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Hanna and her brother Guenter were separated and spent over a year at the homes of different relatives. The siblings were reunited with the family and returned to Turkey when Hanna was eight. Her father, Max Zimmer, was a top adviser to Kamel Pasha, the far-seeing military man who had defeated the British in a brutal battle at Gallipoli a few years before. In 1922, Kamel Pasha (Ataturk) took control of Turkey’s political structures and was instrumental in developing modern Turkey as we know it today. Hanna’s father was also very interested in the works of philosophers of his age and communicated regularly with Alice Bailey and Hanna was educated by her mother in the mornings and by her father in the evenings, when he held round-table discussions open to all the villagers. Hanna said these were fascinating discussions about science, philosophy, politics, and while growing up in Turkey she spent much time in nature. She spent hours caring for the puppies and baby donkeys which were discarded by the pack trains that passed her village. After completing high school she became a translator for an American missionary doctor, Dr. Clark, who traveled from village to village binding up wounds and healing people using common remedies (herbs, cream of tartar, baking soda, vinegar), prayer, and intuition to help people in remote northern regions of Turkey. Under the recommendation of Dr. Clark, Hanna went to an American Hospital in Istanbul to study to become a nurse, later finishing her studies at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

Back to Hanna Kroeger History
After three years at Dr. Brauchele’s hospital, she met Rudolf Kroeger, a young man who had just finished his engineering studies. They married three months after their first date. She had a difficult choice to give up a career she loved, since at that time a woman had to give up her job when she got married. But Hanna had fallen head over heels in love, and was ready to start a family. They had two children when Rudolf’s father gave them the down payment to a house and they moved to a small house surrounded by fruit trees, berry bushes, asparagus beds, and a place to grow potatoes, cabbage, and turnips. This property kept them alive during and after the war when they witnessed the starvation, brutal crimes, mind-shattering sadness, and traumatic hostility that are the result of war.
 

Rudolf was drafted in March 1945, two months before peace was finally declared. He was sent to defend Berlin from the Russians, and was captured and enslaved to work in a coal mine in northern Russia for nearly five years. He was finally released in December 1949 because he was too ill to work in the mines. In the meantime, Hanna had to take care of 4 young children by herself with little food, little clothing, and very little fuel for heating and cooking. When Rudolf finally returned, they agreed that they must start a new life in a new country and started preparations to come to America

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When they picked up a dime lying in the gutter, they were convinced that they had made the right decision to abandon their homeland to start a new life in a rich country. They visited their sponsors (the daughter of Dr. Clark) in Adrian, Michigan, for a week where they were showered with clothing, sheets, towels, and dishes which they shipped to Milwaukee, their final destination. They also sent many packages to their friends and relatives in Germany. It took them three years, living first in Milwaukee, then in Escanaba, Michigan, before they moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1956.

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It was in 1963, ten years after their arrival to America, that Hanna and Rudolf felt that they had finally made enough money to feel that they were comfortable and that Hanna’s work was being noticed and accepted by the community. It was also the beginning of the Flower Children era and Hanna was deeply involved in their movement. She loved the hippies and applauded their protests against the Vietnam War and against the rules of society. She doctored them with herbs, and opened her store on cold nights so that the homeless youth would have a warm place to sleep. She often brought them home for supper, and, after talking with them far into the night, she’d give them a bed and breakfast, before sending them on their way.

More and more people came to the store each day to get Hanna’s often unorthodox advice. One day a woman came holding her two year old child. “Help me, please help me. I just came from the doctor who said my child has hepatitis and is dying. What can I do?” Hanna looked at the jaundiced child whose arms hung lifelessly over the mother’s arms. “Go to the store. Buy fresh limes and fresh beets. Grate the beets and make juice from them. Squeeze the juice from the limes. Give the child a tablespoon of fresh beet juice one hour and fresh lime juice the next. Wake the child up for 24 hours to take the juices.” Two days later the woman came back with a very happy child who wanted only to explore the shelves of products in the store. Another life was saved.

Often herbal formulas were put together depending upon the need at the time. Hanna would choose the herbs, grind them together with a mortar and pestle, and employ her children to encapsulate them around the kitchen table at night while they sang songs and exchanged stories.
In 1969, Mo Siegel, the founder of Celestial Seasonings, displayed his first teas at New Age Foods. Hanna was very concerned about Mo and his friend because “they spent all their time writing happy messages on the tea bags and not enough time selling them.”

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One day, she was served with an indictment charging her with practicing medicine without a license. This was a huge shock to her, as she felt that she was acting on the behest of Jesus’ command to heal His people. She hired a lawyer who was obviously not on her side as he tried to maneuver her to plead guilty. She refused and a full-fledged jury trial ensued. It became the talk of the town and people had to come early in order to find seats. Her friends organized protests and walked her through the streets from the store to the courthouse in a long procession of support.

