Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian. He also worked to assassinate Adolph Hitler, a heroic act for which he was ultimately executed. The thing that sets Bonhoeffer apart (aside from the fact that his story is known to us), and the reason he makes our list, is that he had escaped Nazi persecution, but then returned to do his job and whatever else might be required of him.
(Bonhoeffer’s name and memory have also been abused since his death – a fact we will address at the end of this article.)
THE EXCEPTIONAL CHILD
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in February of 1906 (along with his twin sister Sabine) to a large and prominent upper-class family in Breslau. His father, Karl, was a distinguished neurologist and a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of Berlin, as well as serving as the director of a psychiatric clinic. His mother, Paula von Hase, was well educated and home-schooled her children.
Dietrich soon enough became an exceptional pianist; so much so that his parents assumed that he would pursue a music career. (His grandmother had also been as exceptional pianist, studying with Clara Schulman and Franz Lizt, two of the greatest pianists of the 19th Century.) He was also athletic and excelled at tennis and chess. But in addition to music, it was expected of Dietrich that he would follow his father into psychiatry.
The Bonhoeffers weren’t especially devout, so it was a shock to them when a fourteen year old Dietrich announced to them that he would be a theologian. A telling moment came when his older brother told him not to waste his life in such a “poor, feeble, boring, petty, bourgeois institution as the Church,” young Dietrich responded by saying, “If what you say is true, I shall reform it!” And, he went about to do just that.
Another story is told is that on his tenth birthday, he was given a special egg dish, which he loved. Deciding that he wanted more of this, he used his gift money to assure it. But, instead of buying more of the prepared food, or even eggs, he went out and bought a chicken.
Bonhoeffer graduated from the University of Berlin in 1927 and earned a doctorate in theology by the time he was the age of 21. His thesis, Sanctorum Communio (Communion of Saints), presented a significantly new way of looking at the nature of the Christian church and was so highly regarded as to be called a “theological miracle” by an eminent Swiss theologian named Barth.
PURSUING HIS VOCATION
Bonhoeffer spent the years between 1927 and 1933 learning how to be a pastor and traveling widely to understand the state of Christianity in the world. He spent time in Spain and in Harlem, New York, working in black churches. He also continued to write and developed new theories, based upon what he was learning in actual practice. He continued traveling through the United States by automobile, then to Mexico, and also to Italy, Libya, and Cuba.
After his return from the United States in 1931, Bonhoeffer became a lecturer on systematic theology at the University of Berlin.
EVERYTHING CHANGES
Bonhoeffer’s promising academic and ecclesiastical career took a radical turn when the Nazis came to power on January 30, 1933. He opposed them from the beginning. Just two days after Hitler was installed as Chancellor, Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address attacking him, and warning Germans that they were slipping into an idolatrous cult of the Führer, who was quite possibly a seducer and a destroyer. His broadcast was cut in mid-sentence.
In April of that same year, Bonhoeffer spoke out – being nearly alone – against Hitler’s persecution of Jews. He is recorded to have said the following:
The church must not simply… bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam the spoke in the wheel itself.
At this time, Bonhoeffer turned his attention to an area where he had some influence: The German Church.
A struggle had developed inside the Evangelical Church between a nationalistic German Christian movement and Young Reformers. But despite Bonhoeffer’s efforts, the Nazi-supported German Christians won control in a rigged election. Bonhoeffer then tried to stop all pastoral services such as baptisms, weddings and funerals (this was an old and effective clerical maneuver), but the older, established theologians derailed his efforts.
His next attempt to work through the church hierarchy ended similarly: In August 1933, Bonhoeffer and a fellow-theologian named Hermann Sasse drafted a new statement of faith called the Bethel Confession. Bonhoeffer and Sasse specifically included references to the Jews as God’s chosen people, but by the time the men of the institution were through with it, it was so degraded that Bonhoeffer himself refused to sign it.
Finally, in September of 1933, Bonhoeffer and his friend Martin Niemöller left the church hierarchy behind and helped formed an Emergency Covenant of Pastors. (A long-time Nazi churchman named Ludwig Müller and the German Christians had been trying to merge the German evangelical churches into one “Reich’s church,” that would be Nazi in ideology and entirely lacking in Jewish or Christian origins.)
Ultimately the Emergency Covenant of Pastors resulted in a new group called The Confessing Church. This became the major source of Christian opposition to the Nazis. Their Barmen Declaration insisted that Christ, not the Führer, was the head of the church. The much large German Evangelical Church, however, obeyed state authority and forbade non-Aryans from holding any church positions. This group offered Dietrich a highly-regarded a post in Berlin, which he promptly turned down.
