10. In the Resistance (1939\u20131943)<\/p>\n
The journey towards reality<\/p>\n
In 1914 the German people had welcomed the First World War enthusiastically, because they saw it as a \u2018just war\u2019. This time there was no such talk, and even the propaganda efforts of a Joseph Goebbels did not make much difference. Bonhoeffer\u2019s father wrote in his memoirs: \u2018In 1939 the people had no doubt that this was a war of aggression, prepared for and organized by Hitler, for which there was no kind of sympathy among most of the population\u2019 (DB-ER 663).
\nBonhoeffer had imagined the outbreak of war as a more dramatic event. He was not called up for induction into military service, so the question of conscientious objection did not come up urgently. On the other hand, there were no new plans to overthrow Hitler, which would have allowed him to hope that the Nazi regime would soon be at an end and with it the war. The church struggle also seemed to subside; in many parts of Germany things became noticeably easier for Confessing Church pastors. There were more than a few who volunteered, having been officers in the First World War, and the consistories were willing to employ \u2018illegals\u2019 in their places, though without recognizing them as regular pastors. However, most \u2018illegals\u2019 had long since been conscripted into the army. Right at the beginning of the invasion of Poland, Bonhoeffer had to report in his newsletter the death of the first former Finkenwalde seminarian:<\/p>\n
In reply to a card sent through the military postal service, I have received the news that our dear brother, Theodor Maa\u00df, was killed in action in Poland on 3 September \u2026 In him we had a good brother and a quiet, faithful pastor of the Confessing Church \u2026 whom God had also deemed worthy to stand up for the Gospel through his suffering. (DBW 15, 267)<\/p>\n
Theodor Maa\u00df had been the first pastor in Pomerania to go to prison. In this letter Bonhoeffer looks back to the end of the First World War when many people were asking, where was God\u2019s justice now, since even after so many sacrifices the war was lost.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know whether the question of theodicy will come up again so painfully as it did in the last war \u2026 Christians probably know more today about the Bible\u2019s verdict upon the world and history, so they may be confirmed in their faith rather than sorely tried by present events. (DB-ER 663)<\/p>\n
The news that Martin Niem\u00f6ller in his concentration camp had volunteered for the navy combat forces was spread even abroad. Karl Barth prevailed on a friend in England to deny this emphatically. But it was actually true, and Bonhoeffer was one of those whose advice had been sought beforehand. He had counselled in favour of it, not so that Hitler would gain one more capable officer, but to save a man who would be urgently needed after the coup from being killed off beforehand by the SS.
\nOn his own behalf, Bonhoeffer investigated the possibility of being assigned to a military chaplaincy, but was turned down; only a pastor who had already served as a soldier could be considered for a chaplaincy. So, after the invasion of Poland was over, he drove to Schlawe and from there on to Sigurdshof. There, \u2018protected by one of the most severe winters\u2019, as Bethge reports, he directed the fifth and last of the \u2018collective pastorates\u2019. Eight ordinands had gathered there, and only one of them was conscripted into the military during that time.
\nDuring the first three years of the war Bonhoeffer was able to concentrate extraordinarily well on his theological work. This was already true of the months in Sigurdshof, where he began an exegesis of Psalm 119. This 176-verse psalm, which could have a numbing effect even on eager readers of the Bible, was Bonhoeffer\u2019s favourite. For him it was the psalm for those who had decided to \u2018walk in God\u2019s ways\u2019 because God had decided to call them. The Christian life is not one of \u2018continually beginning anew\u2019, but rather a path on which the believer goes forward because it is God\u2019s path.<\/p>\n
\u2018Happy are those \u2026 who walk in the law of the Lord.\u2019 They are the ones \u2026 who come from the beginning which God has accomplished. They are like victors after having won a battle \u2026 Now they are reaching out toward a new future, now they go on from victory to victory, now they are on the path that is in the light. (DBW 15, 503)<\/p>\n
The tormenting uncertainty of the days in New York, when he thought his only hope lay in the \u2018beyond\u2019, were behind him; he was back on earth again. Here we can see that the decision to come back to Germany had also taken Bonhoeffer a decisive step further in his theology. In his interpretation of verse 19, \u2018I am a sojourner on earth\u2019 (RSV), he expresses this for the first time. This exegesis became a further and especially important step in his journey to reality.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s last group of students in Sigurdshof\/Pommerania<\/p>\n
The earth that nourishes me has a right to my labour and my strength. I am not entitled to despise the earth on which I have my life. I owe it loyalty and gratitude. My lot as a stranger and a sojourner, and thus the call of God to this condition as a stranger, is not something I can escape by dreaming away my earthly life with thoughts of heaven. There is a homesickness for the world beyond which has nothing at all to do with God, and which will certainly not be granted its homecoming. I am to be a sojourner with everything that this implies. I am not to close my heart to the tasks, the sorrows and joys of the earth and remain indifferent. And I am to wait patiently for the fulfilment of God\u2019s promise, really wait, and not rob myself of it ahead of time by wishing and dreaming. (DBW 15, 530)<\/p>\n
While in Sigurdshof, Bonhoeffer received a request from a New Testament scholar in the Rheinland, Georg Eichholz, for help in trying to compile new resources for pastors. Eichholz wanted to have Confessing Church theologians write sermon meditations for the Sundays of the church year, and to publish them as a book. Bonhoeffer remembered this colleague right away as the one Barth referred to as his \u2018theological masterpiece\u2019 in 1931. A lively correspondence ensued between the two of them, since Bonhoeffer, while agreeing to help, did not immediately understand the point of the proposal. He then realized, however, that his former students, especially the ones in lonely villages who had scant opportunities for conversations with one another, were very grateful for help with preparing sermons. The pastoral resource series that Eichholz began in those days is still in use today, and the contributions that Bonhoeffer made to that first edition have remained an exemplary part of it (see DBW 15, 548ff.).
