Hubert Schiffer

Who is Hubert Schiffer?

Father Hubert Schiffer, was one of eight German Jesuits who survived the nuclear bomb "Little Boy" 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. The group of Jesuits survived not only to the explosion, its members also survived to the radiation. Skeptics counter that while people inside Nagasaki's Urakami Cathedral were afforded no special protection, 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.

According to the account of Jesuit priest Fr. John Seimes, 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.