Dorothee Soelle (born 1929), German theologian, political activist, and feminist, was a leader among the generation of liberation theologians who reinterpreted the Christian message within the context of socialism and pacifism.

Dorothee Soelle was born September 30, 1929, in Cologne, West Germany, to a middle-class Protestant family. Her father was a lawyer who attempted to maintain a distance from both the Hitler regime and the church. He impressed upon the young Dorothee the importance of education and a disregard for material wealth. Despite parental indifference to religion Dorothee became interested in the church (Evangelical Church of the Rhineland) and theology as a high school student. She studied philology, philosophy, theology, and German literature at the Universities of Cologne, Freiburg, and Göttingen and was awarded the doctoral degree by the University of Göttingen in 1959, where her teachers were Friedrich Gogarten and Ernst Käsemann.

She taught German...