For the trial Hanna dressed in a replica of her nurse’s uniform and confounded the prosecution when she refused to answer any question until she had consulted with God. Her answers to the questions became headlines in the newspapers all over Colorado. When the verdict was finally read (she was convicted of 7 of 12 counts- five counts had been dismissed because the entrapping detective had failed to pay for the herbs she had given him) the whole town was up in arms. The judge called her in and told her that he disagreed with the verdict and asked her to sign a paper saying that she would no longer practice medicine. Since she never considered herself to be practicing medicine in the first place, she had no trouble signing the paper and went back to the store with gratitude.

Back at the store, the trial publicity had made the whole state of Colorado aware of her abilities and now the lines of people waiting to see her wrapped around the block

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All types of medical tests were done and drugs were ingested, all without success. Soon Hanna and Rudolf had seen all likely professionals in Boulder and Denver and expanded their search world wide. They tried alternative practitioners, ministers, medical experts, psychiatrists, chiropractors, and shamanic healers. They traveled to Europe, South America, Canada, the Philippines, and Mexico to find someone who could help. Diagnoses of lymphoma, leukemia, and schizophrenia, were bandied about and quickly discarded. At one point, when she was 15, she was on her deathbed, and then came out of a coma talking about her near-death experience where Jesus told her that she had to go back to earth to “complete her mission.”

Hanna started reading up on the Salk vaccine and discovered things that only later became common knowledge. She discovered that the polio vaccine was made by injection of the polio virus into the kidneys of Rhesus monkeys. Once the kidneys were inflamed, the pus was extracted to become the basis for the vaccine. In the process of this extraction, many viruses that had never been in human beings before, were extracted as well and never removed. Retro-viruses as well as the Simian 40 virus, a deadly virus that causes brain tumors, were identified many years after the polio vaccine had been injected into millions of people. Even today, it remains in the vaccine supply.

By the time Hanna had discovered the cause of Lisa’s problem and developed some remarkable remedies against them, it was too late to help Lisa whose brain was permanently damaged from the viruses. Lisa became a huge burden for Hanna and her family, but also was the spur that egged Hanna to explore more and more remedies. One remedy that Hanna developed with the help of a Native American medicine woman, Wanita Windwalker, was the X40 Kit. When Magic Johnson announced that he was HIV positive, Hanna sent him a kit with instructions on how to take it.

After Rudolf and Hanna’s deaths, Lisa was lovingly cared for by her eldest brother Klaus. Her trusting, unclouded, and loving gaze also became the impetus that caused many people to embrace every problem that they had as a gift, rather than a curse, from God. She died on September 17, 2009.

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It was during the 70’s that she also became a popular speaker at the many new health food and new consciousness shows that were drawing people into natural and spiritual healing. She displayed her books, dowsed people, and gave many talks at conferences all over the country and in Canada. One of her earliest books that became very popular was titled “God Helps Those Who Help Themselves.” It outlined her brilliant analysis of the seven physical causes of ill health, which categorizes all diseases into seven sections: It was this analysis together with her identification of the seven spiritual (and emotional) causes of ill health which became the backbone of her work. It also caused her to come up with many herbal and homeopathic remedies to help combat each item in each category.

Many people came to stand in the increasingly longer lines at the store. People flew in from as far away as Japan and Saudi Arabia to get three to five minutes behind the curtain to find out what their underlying problems were. Many people were sent from other sources such as Belva Bloomer who was the secretary to Shirley MacLaine during that time. Belva (with Shirley’s permission) redirected many of the desperate people who wrote Shirley to Hanna for help.

When not in the store, Hanna was at the Retreat teaching classes and developing new herbal remedies. One of her guests was Hulda Clark who later used her chemical knowledge to prove (with much greater detail) that minute amount of chemicals and heavy metals draw parasites, as well as all types of infections including cancer.

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As more and more ideas came to her, she wrote more booklets. She wrote a booklet on tumors and cysts, another on heart problems, another on organ cleansing, and yet another on the use of spices for healing. Louise Hays combined many of the smaller books into two more comprehensive books. Patience was not one of Hanna’s virtues. She would spend hours, weeks, and months cutting out text from magazines or her other books, or scribbling a few pages on scratch paper. She would paste all of these into a notebook and call her friend Greg from Johnson Publishing to pick it up and put into a book. Inevitably, she would call a week later and ask him why he hadn’t delivered her proof yet.

In 1988, she was called into the courthouse by the district attorney again and was threatened with another indictment if she did not quit dowsing and advising people. Hanna decided that it was time to sell the downtown store and move. She moved the store to 57th street (closer to the retreat), and renamed it from New Age Foods to Hanna’s Herb Shop. She also started dowsing people over the telephone and soon she had to have a switch put on the phone line so she could turn it on at 7 AM (after her morning meditation) and shut it off at 7 PM (before her evening meditation). She worked 10 more years healing more people than ever through the phone line.

She died on May 7, 1998, fourteen months after Rudolf passed. She made her transition in the early hours of dawn in her sleep on the day yet another class was arriving. Her room was glowing with a golden light. Three hours after her passing, condolences came in from Japan, Saudi Arabia, Canada, as well as from all over the United States. The world had lost a great healer and a very courageous Being who served God and mankind fully, with great unwavering determination and compassion.