They began at opposite ends of a spectrum but met – no, collided – at the intersection of the treatment of the Jews. Hitler’s adult life was completely
dedicated to the extermination of the Jewish race and Bonhoeffer’s life became
focused on his mission to save them. This story is not so much about theology
and the church – although it includes those – nor is it about war – even though that is the background. It is about the story of two men and their headlong
race to extinguish or to save the Jews.

2. Look at their two lives side by side before we focus just on Bonhoeffer. In a very real sense there would not be the Dietrich Bonhoeffer we are looking at today had there not been an Adolph Hitler. Bonhoeffer almost needed such an opponent as everything came so easily to him.
He needed a moment in history like this one to reveal the strength and depth of his character – not just his talent. It is said that history makes the man and nothing was ever more true about Bonhoeffer. It is true for all of us. People,
circumstances and decisions make our lives what they are. Bonhoeffer was not a
victim. He could have saved himself almost up to the very end but he chose to
sacrifice his life for Christ. Robert Coles writes in his book on Bonhoeffer:
“the very heart of Bonhoeffer’s “sacrifice” has to be seen as not only a brave civil dissent but a Christian one. Such a stand was, needless to say, not the only one possible. Others, with equal tenacity and honor, went to their deaths resisting Hitler out of different reasons of mind and heart. But Dietrich Bonhoeffer had made clear his own spiritual rationale, a way of seeing things that demanded, over the long haul, a witness that had to go beyond prayer, writing and teaching.”

Adolph Hitler’s father was illegitimate and Hitler’s own paternity is murky. Bonhoeffer was born one of 8 children to one of the most intellectually and culturally refined families in Germany. His father was an esteemed and famous psychiatrist and his mother was part of a long line of Prussian aristocracy. His siblings were all accomplished and brilliant. Bonhoeffer adored his family to the end of his life. “The Bonhoeffers were that terribly rare thing: a genuinely happy family, and their ordered life continued along through the weeks and months and years as it always had, with musical evenings every Saturday, and with many birthday and holiday celebrations too.”

Adolf Hitler had early and serious conflicts with his father that became violent and eventually drove him out of the home. He failed at school and was expelled. Both his parents died before he was 16. A year after Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born. Bonhoeffer was challenged by the serious discussions and thinking of his highly educated and articulate parents and siblings. He thrived in school and received his Ph.D. in 1927 in Berlin when he was only 21 –practically unheard of at the time.

Adolph Hitler was obsessed with German nationalism and the racial purity of the Fatherland while Bonhoeffer became a disciple of the universal church – not just the German church. His conviction was the Church is beyond the bounds of a single culture. It became one of the great conflicts of his life. He was committed to a Church which crossed all borders and was not synonymous with nationalism of any kind.

Hitler was a loner who lived for a time in a homeless shelter in Vienna and spent time in prison after a failed political plot. It was not until he enlisted in the army that he established relationships with others. Bonhoeffer was at the center of a network of wealth, privilege, and rank. His family had access to the top echelons of German society and had family connections at every level.

In August 1934 Hitler demands a loyalty oath to Hitler alone – not to the State or the office. Only to him. That same year Bonhoeffer forms the Confessing Church that demands loyalty to Christ alone – not to the Church or the State.

Hitler occupies Paris and Bonhoeffer joins the resistance in 1941.

On April 9, 1945 Bonhoeffer is hanged, stacked with other corpses and burned.
On April 29, 1945 Hitler commits suicide, his body is soaked with 200 gallons of fuel and he is burned.

Hitler’s last words are: “Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.”

Bonhoeffer’s last words are: “This is the end. For me the beginning of life.”

3. After his Ph.D. Bonhoeffer makes the decision to move to Barcelona to be the assistant pastor of a small Lutheran congregation. He does so to intentionally. “This offer seemed to bring to fruition a wish that had grown stronger and stronger over the past few years and months, namely, to stand on my own feet for a longer period completely outside my previous circle of acquaintances.”

