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Stories: Hans-Juergen Saager--A Life Spared for a Special Purpose

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Hans-Juergen Saager--A Life Spared for a Special Purpose 06 Nov 2010
A Life Spared for a Special Purpose HANS-JUERGEN SAAGER By Daniel Bay Gibbons (2002) Emerging from the terrors and disruption of World War II, his life hanging by a thread, and then enduring fourteen years of imprisonment, hospitalization and disability, Hans-Juergen Saager felt an overriding Providence which protected him and beckoned him on toward a “special purpose” for his life. Hans-Juergen found that “special purpose” when he later encountered the Mormon missionaries and commenced a new life of service, including his call to serve as the first West German citizen to preside as a full time mission president. Hans-Juergen Saager was born February 26, 1925 in the city of Stetin, then a part of Germany and now located in Poland. His father was a printer and found it necessary to move his family to Hamburg in 1927 to pay off some family debts. Hans-Juergen was only two years old when the family moved to Hamburg, and there he spent his formative years in a happy and loving home. Eventually Hans-Juergen studied in a trade school and apprenticed in an electrical wholesale business. He was young, strong and unusually intelligent. His future looked bright. The only shadow over his life was the start of World War II. In 1943 he was conscripted into the German army at the age of 17, and thus began a sixteen year nightmare of war, pain, injury and illness which shattered his peaceful life. Hans-Juergen suffered grave injuries in the war, and almost didn’t live to see its traumatic conclusion in May of 1945. Hans-Juergen was the only one of his original company who lived to see the end of the war. On several occasions he survived while his companions around him fell. It was during the terrible heat of battle that he commenced to feel that God had saved his life for a “special purpose”, which Hans-Juergen did not yet know. As the war wound to its horrific conclusion, he continued to feel that the Lord was protecting him from death. He was in the last jeep to cross one of the last operating bridges on the Rhine River as the German army retreated in disarray before the advancing Allied forces. Commencing in May of 1945 he was imprisoned under American military jurisdiction, spending much of the time hospitalized for treatment of his extensive injuries. Although imprisoned for a full year, he bore little animosity toward his American captors. Indeed, he later developed a special bond with Americans, including hundreds of full time missionaries who served under his loving leadership. Ironically, he spent part of his imprisonment in Duesseldorf, the city where he later served as President of the Germany Duesseldorf Mission. When not hospitalized, Hans-Juergen was assigned by his American captors to write out discharge papers for German soldiers who lived within 50 kilometers of the place of their incarceration. Since he lived a great distance from the prisoner of war camp, he was in the last group of soldiers discharged. He spent the final months of captivity in France, and was finally released in May, 1946, a full year after the cessation of hostilities. Though he was discharged, and returned to his home town of Hamburg, the war was not yet over for Hans-Juergen. Because of the gravity of his injuries, he was again hospitalized. From May of 1946 until 1959 he was in and out of hospitals and was unable to pursue his schooling or work because of his disability. During this period he also saw nearly all of his companions pass away from injuries in the hospital, and Hans-Juergen was once again left to question what “special purpose” God had in mind for him in the future. Two events represented a break in the clouds for Hans-Juergen during the years of his painful treatment and slow recovery. The first was his marriage in 1953 to Irmgard Will in Hamburg, and the second was his meeting of LDS missionaries in 1957. Hans-Juergen has written that the first thing he learned from the missionaries was how to pray. Prayer soon brought deep solace and comfort to Hans-Juergen in the midst of his physical afflictions. Still gravely ill from his war injuries, Hans-Juergen made a solemn promise to the Lord, that “if He would allow me to live, I would promise to serve Him until my life on this earth finds its end.” As the first step in fulfilling this personal covenant, Hans-Juergen started to teach mutual and genealogy classes in the Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg Branch even before his baptism. Finally he and his wife were baptized on August 28, 1958. As a new convert, Hans-Juergen’s Church responsibilities soon increased dramatically. The native talents which he possessed and which had been long hidden during his protracted convalescence, were brought forth as he served in the small but growing Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg Branch. He was called as a Branch President in 1960, as a Bishop in 1963 and then as a Stake President in 1969. As he served to the best of his physical ability, the Lord also blessed him with a miraculous physical recovery from his war injuries, so that in 1959 he was able to start working for the first time since the war. Not only was Hans-Juergen able to work again, but he also returned to trade school. Whereas the fourteen years after the end of the War had meant only pain, and hospitalization for Hans-Juergen, he now experienced a great increase of health and vitality as he worked long hours to support his family and serve in the Church. He wrote, “The Lord provided me with the strength to work as I never had before; to work for Him and to work for our living.” Finally, the war was over for Hans-Juergen Saager. Hans-Juergen’s wife Irmgard passed away in 1970. The pain of her death was lessened by the firm faith which they both had in the blessings of Eternal Life. Following her death, Hans-Juergen entered a new and exciting phase of his life, as he moved to Frankfurt to work for the Church. It was while he was living there that he married and was sealed to his second wife, Ursula Wiese in the Swiss Temple. Ursula had been baptized in Hamburg in 1963 with other members of her family during the time which Hans-Juergen served as her bishop. During her conversion, Ursula struggled mightily with a lifetime addiction to cigarettes and coffee. However, the missionaries taught her that this and all other problems can be overcome through faith and prayer. Following their counsel, Ursula had prayed fervently for the strength to overcome. She writes: “I stopped smoking on a very beautiful Sunday morning, went to Church, brought my missionaries home for dinner, and never touched a cigarette again in my life.” Within three years of their marriage, Hans-Juergen was called as President of the Germany Duesseldorf Mission. The mission boundaries included areas where Hans-Juergen had both served in the German military, and been imprisoned after the war. And here he was once again associated with many young Americans — only now they were not his military captors, but the full-time missionaries he was called to preside over. Though Hans-Juergen had never had children of his own, he soon became a loving and tender “father” to many young men and women who served under his direction. In his calling as mission president, and in other Church service, Hans-Juergen felt that he had finally discovered the “special purpose” for which the Lord had prolonged and preserved his life. Hans-Juergen died in Germany on June 7, 2001 at the age of seventy-six, full of years, faithful and true to the end, and mourned by hundreds of “sons and daughters” whose lives he had touched as a Bishop, Stake President and Mission President. SOURCES 1. Saager, Hans-Juergen and Ursula Saager, “Autobiography and Testimony of Hans-Juergen Saager and Ursula Saager”, dated 1998, in possession of Daniel Bay Gibbons. 2. Gibbons, Daniel Bay, Missionary Diary of Daniel Bay Gibbons, 1976 to 1978. 3. Gibbons, Daniel Bay, Letter of Daniel Bay Gibbons dated August 29, 1977.
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