\nOn 15 March 1939, Visser \u2018t Hooft sent a letter from Geneva to the World Council member churches, to say that in times of war there were three tasks for the churches to fulfil:<\/p>\n
1. the task of prayer and the pure proclamation of the Word of God
\n2. the task of preserving brotherly relations with the churches in all countries
\n3. the task of preparing for a just peace<\/p>\n
The first Christians to respond to this at the beginning of the war were those in the Nordic countries, who made efforts toward a rapid restoration of peace. As yet, the attack on Poland had not turned into a world war, so the Norwegian Bishop Eivind Berggrav carried the peace proposals, first to Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Minister, in London, then to Marshal G\u00f6ring, then back to Halifax, and finally made a second visit to G\u00f6ring in Berlin. In January 1940 the World Council\u2019s Provisional Committee met in the Netherlands and tried to draft an appeal for peace. But the Scandinavians and the British could not agree on it.
\nBonhoeffer could not put his trust in any of this, not only because Berggrav made his contact exclusively with Heckel rather than with anyone in the Confessing Church, but especially because the Scandinavians were saying that peace must be concluded first, after which it could be decided what to do about Hitler and his regime. Bonhoeffer was convinced that Hitler must be eliminated first, because otherwise peace would not be possible. The Church Foreign Office, which thought otherwise, was in close contact with Berggrav and with Sch\u00f6nfeld\u2019s Research Department in Geneva, and Heckel\u2019s staff often turned up in Scandinavia and in Switzerland. However, when a man like Professor Siegmund-Schulze, who had been expelled from Germany, wanted to travel from Switzerland to Sweden, Eugen Gerstenmaier of the Church Foreign Office asked the Foreign Ministry to prevent this discreetly by telling the Swedish Embassy that granting the entry visa would be considered an unfriendly act and not in the interest of the Reich (DB-ER 670).<\/p>\n
New plans for a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/p>\n
On 25 August 1939, Hans von Dohnanyi had been inducted into the military as a special aide to the chief of staff, Colonel Hans Oster, in the foreign office of Military Intelligence (Abwehr). The Abwehr office was in the Armed Forces High Command in Berlin and was headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Oster had agreed with Dohnanyi that as soon as war broke out he would request Dohnanyi\u2019s assignment to Military Intelligence. A pastor\u2019s son from Dresden, Oster was considered the most elegant officer in Berlin. \u2018I\u2019ve never seen a more dashing horseman\u2019, said one of the conspirators of him, and with regard to Oster\u2019s efforts in 1938 to rescue the honour of General von Fritsch: \u2018He was a man after God\u2019s own heart.\u2019<\/p>\n
Colonel Hans Oster, Military Intelligence Chief of Staff under Admiral Canaris<\/p>\n
On 27 September 1939, the day of Poland\u2019s surrender, Hitler ordered his general staff to plan invasions of the Netherlands and Belgium in preparation for attacking France. This was the decisive step towards world war. If Hitler were to be stopped in time, it had to happen now. At the same time the first reports were coming in of the SS atrocities in Poland. They were so monstrous that most people who heard them did not want to believe such things had taken place. But Canaris and General Blaskowitz, who commanded the troops in Poland, confronted a number of generals with the facts of what had happened and was still going on in the east. Blaskowitz wrote:<\/p>\n
What the foreign radio stations have broadcast up to now is only a tiny fraction of what has actually happened \u2026 The only possibility of fending off this pestilence lies in bringing the guilty parties and their followers under military command and military justice with all possible speed. (DB-ER 671)<\/p>\n
Hitler reacted immediately by recalling Blaskowitz from his post. But Halder and Brauchitsch were prepared to oppose the attack on France and the invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium, and if they were looking for fellow conspirators in this they could start with General Beck. Beck asked Dohnanyi to bring his chronicle of the regime\u2019s crimes up to date, so that it could be used to help the German people understand why Hitler had to be overthrown. Dohnanyi also obtained the SS films of the massacres they had committed in Poland, and reports that had been written for SS Director Himmler\u2019s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich. Dohnanyi showed these to generals known to be opposed to Hitler, and arranged contacts for Beck with former trade union leaders to explore the possibility of a general strike.<\/p>\n
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, 1940<\/p>\n
The decisive point was, however, to gain assurances from the British government that they were prepared to keep quiet until the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat had taken place. Dohnanyi and Oster entrusted this task to Dr Josef M\u00fcller, a lawyer from Munich who had close ties with the Vatican. He was able to get Pope Pius XII to vouch for the conspirators, and the seriousness of their request, to the Western powers. The prerequisite for the negotiations that would have to be carried out with them was that the overthrow of the German government must take place before Hitler launched his western offensive.
