Anna Hedvig Büll

Who was Anna Hedvig Büll?

Anna Hedvig Büll was an Estonian missionary of Baltic German extraction who helped to save the lives of several thousand Armenian orphans during the Armenian Genocide.

Hedvig Büll was born into a Lutheran family in 1887 in Haapsalu, Estonia where her father owned a mud cure resort. She was the sixth of eight brothers and sisters. Büll attended a government school in Estonia until she was 15. Then she was sent for continued studies to Saint Petersburg where she attended for three years a protestant German school. While visiting her family in Haapsalu in 1903 she was inspired by a lecture given by a well-known evangelist Johann Kargel in her father's house and decided to dedicate her life to humanitarian mission work.

After receiving her baccalaureate in 1903, Büll spent some time at the Mission House Malche in Bad Freienwalde where she learned about the fate of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Motivated by her desire to work among the Armenian people she continued her studies at an evangelical school.