Hubert Jedin

He was born in Upper Silesia as one of ten children and studied theology in Breslau, Munich and Freiburg. He was ordained in 1924. In 1927 he went to Rome where he completed a biography of Girolamo Seripando. He returned to Germany in 1930, to teach Church History at the Catholic faculty of the University of Breslau. Because of his Jewish mother, he was defined half-Jewish by the National Socialists. They stripped him of all academic titles and prohibited him from working in public institutions in Germany. Jedin returned to Rome and worked there for the Görres Society. From 1936 until 1939, he worked for his diocese in Breslau. He returned to Rome after narrowly escaping deportation to the Concentration Camp at Buchenwald.

In Rome, he lived at the Campo Santo Teutonico in the Vatican and was thus under the protection of Pope Pius XII during the German occupation. He worked on a history of the Council of Trent, which he published in the years 1951–1976. Jedin created the most comprehensive description of the Council in his History of the Council of Trent (Geschichte des Konzils von Trient) with about 2400 pages in four volumes.

After the war he was rehabilitated in Germany and accepted a professorship at the University of Bonn in 1948. Pope John XXIII nominated him to assist in the preparation of the Second Vatican Council in 1960. He continued to work for the council until it ended in 1965.