It was in Barcelona that he learned to communicate – through teaching children and people not overly interested in church or sermons. It was here that he learned to listen.
““Every day I am getting to know people, at any rate their circumstances and sometimes one is able to see through their stories into themselves – and at the same time one thing continues to impress me: here I meet people as they are, far from the masquerade of the “Christian world”; people with passions, criminal types, small people with small aims, small wages and small sins – all in all they are people who feel homeless in both senses, and who begin to thaw when one speaks to them with kindness – real people; I can only say that I have gained the impression that it is just these people who are much more under grace than under wrath, and that it is the Christian world which is more under wrath than grace.”

It was also in Barcelona that he came to his lifelong understanding of the church and it’s relationship to real people and the world. It was not a retreat for monks or academics or what he called “ghosts”. “God wants to see human beings, not ghosts who shun the world. In the whole world of history there is always only one really significant hour – the present.
If you want to serve eternity, you must serve the times.” This became one of the major themes of his life. The Church and Christians cannot withdraw from the conflicts in the world. They cannot wait until things are simple or
pure or obvious.

They must act in the world in which they find themselves living.

Bonhoeffer’s life was one of a few continuous themes that start, build and mature and recur over and over again. Imagine the rings of a tree and as you study them you can see years of growth and years of drought. Instances of fire and times of health. The whole record of the life of the tree is in those rings. It is the same with Bonhoeffer. Themes that are established early in his life here grow over time and we see them all the way to the end. One of those is the nature of the true church and the true Christian.

The true Church is, ultimately, for the sake of the world and not itself. It was years later when he wrote this but he came to it in Barcelona: “The Church is the Church only when it exists for others. To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need. The clergy must live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling. The Church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others. In particular, our own church will have to take the field against the vices of hubris, power-worship, envy, and humbug, as the roots of all evil. It will have to speak of moderation, purity, trust, loyalty, constancy, patience, discipline, humility, contentment, and modesty. It must not underestimate the importance of human example; it is not abstract argument, but example, that gives its word emphasis and power.”

The true Christian is not one who believes a particular theology or holds to a certain ethic or, as all Nazis and many Germans believed, is of a particular ethnicity but one who takes Christ seriously: “I can doubtless live with or without Jesus as a religious genius, as an ethicist, as a gentleman. Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ has not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me. Understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously.”

You have probably seen the video on the internet made by the young man Jeff Bethke titled Jesus/Religion which says, essentially, he loves Jesus but he hates religion. In a very limited sense, that is what young Bonhoeffer was saying here as well:

“Christianity conceals within itself a germ hostile to the church. It is far too easy to base our claims to God on our own Christian religiosity and our church commitment, and in so doing utterly to misunderstand and distort the Christian idea.”

The church and our religion can become one of the obstacles to true belief and sometimes Christianity needs to break out of the captivity of the church.

4. Bonhoeffer is 24 years old in 1930 when he leaves Barcelona via a brief stay in Berlin for the United States at the invitation of Union Theological Seminary in New York – at that time the center of American liberal theological thought and the home of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. It was a pioneer in the formation of “settlement houses” where students and faculty moved into poor neighborhoods. It was one of America’s most esteemed academic institutions and one of the most socially progressive – and it was a shock for the young academic Bonhoeffer.

Instead of a high caliber academic institution he says: ““The Union students talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria… They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.”

“In New York they preach about virtually everything, only one thing is not addressed, or is addressed so rarely that I have as yet been unable to hear it, namely, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the cross, sin and forgiveness, death and life.”

“I am in fact of the opinion that one can learn extraordinarily little over there…but it seems to me that one also gains quiet insights…where one sees chiefly the threat which America signifies for us.”

It is not only the superficiality of American academics that disturbs him but the blatant racial injustice toward blacks that, in his words, horrifies him.

