When Heinrich Arnold was seven, his parents Eberhard and Emmy Arnold and their five children left a bourgeois life in Berlin for a dilapidated villa in the German village of Sannerz, where they founded the Bruderhof, a Christian community based on Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.

As a young man, Heinrich Arnold refused to serve in Hitler's armed forces and was forced to flee Germany. He studied agriculture in Zurich, Switzerland, and in 1936 married Annemarie Wächter, a kindergarten teacher and fellow Bruderhof member.

In 1938 they moved to England, where Heinrich managed the community’s farm. (The community had by then been expelled from Nazi Germany.) In 1941 the community was forced to emigrate to South America. In 1954, Heinrich Arnold and his family moved to the fledgling Woodcrest Community in Rifton, New York, the first of many Bruderhof communities in North America. From 1962 until his death, Heinrich Arnold served as elder and pastor of the growing movement, guiding its communities through times of crisis and renewal, and pointing again and again to Jesus Christ.