Departures of note

In early 1990, Uwe Holmer, then head of the Hoffnungstaler Stiftung Lobetal, a sanatorium for the homeless and disabled near Berlin, took in Erich Honecker and his wife Margot after the former East German leader was ousted and left without a home. The Volkskammer had seized Honecker's property, and his request for housing had been denied four times by the state. Bishop Gottfried Forck of the Protestant Church of Berlin-Brandenburg agreed to send the couple to Lobetal, where Holmer and his wife Sigrid housed them from the end of January to April 1990. During that time, Holmer's house was inundated by journalists and protesters, but he believed harboring the Honeckers was morally right and saw it as an act of forgiveness.

Holmer was born in Wismar in 1929 and joined the Hitler Youth as a teenager, seeing it as an opportunity to learn in an optimistic and comradely environment. After a ten-month stay in a lung clinic, where an older boy told him about Jesus, he decided to become a Lutheran minister. He studied theology at the University of Jena, was ordained in 1955, and became a pastor in Mecklenburg. When his family escaped to West Germany in 1953, he stayed in East Germany because he believed it would need more pastors. He criticized the GDR's forced collectivisation of agriculture, which made him a target of the Stasi. His political stances prevented his family from visiting him for a year, and none of his children were allowed to attend secondary school despite good grades. He nearly appealed to the European Commission for Human Rights, but his bishop advised against it, fearing the state would close his Bible school.

Holmer headed Bibelschule Falkenberg from 1967 to 1983, then took over the Hoffnungstaler Stiftung Lobetal, where he opened an addiction clinic and gained many Pietist employees in the face of staffing shortages. For his work there, he received a medal of merit from the GDR. After the Honeckers moved out, Holmer maintained correspondence with them, and they sent Christmas cards each year until Margot died in 2016. Ten years after Erich Honecker's death, Holmer campaigned to transfer his remains from an urn on Margot's windowsill in Chile to a grave in Friedrichsfelde, Germany.

After his first wife Sigrid died in 1995, Holmer married Christine Lander in 1996 and adopted her five children from her first marriage. After retiring, he moved back to Serrahn to work in a rehabilitation clinic for addicts and joined the board of the German Evangelical Alliance. He denounced abortion and criticized the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland for being guided by 'extreme Bible criticism'. He regularly travelled to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to teach in Bible schools. In 2009, he wrote an autobiography titled 'Der Mann, bei dem Honecker wohnte' (The Man with whom Honecker Lived). His story was also the subject of the 2022 documentary 'Honecker und der Pastor', which he praised for capturing the concern from back then. Holmer died on 25 September 2023 in his home in Serrahn.