He tours the South with a friend and discovers segregated hotels, restaurants, restrooms, schools and is shocked by our treatment of blacks. Our prejudice
reminds him of Germany’s attitude toward the Jews. They are inferior and even dangerous. They need to be controlled and excluded. How could a country extolling
extolling the virtues of freedom, opportunity and equality tolerate such hypocrisy?
Yet, it is in America with all its flaws where Bonhoeffer discovers a heart faith and the Bible:
“For the first time I discovered the Bible…I had often preached. I had seen a great
deal of the Church, and talked and preached about it – but I had not become a
Christian…Then the Bible, and in particular the Sermon on the Mount, freed me from that. Since then everything has changed.”

It was in Harlem at the Abbyssianian Baptist Church under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. that Bonhoeffer first understood the spiritual impact of music, worship and preaching that came from a power with which he had little previous experience. Until then, it had been an academic study but now it was a genuine belief in the power of the Gospel to change hearts – starting with his.

“Bonhoeffer’s experiences with the African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering. Somehow he had seen something more in those churches and in those Christians, something that the world of academic theology – even when it was at its best, as in Berlin – did not touch very much.”

5. After a year in America he returns to Germany in 1931 but to a changed Germany. It is Germany on its way to being under the thumb of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party. While Bonhoeffer was in America, the Nazis – who were not taken seriously by Bonhoeffer’s upper class friends – had used the intense nationalism of the German people, the economic suffering of the Weimar Republic years following the defeat of World War I and their shame at the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which robbed them of all dignity.  As well, most people believed they had been betrayed in the war by the communists and the powerful Jews and were highly susceptible to Hitler’s rabid hatred of both – as well as his consistent railing against the treatment of the Germans and the Fatherland by other nations.
But Hitler was not only street-smart. He was violent and vicious in his climb to power. When he needed to be wily he was.
When he needed to kill opponents and allies alike he never hesitated. Many, while disgusted by him and his riff-raff collection of thieves, perverts, sociopaths, occultists and demented followers thought he could fill the office of Chancellor and then they could control him – and eventually oust him. They had no idea. Hitler accumulated power so quickly and ruthlessly
that everyone was surprised when he stole the office of Chancellor and demanded total obedience to the Fuhrer – the leader. He was not just a political figure now – but a religious one who fused the two in his own personality. He was at once repulsive and charismatic.

A Prayer at the time: “Leader, my Leader, given to me by God, protect me and sustain my life for a long time. You have rescued Germany out of deepest misery, to you I owe my daily bread. Leader, my Leader, my belief and my light. Leader, my leader, do not abandon me.”

“The Bonhoeffers saw through Hitler from the beginning, but no one believed his reign would last as long as it did. Surely the Nazis would have their moment, perhaps even a long moment, but then it would be gone. It was all a terrible nightmare that, come morning, would disappear. But morning never seemed to come. So the German people clamored for order and leadership. But it was as though in the babble of their clamoring, they had summoned the devil himself, for there now rose up from the deep wound in the national psyche something strange and terrible and compelling. The Fuhrer was no mere man or mere politician. He was something terrifying and authoritarian, self-contained and self-justifying, his own father and his own god. He was a symbol who symbolized himself, who had traded his soul for the spirit of the age.”

Not only that but there was something of a German predisposition toward war. A hundred years earlier Heinrich Heine wrote: “Christianity – and that is its greatest merit – has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flames. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.”

Hitler personified and glorified that insane berserk rage of the ancient stony gods.

6. In 1933, two days after Hitler was made Chancellor, Bonhoeffer spoke on a radio broadcast about the dangers of what he termed the “unleader” and the distortion of the role of the church and the state. “The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, be it of a Leader or of an office, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here is infringing eternal laws and taking upon himself superhuman authority which will eventually crush him.”

“The church has only one pulpit, and from that pulpit, faith in God will be preached, and no other faith, and no other will than the will of God, however well-intentioned.”

Not only was the broadcast cut off in mid-sentence but Bonhoeffer was now on a collision course with Hitler, the Nazi party and, sadly, the German Church itself. Now is the time to ask the complex question: “How could so many Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, be deluded by such evil?”

