Deane & Ian Barbour: Toiling with the Defeated, 1948

US Diaries from the Ruins in Hamburg and Münster

February 15, 2023, Rotary Club of Jerusalem, Video PowerPoint about the US diaries of Ian and Deane Barbour, Northfield, MN, who in 1948 participated in summer work camps in Münster and Hamburg. The young couple worked with American, Dutch, and German students to clear rubble from bombed university buildings. These Christian groups also sought understanding and reconciliation between former enemies and experienced moments of great honesty and emotional depth. In Germany and Europe that summer there were 150 work camps with thousands of student volunteers from many countries. Extensive research about the work camps of 1948 was not very successful. We hope that this video encourages further engagement with these early friendship initiatives. Perhaps descendants of the participants (see appendix 1 of our book publication) own more documents. Printed copy via: www.LuLu.com

The work camps were organized by Christian student organizations like the YMCA, Congregational Service Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee. Young people toiled for defeated Germans still scraping a living and hungry and nearly hopeless between hills of ruins.

Deane and Ian Barbour were married in 1947 in the US capital, Washington. Deane studied theology, and Ian physics.“

PS: Ian Barbour, Pioneer in Integrating Faith and Science, was an American scholar on the relationship between science and religion. According to the Public Broadcasting Service his mid-1960s Issues in Science and Religion "has been credited with literally creating the contemporary field of science and religion. In the citation nominating Barbour for the 1999 Templeton Prize, John B. Cobb wrote, "No contemporary has made a more original, deep and lasting contribution toward the needed integration of scientific and religious knowledge and values than Ian Barbour.”