He was 16 when he was drafted in the German army, in 1943. He served a little more than one year before he surrendered to the British army. He was a prisoner of war in Belgium, England and Scotland and it was as a prisoner of war that, as he said, "#Jesus found [him]". Back in Germany in 1948 or 1949, he studied theology and became pastor (as a pastor he fought for the idea that the Church shouldn't continue is work as if Nazism didn't occur and joined the Confessing Church, which gathered anti-Nazi Protestants during the Nazi era) and later professor of systematic theology, and then he published, between other important books, the "Theology of Hope", a very important and influent work which was inspired by Marxism (and especially by the book "The Principle of Hope" of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch) and inspired the #TheologyOfLiberation. He also published about #ecology and as soon as 1985 he published a book titled "God in #Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation".
All his life he tried to think the common problems of his time from a Christian perspective, proving the pertinence of the Christian faith in our time. he was one of the great names of his generation.