This year's choice of speaker for the Woodbury Prayer Breakfast is stirring a buzz, much like that first cup of morning coffee.

In the past, good-guy athletes such as former North Stars player Bill Butters and former Vikings tight end Joe Senser, and widely respected business leaders such as Paul Ridgeway and Jay Coughlan, have drawn hundreds of people to hear inspirational stories about the role their faith has played in their lives.

Like the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on which it is patterned, politics at the Woodbury event has been checked at the door as values held common are celebrated.

So this year's speaker, an ex-Nazi-turned-born-again-Christian, who has drawn fire for comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler and linking him to the antichrist, has raised some eyebrows.

But those involved with the event say that Maria Anne (Hansi) Hirschmann will keep with tradition by focusing on her own life story and keep out any potentially strident political messages.

"This is a faith-based community event, pure and simple," said Alisa Rabin Bell, spokeswoman for the event's organizing committee. "It always has been and it always will be."

It's Hirschmann's amazing life story that made her a strong choice as speaker, Bell added.

According to her autobiography, "Hansi, The Girl Who Left the Swastika," Hirschmann grew up orphaned and impoverished in then-Czechoslavakia. When Hitler's army took over that country in 1938, she was indoctrinated as a youth leader.

After World War II, she was taken to a Communist labor camp in Bohemia, but escaped, became a Christian and gradually made her way to the United States. She learned English and taught school, rejecting her Nazi past. She founded Hansi Ministries in 1974.