled the air with one bursting thunderstroke. An invisible force lifted me from the chair, hurled me through the air, shook me, battered me, whirled me 'round and 'round like a leaf in a gust of autumn wind.
- Survivors
All four Jesuit priests survived the explosion. Quoted in 1950, Schiffer said, "Of 14 clergy and laymen we lost only one, a Japanese." The Jesuits were in a building stronger than most surrounding buildings, as noted by Hersey and Siemes, respectively:
[Father Kleinsorge saw] that all the buildings round about had fallen down except the Jesuits’ mission house, which had long before been braced and double-braced by a priest named Gropper, who was terrified of earthquakes
The solidity of the structure which was the work of Brother Gropper again shone forth.
They were not the only survivors close to ground zero; an estimated 14% of people within 1 kilometre (0.62 mi) of ground zero survived the explosion. Other survivors included ten people in a streetcar 750 metres (820 yd) from ground zero, and a woman in a bank 260 metres (280 yd) away from the blast. One person survived at a distance of just 170 metres (190 yd), protected in the basement of a building while looking for documents.
- Religious aspects
The survival of the priests has sometimes been referred to as a miracle. In 1951, Schiffer said:
I won't call it a miracle exactly, but I think we were under the special protection of God.
Similarities with Nagasaki are sometimes highlighted, where a Franciscan friary established by St. Maximilian Kolbe was "unaffected by the bomb which fell there", as "the friary was protected from the force of the bomb by an intervening mountain".
Later life
Schiffer met both the pilot and co-pilot of the B-29 that bombed Hiroshima, the Enola Gay. In New York City in 1951, Schiffer met co-pilot Robert A. Lewis. Schiffer invited Lewis to visit Hiroshima in August 1952 for the dedication of a "palace of prayer", which Lewis accepted; however, there is no record of Lewis actually making such a visit. The two also appeared together at Fordham University in 1957, on the twelfth anniversary of the bombing, with Schiffer noting that they had become "very fast friends." Schiffer later met pilot Paul Tibbets in Dallas in 1975.
Schiffer, who had received a bachelor's degree in Japan, received a master's degree from Fordham University in 1952, and a doctorate there in 1958. In the 1960s, Schiffer worked as an associate professor of economics at St. Joseph's College in Philadelphia, and wrote a book on the Japanese banking system.