MATURATION
It is a very difficult thing for someone who has chosen to work through a hierarchy to see it fail him and to leave it. Most will find reasons to remain within the structure. Bonhoeffer, however, held to his own thoughts and would not give them up. Disgusted that the institutions were falling in line behind the state, he went to London and accepted a two-year appointment as the pastor of two German-speaking churches. (He did remain deeply involved with the Confessing Church, running up a staggering telephone bill with calls to Niemöller.) In international meetings, he encouraged people to oppose all attempts to merge Nazi racism and the Christian gospel. Bonhoeffer was warned not to engage in activities that were unauthorized by Berlin – and he flatly refused.
By 1935, Bonhoeffer was ready to return to Germany. Once back, he ran an underground seminary for training pastors for the Confessing Church. In other words, Bonhoffer left Germany discouraged, though still thinking institutionally, but returned a radical. This was not due to any specific events or learning in London, but due to his character maturing and dropping the crutch of attachment to an institution.
PERSECUTION
In July of 1936 Martin Niemöller was arrested and Bonhoeffer’s authorization to teach at the University of Berlin was revoked. One month later he was publicly denounced as “a pacifist and enemy of the state.”
At about this time, Bonhoeffer fell in love. Her name was Maria von Wedemeyer. He was in his thirties and she was only eighteen; moreover, she was neither a great student nor especially interested in theology. But, she was a young woman of exceptional character and they cared for each other deeply. He met her at the estate of her grandfather, where Bohnhoffer’s underground seminary students and their wives would sometimes hide. The two were ultimately engaged, but were unable to marry before Bohnhoffer was arrested and executed.
By November of 1937, Himmler (the head of the SS) had arrested 27 pastors and students of the underground seminaries. It was around this time that Bonhoeffer published a book called, The Cost of Discipleship, in which he attacked “cheap grace,” calling it a cover for ethical weakness.
Bonhoeffer spent the next two years secretly moving from one eastern German village to another, conducting what he called a “seminary on the run,” and helping his students who were working illegally in small parishes. The Gestapo had banned him from Berlin by 1938. Also at about this time, his twin sister Sabine, her Jewish husband, and their two daughters escaped to England by way of Switzerland.
ESCAPE & REGRET
It is important to understand that escape is something that most people will not do. They much prefer to remain, and to convince themselves that “it will work out.” It takes a strong mind to see the facts, leave everything behind and start over somewhere far away. Most people, even in great danger, find reasons to stay right where they are… and very often die there.
In February of 1938, Bonhoeffer made contact with members of German Resistance. (The contact was created by his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, who was working with a group from German military intelligence to overthrow Hitler.) Bonhoeffer discovered that war was imminent, and that he would be called as a soldier. He knew he could never swear an oath to Hitler and fight in his army (such a refusal could be a capital offence), but he also knew that German Christians were still highly nationalistic, and refusing service to the nation – even if the leader was out of control – would have brought public shame upon him and all his friends. (Again he was buffeted by the pressures of the masses and their institutions.)
This situation, combined with strong pressure from his friends, led him to escape to the United States in June of 1939, accepting an invitation from the Union Theological Seminary of New York.
But as soon as he arrived in New York he regretted his decision to flee. He wrote this to his friend Reinhold Niebuhr:
I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people… Christians in Germany will have to face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose but I cannot make that choice from security.
Bonhoeffer returned to Germany on the last scheduled steamer to cross the Atlantic.
BACK INTO THE FIRE
Back in Germany, Bonhoeffer was forbidden to speak in public and was required to report his activities to the police. In 1941, he was forbidden to print or to publish. In the meantime, Bonhoeffer joined the German military intelligence people he had met earlier. It was then that the pacifist pastor joined in plans to assassinate Hitler.
In 1943 there were several plots to assassinate Hitler, and Bonhoeffer was close to most of them. Being close to an intelligence service, he became aware of many Nazi atrocities, and wrote the following as he pursued Hitler’s death:
The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live.
Being a theologian by vocation, Bonhoeffer was deeply concerned with the ethics of what he was doing. He also wrote the following at about this time:
When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it… Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace.
Bonhoeffer worked during this time as a courier for the German resistance movement. They wanted to let the Allies know that they were in place, and that they intended to kill Hitler, and that they wanted to secure terms of peace with them. Because of his previous work, he was able to meet with an English Bishop who was also a member of the House of Lords. Attempts were made to contact the British Foreign Minister, but they were ignored. Bonhoeffer traveled to Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland as well, under cover as a legitimate intelligence officer.