7. There is no simple answer. There are a number of reasons making it possible. It is important that we not see these as unique to Germany. There are always those who would like to combine the power of religion and the political realm. For Germany, it was not all that difficult.

First, there was the State church. When Martin Luther translated the Bible he basically created a common German language and what had up to then been a nation separated by language and geography became united with a single language and a dominant religion. “German culture was inescapably Christian. This was the result of the legacy of Martin Luther, the Catholic, who invented Protestantism. Looming over the German culture and nation like both a father and a mother, Luther was to Germany something like what Moses was to Israel. Like a medieval Paul Bunyan, Luther in a single blow shattered the edifice of European Catholicism and in the bargain created the modern German language, which in turn effectively created the German people. The Church was the handmaiden of the State and the State the protector of the Church.
German Christians sometimes spoke of baptism not into the body of Christ but into the community of the German Volk. There was no separation or tension between being German and Christian. Doing one’s duty for German went hand in hand with doing one’s duty to God. As Bonhoeffer said later, “The question is really: Christianity or Germanism? And the sooner the conflict is revealed in the clear light of day the better.” For most German Christians there was no conflict at all. Good Christians did what the leadership dictated. Good Christians were chasing the communists and Jews from the country to restore moral order and national dignity. To serve was to serve “Holy Germany”. In a real sense, German identity was so tied to the State and their identity with German exceptionalism that the Church was there merely to bless the State – not to challenge it. For most they thought of themselves as patriotic Germans who were devoted to their country. The phrase was “One Reich. One People. One Church.”

Second, there were many Christian leaders who were nearly as anti-Semitic as the Nazis. These were known as the Positive Christians who wanted to eliminate all the Jewish influences in the Bible – including the Old Testament, the Gospel of Matthew and all the writings of Paul. They insisted on a Gospel cleansed of the dark and depressing influences of Jews and portrayed Jesus as an Aryan who fought the Jews until they killed him. The Jewish dogmas of hell and punishment threatened the free and enlightened Nordic spirit. Original sin and grace are false ideas
that corrupt the purity of the Aryan blood. The Positive Christians wanted a religion that was consistent with the Nordic myths and legends of a dominant and noble race that is free of the defective and impure.

” At the very end of his life, after becoming a parody of his former cranky self, Luther said and wrote some things about the Jews that, taken on their own, make him out to be a vicious anti-Semite. The Nazis exploited these last writings to the utmost, as though they represented Luther’s definitive take on the matter, which is impossible, given what he’d said earlier in life. So it is in his larger context that one has to take his attitude toward the Jews, which, like everything else in his life, unraveled along with his health. Goebbels and the other Nazis rejoiced that Luther’s ugliest ravings existed in writing, and they published them and used them with glee, and to great success. The hundreds of thousands of sane words he had written were of little interest to the men in brown. The constant repetition of Luther’s ugliest statements served the Nazis’ purposes and
convinced most Germans that being a German and being a Christian were a racial inheritance, and that neither was compatible with being Jewish. The Nazis were antiChristian, but they would pretend to be Christians as long as it served their purposes of getting theologically ignorant Germans on their side against the Jews.

To this, Bonhoeffer spoke out in 1933 and was alienated by the government and official Church that Hitler controlled by virtue of being head of the State. “The church must continually ask the state whether its actions can be justified as legitimate action of the state…as action which leads to law and order, and not to lawlessness and disorder. If the state is creating excessive law and order then the state develops its power to such an extent that it deprives Christian preaching and Christian faith…of their rights. The church must reject this encroachment of the order of the state…The state which endangers the Christian proclamation negates itself.”

“A state which includes within itself a terrorized church has lost its most faithful servant.”

“One can’t be a Christian and a nationalist at the same time.”

