Kurt Hahn

Origins and early life

Kurt Hahn was born in Berlin on 5 June 1886 into a well-off Jewish family of industrialists, the son of Oskar Hahn, a steel manufacturer, and this fiche states plainly that he was born and raised a Jew and that late in life, in Britain, he became a communicant member of the Church of England in 1945 and also preached in the Church of Scotland, a conversion he never hid and that does not alter his origin. He studied at Oxford and in Germany, and a sunstroke at eighteen left him unable to bear direct sunlight for the rest of his life.

Work and career

During the First World War he worked in the German foreign ministry's intelligence service and afterwards became private secretary to Prince Max of Baden, the last imperial chancellor; with him he founded in 1920 the school of Schloss Salem, built on the conviction that education should form character through responsibility, physical challenge and service to others rather than through examinations alone. He denounced the Nazis publicly, telling Salem's old boys in 1932 that they must choose between the school and Hitler, was arrested in March 1933, and was released only after the intervention of the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald.

Exiled to Britain, he founded Gordonstoun in Scotland in 1934, where Prince Philip and later Prince Charles were educated. From his ideas came the Outward Bound movement, born in 1941 to teach young merchant seamen the resilience that survival at sea demanded, the county badge scheme that became the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, Atlantic College and the United World Colleges, and the network of mountain rescue and coastguard services run by schools.

He died at Salem on 14 December 1974, and tens of millions of young people have since passed through programmes descended from his.