Bruno Gröning, German mystic and author (died 1959)

Bruno Bernhard Gröning was a German mystic who rose to fame in the late 1940s for performing faith healings. Prior to this, he was a member of the Nazi Party, serving in World War II and spending several months in a prisoner of war camp. He died of cancer at the age of 52.

The Friends of God was a medieval mystical group of both ecclesiastical and lay persons within the Catholic Church and a center of German mysticism. It was founded between 1339 and 1343 during the Avignon Papacy, a time of great turmoil for the Catholic Church. The Friends of God were originally centered in Basel, Switzerland and were also fairly important in Strasbourg and Cologne. Some late-nineteenth century writers made large claims for the movement, seeing it both as influential in fourteenth-century mysticism and as a precursor of the Protestant Reformation. Modern studies of the movement have emphasised the derivative and often second-rate character of its mystical literature, and its limited impact on medieval literature in Germany. Some of the movement's ideas still prefigured the Protestant reformation.