While there were many German Christian leaders who went along willingly and enthusiastically with Hitler, there were thousands – Protestants and Catholics – who opposed him and died horrible deaths. One man who survived the camps said the guards treated the pastors worse than the Jews. Thousands of Catholic priests, nuns and Protestant pastors were tortured and killed. Thousands of others in illegitimate religious groups – like Jehovah’s Witnesses – were shot, gassed and worked to death. It was not the whole Church that played into the hands of Hitler but virtually everyone who did not was eliminated.

8. In 1934, three years after returning to Germany from the United States, Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoller organized the Confessing Church. It was the Church that would not give in to the redefinition of Christianity as a folk religion cleansed of all Jewish influences but a church loyal to Christ alone. They were not anti-State or anti-German. They rejected the false doctrines of the Positive Christians and the absolute power of the State to rule the Church as well as the prevalent anti-Semitism and increasing heresy of the German Church. This was the Barmen Confession written by the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth. It was the declaration by a minority of Protestant pastors that the German Church had been deluded and was apostate. While it was brave and attracted many to its cause it was much too late to change the Lutheran Church that was swept up in the nationalism and righteous cause of a new Germany under Adolph Hitler.

You may have read Martin Niemoller’s famous quote about these times:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak out because I was Protestant.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

By 1936 Bonhoeffer was forbidden to teach at Berlin University and the small seminary he started for young pastors was shut down in 1937. The circle was beginning to close around him. While he was in no real physical danger and his family connections protected him for the most part, he was identified as a trouble maker for the Lutheran Church, a renegade and someone espousing ideas that were threatening to the authority of the State. The Nazis had their eye on him and his friends but did not take him very seriously. After all, what could one idealistic academic do to jeopardize the juggernaut of Hitler’s increasing success across Europe.

It was now that Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship – perhaps his most famous book. It was written in the pressure of his struggle with the German church and their apostasy. “The proclamation of grace has its limits. Grace may not be proclaimed to anyone who does not recognize or distinguish or desire it…The world upon whom grace is thrust as a bargain will grow tired of it, and it will not only trample upon the Holy Spirit, but also will tear apart those who force it on them…The preaching
of grace can only be protected by the preaching of repentance.”

“Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”

“Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline. Communion without confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.”

“When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die”

These words were not written in a monastery by a man speculating on lofty themes of theology. They were written by a man struggling with his own decision to follow Christ wherever that road led him. As Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison, Bonhoeffer was writing Cost of Discipleship facing the prospect of prison – and worse.

By 1938, Bonhoeffer had strengthened his relationships with religious leaders in other countries who were becoming aware of what Hitler was doing. Along with many others, Bonhoeffer thought he could rally the support of the international church community to change the course of the German church and to put Hitler out of power. No one except Hitler’s closest circle had any idea of the atrocities to come.

More than likely, although no one is sure, it is during this time when the idea of joining an existing resistance movement becomes a plan in his mind but he will not act on it for the moment. Many of the elite officers of the military had begun to make plans to overthrow Hitler, Goering and Himmler. They were hopeful that they could take over the leadership of Germany and stop what was happening. In all, there were 27 separate plots to kill Hitler between 1934 and 1944 and any number of plots to merely oust him. None of them succeeded but all of them only convinced him and those around him that he was protected by Providence until he had accomplished his mission to cleanse the world of Jews and establish a Reich that would last 1,000 years.

In 1939 a number of friends and supporters out of concern for his safety convince him to accept the invitation to return to Union Seminary in New York. He stops in England to try and raise support from the Church of England and convince others to speak out against what is going on in Germany. Does he know already what is happening to the Jews? We don’t know but we do know that he was in touch with military officers and friends of his family who were in places of authority and who were keeping secret records of the crimes being committed and eventually the horrific atrocities. While many of the Nazis were from the dregs of society there were many in the aristocracy who were disgusted by Hitler – personally and professionally. They were increasingly fearful of the consequences his leadership on Germany. As Bonhoeffer said as early as 1934 when few were listening, “The question at stake in the German church is no longer an internal issue but is the question of the existence of Christianity in Europe.” The moral fabric of Germany itself was being destroyed. This was not to be a normal war – as terrible as any war is. This was going to be demonic and increasingly people knew it. “Hitler had something alien about him, as if he sprang from an otherwise extinct primeval tribe.” But these gentlemen from the Prussian officer tradition were all too well bred to know how to deal with someone as vulgar as Hitler.