Stop for a moment here and think about undertaking this work. This occurred in modern enough times to be clearly imagined. Think about choosing to do this – to get up in the morning and go out into the city streets, knowing that your life was at serious risk, and doing it anyway, again and again. We are all able to do such things, but most people would rather watch them safely on television than ever to attempt them. Doing them is frightening and tests our characters. While we all possess the ability to do these things – and quite a few of us encounter such needs at some point in our lives – most people are very clever in finding reasons to avoid difficult choices.
Among their other work at this time, Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law arranged for a group of German Jews escape to Switzerland. But Bonhoeffer did not abandon his work as a theologian and pastor during this time: He wrote letters to encourage his former students and worked on a book call Ethics. He intended for this book to be his magnum opus, but it was never completed.
ARREST
On April 6, 1943, Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law Dohnanyi were arrested – not because of their conspiracy but because of a stupid bureaucratic rivalry. The Abwehr group that Bonhoffer worked for had existed since 1921, preceding the SS. As you might expect, the SS (the Nazi “Protective Echelon”) resented the Abwehr and wanted to close them down. They got their chance when an Abwehr officer, Wilhelm Schmidhuber, was arrested by the Gestapo for involvement in smuggling currency.
In the investigations that followed the Gestapo (the Nazi Secret Police) uncovered the operation of Bonhoffer’s brother-in-law Dohnanyi, in which fourteen Jews were sent to Switzerland, along with large sums of foreign currency (as compensation for confiscated properties). The Gestapo searched Dohnanyi’s office at Abwehr and found notes revealing Bonhoeffer’s foreign contacts and other documents related to the anti-Hitler conspiracy. One of them was a note that discussed plans for a journey by Bonhoeffer to Rome, where he would explain to church leaders why the assassination attempts on Hitler in March 1943 had failed.
Nevertheless, the Gestapo did not know of Bonhoeffer’s direct involvement in assassination plots – they were able to explain away the most damning documents as official, coded intelligence materials.
Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were, however, suspected of subverting Nazi policy toward Jews and misusing Abwehr for inappropriate purposes. Bonhoeffer was also suspected of evading military call-up, using Abwehr to circumvent Gestapo orders against public speaking and remaining in Berlin, and using Abwehr to further his church work.
PRISON & DEATH
Bonhoeffer was imprisoned at Tegel military prison for about eighteen months, awaiting trial. There he continued his work as a pastor among his fellow prisoners and guards. A few sympathetic guards helped smuggle letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge and to others. These uncensored letters were published as Letters and Papers from Prison after his death. A guard named Knobloch even offered to help him escape and “disappear.” Bonhoeffer turned-down the offer, fearing retribution upon his family, especially his brother and brother-in-law, who were also imprisoned.
There was another attempt on Hitler’s life July 20th, 1944, and it nearly succeeded. (Simple bad luck allowed Hitler to survive.) But it launched a massive investigation, which uncovered evidence of Bonhoeffer’s assassination work. He was transferred from the military prison in Berlin Tegel to the detention cellar of the Gestapo’s high security prison. In February 1945, he was secretly moved to Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Flossenbürg.
On April 4th, 1945, the diaries of William Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, were discovered. Hitler read them and fell into a rage, ordering all the conspirators to be destroyed. Bonhoeffer was led away just as he completed a church service in the prison.
Bonhoeffer was condemned to death on April 8, 1945, by an SS judge at a trial that featured no witnesses, records and no defense. Still, a trial was held to maintain the appearance of legitimacy. This illustrates just how important the image of legitimacy is, even to tyrants. If they ever had to rule by force alone, their regimes would soon fail. They need people to think they are legitimate, to willingly obey, and to always give them the benefit of the doubt.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging, at dawn on April 9, 1945, just three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin. He was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged with thin wire; this was chosen to cause strangulation, a more painful death than the breaking of the neck. Five others were executed with him. His brother, Klaus, and his brother-in-law Dohnanyi were executed shortly thereafter.
The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote this:
I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer … kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.
I will close this section with another quote from Bohnhoffer on living life:
Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering.
THE ABUSE OF HIS NAME
One obvious part of Bohnhoeffer’s story is the way institutions let him down consistently. Nonetheless, the current institutions of Germany claim him as their son. Many schools are named after him. When people complain about institutions, Bohnhoffer’s name is often trotted out to subdue the arguments. Some even read his writings to begin public meetings.
Perhaps it is most fitting to answer the abusers of Bonhoeffer’s name in his preferred medium of scripture. Here are the words of Jesus, as he berates the religious people of his time. Parallels should be drawn easily enough:
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, And say, “If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.” Thus you are witnesses against yourselves, that you are the offspring of those who killed the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while in Tegel military prison.
© Copyright 2009 by Paul A. Rosenberg
Paul Rosenberg is the author of books such as 
Interesting guy. I can think of a lot worse things to be called than a pacifist and enemy of the state.