Until now, Bonhoeffer had experienced his own struggle – his “mein kampf” – with the war and his part in it. During his first trip to America he had become a pacifist and was determined not to serve in the army or to do anything overtly violent but he was gradually coming to the conclusion that Hitler and the Nazis were more than criminals – they were evil and “at some point the church must directly take action against the state to stop it from perpetrating evil.” This went against everything he had been taught as a member of the Lutheran church and everything he believed. Yet, Bonhoeffer did not try to rationalize or justify his decision. He recognized that it might well be against the will of God and he was prepared to accept the guilt of that. One of his closest friends wrote many years later, “Bonhoeffer confided to me that he was actively and responsibly involved in the German resistance against Hitler, following his moral conviction that “the structure of responsible action includes both readiness to accept guilt and freedom. If any man tries to escape guilt in responsibility he detaches himself from the ultimate reality of human existence, and what is more he cults himself off from the redeeming mystery of Christ’s bearing guilt without sin, and he has no share in the divine justification which lies upon this event.” Bonhoeffer was not going to act on this for a year – but he had determined to act and accept the guilt of his action.

He sailed from England to America but stayed only twenty-six days this time. He turned around and came home almost as soon as he arrived as he felt it was a great mistake for him to leave Germany now. “I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I shall 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 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 destroy our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose, but I cannot make that choice in security.” His friends at home who had risked their lives to get him out and those abroad who wanted him spared because of his future promise of leadership were very much against this decision but could not argue him out of it. He was determined to return home and join the resistance in some way.

His way became clear to him but it confused and alienated him from his friends and students. He will eventually join the Abwehr – a branch of military intelligence – to avoid declaring himself a conscientious objector. Such a declaration would mean immediate arrest and execution and would be disastrous for those in the Confessing Church who would also be arrested and executed. Hundreds of lives would be lost. “He was looking for a way that would allow him to obey his conscience, but that would not force others to obey his conscience.”

After the invasion of Poland, Bonhoeffer began to hear things he had not heard before, things that would fundamentally alter his thinking. It was worse than anything he had dreamed. “Canaris and the others in the German military leadership thought that Hitler’s bestial nature was unfortunate, but they had no idea it was something he cultivated and celebrated, that it was part of an ideology that had been waiting for the opportunity to leap at the throats of every Jew and Pole, priest and aristocrat, and tear them to pieces. The German generals had not seen the dark river of blood bubbling beneath the surface of the new German, but suddenly here it was, gushing like a geyser. Despite all the hints and warnings, it was too gruesome to be believed.”

In 1940, Bonhoeffer at the encouragement of others in the resistance, joined the Abwehr. This was not the Gestapo. It was a rival to the Gestapo and was not responsible for action. It was merely information gathering and it gave Bonhoeffer freedom from being called to military service and a cover from the attention of the Gestapo. But it also meant his surrendering his credibility and standing in the Confessing Church and among his friends and students who had looked up to him. It meant another “death to self” because he had to surrender his reputation and trust. “People wondered how he escaped the fate of the rest of his generation. He was writing and traveling, meeting with this one and that one, going to movies and restaurants, and living a life of relative privilege and freedom while others were suffering and dying and being put in excruciating positions of moral compromise.” Yet, he could say nothing to defend himself.

Until 1943, Bonhoeffer was free to travel and be instrumental in not only keeping people in the resistance informed but also friends outside Germany. As well, he was able to smuggle Jews out of Germany to Switzerland. However, that same year the Gestapo discovered a money smuggling scheme and they traced a connection back to Bonhoeffer. On April 5th he returned home to learn two men were waiting for him. Taking his Bible with him he was driven away to Tegel prison and never returned. As it turns out, Bonhoeffer was not arrested for being part of a conspiracy against Hitler but for money laundering – not a capital offense.
It was while he was in prison that the famous attempt on Hitler’s life by Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg – played by Tom Cruise in the movie Valkyrie. For the longest time they wanted to kill Hitler so that they could get better peace terms from the Allies, but as Churchill’s determination to totally defeat Germany hardened, they realized their only course was to kill Hitler and his top staff. “It was hopeless to look for anything from the Allies, but they came to the conclusion that this no longer mattered. Now it was simply about doing the right thing, come what may. Stauffenberg, a devout Catholic, said, “It’s time now for something to be done. He who has the courage to act must know that he will probably go down in German history as a traitor. But if he  fails to act, he will be a traitor before his own conscience.”

As we all know, the explosive force of the bomb was diverted by the massive table by which Hitler stood and he survived. But, in the aftermath, he ordered every single individual and their families hunted down, imprisoned and executed. Bonhoeffer heard about the failure from prison and knew this sealed his fate. From prison he writes, “Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God.” Over 5,000 people were hunted down and thousands of those were imprisoned, tortured, hanged and shot. Bonhoeffer knew it was only a matter of time until the Gestapo discovered his indirect connection to the plot through his friends and coconspirators.

9. Bonhoeffer was moved in October 1944 from the Tegel prison to the dreaded Gestapo prison. On February 7, he was moved from there to Buchenwald – one of the Nazi centers of death where prisoners were used for medical experiments and sometimes murdered for their skin to be used for wallets and knife cases for the SS. After seven silent weeks he is moved to Flossenburg on Sunday, April 8 – the first Sunday after Easter. Several of the prisoners asked him to hold a service where he read the verses for that day: Isaiah 53:5. “With his stripes we are healed” and 1 Peter 1:3. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” He had hardly finished his final prayer when two men in civilian clothes came in and said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer. Get ready and come with us.” As he left, he said to one of the other prisoners, “This is the end. For me the beginning of life.”

The prison doctor wrote years later: “On the morning of April 9th between five and six o’clock the prisoners were taken from their cells, and the verdicts of the court martial read out to them. Through the half-open door in one room of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his 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 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.”

Because the ovens were not working, the bodies were stacked, soaked with gasoline and burned.

Two weeks later on April 23, the Allies marched into Flossenburg. A week after that Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide hiding in his bunker. His body was soaked with gasoline and burned and, I suspect, that fire has yet to go out.

Robert Coles in Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“The heart of Bonhoeffer’s spiritual legacy to us is not to be found in his words, his books, but in the way he spent his time on this earth, in his decision to live as if the Lord were a neighbor and friend, a constant source of courage and inspiration, a presence amid travail and joy alike, a reminder of love’s obligations and affirmations and also of death’s decisive meaning (how we die as a measure of how we have lived, of who we are). Bonhoeffer abandoned cleverness with language, brilliance at abstract formulations; he forsook denominational argument, oaths and pledges and avowals. In the end he reached out to all of us who crave, in hunger and thirst, God’s grace…His spiritual gift to us, especially, is his life. The principles he avowed and discussed in his writings gain their authority from the manner in which he conducted that life.  As two thousand years of Christianity come to an end, the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in all its storybook drama, reminds us that if evil can be, as Hannah Arendt observed, “banal” in its everyday enactment, then good can be surprising in its occurrence, tenacious in its vitality, no matter the overwhelming odds against its survival. In the end, Hitler showed us a “heart of darkness,” beating all too horribly fast, not in a distant jungle but right in our very midst, in our living rooms and our classrooms and, alas, even our churches and seminaries. It is just such near-at-hand truth that Dietrich Bonhoeffer grasped right away, when others closed their eyes or calculated cravenly their immediate prospects. But he went one further step; he remembered Jesus not intellectually or theologically or historically, but as the One who holds us to a certain moral and spiritual mark, and won’t let go of us – if, that is, we are truly prepared, at whatever risk, to stay engaged with Him, to follow Him in his footsteps.”