\nFor a while it looked as though something of these plans had leaked out and that Hitler\u2019s henchmen were on the trail of the conspirators. Heydrich, now chief of the Reich SS Headquarters Office, had intercepted Vatican radio broadcasts revealing an exact knowledge of the German attack plans, and Admiral Canaris seemed likely to take the blame. Eventually, however, the conspirators were reassured that the SS had not discovered anything concerning their scheme, so Oster and Dohnanyi went to work again.
\nJosef M\u00fcller had been taken on by Military Intelligence at the beginning of the war and was assigned to its Munich office. This made it possible for him to travel abroad without any enquiries from other offices. In January 1940 he came to Berlin several times to discuss his conversations in the Vatican with Dohnanyi. After the war, as one of the founders of the Christian Socialist Union, the conservative political party in Bavaria, he was to enjoy a certain renown under the nickname \u2018Ochsensepp\u2019 (\u2018Joe the Ox\u2019). He and Bonhoeffer were very different, but opposites attract, and when they met at Dohnanyi\u2019s a friendship developed between them, even before Bonhoeffer, too, was assigned to the Military Intelligence office in Munich.
\nM\u00fcller brought the news from Rome that the British had consented to an armistice, before an attack in the west and after the overthrow of Hitler. They also assented to peace negotiations based on Germany\u2019s remaining intact within its 1937 borders.
\nWhen Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff in the High Command headquarters, approached Brauchitsch, the Army commander-in-chief, with a memorandum prepared by Dohnanyi, the latter refused to participate in the coup. He is said to have answered Halder, \u2018You ought not to have submitted that to me! What is happening here is absolute treason.\u2019 Brauchitsch demanded that Halder have the man arrested who had delivered the memo, and Halder is said to have replied, \u2018If anyone is to be arrested, arrest me!\u2019 (DB-ER 674).
\nHans Bernd von Haeften, a boyhood friend of Bonhoeffer\u2019s and one of the conspirators in the Foreign Office, said of Brauchitsch, his mother\u2019s brother, \u2018And why was our dear little Walther Hitler\u2019s choice? Because he is a cadet by nature and his master\u2019s obedient pupil.\u2019 So another coup attempt had been lost. What was important now, for future attempts, was to preserve the credibility of the conspirators, after the pope had vouched for them. Josef M\u00fcller made a third trip to Rome with the information that the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat had failed and the attacks on the Netherlands, Belgium and France were imminent.
\nThere is no doubt that, according to the letter of the law, what Josef M\u00fcller and those whose missions he carried out had taken upon themselves was treason. Hans Oster even went a step further. He arranged a meeting with the Dutch military attach\u00e9, who was a friend of his, revealed the plans to attack the Netherlands, including the date, and implored him to see that the German advance was hindered by blowing up all the relevant bridges in the Netherlands. However, the government in The Hague did not believe this message. Before taking this action, Oster had held a long conversation with Bonhoeffer about what would be the responsible thing to do in such a situation; for of course it was clear to him that he was about to put the lives of German soldiers at risk. On the issue of treason, Bethge says:<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer regarded Oster\u2019s action on the eve of the Western offensive as a step taken on his own final responsibility \u2026 \u2018Treason\u2019 had become true patriotism, and what was normally \u2018patriotism\u2019 had become treason. An officer saw [Hitler\u2019s] diabolical reversal of all values, and acted entirely alone to prevent new outrages in other countries, such as those he had experienced in Poland\u2014and the pastor approved of what he did. (DB-ER 675)<\/p>\n
When Eberhard Bethge was writing his biography of Bonhoeffer, heated discussions were still going on as to whether the men of the Resistance had betrayed their fatherland. Bethge and others were and are right to deny that they had. For us today it seems more logical to ask how the German elite, to which Brauchitsch belonged, could share in the guilt by continuing their unconditional obedience, for so long, to a regime which committed such crimes.
\nBonhoeffer knew about the early coup attempts, and was in Berlin on the crucial days, but he was not yet a member of the Military Intelligence resistance group. He only began \u2018leading two lives\u2019, as a Confessing Church pastor on one hand and as a Military Intelligence staff member on the other\u2014just those closest to him were allowed to know about the latter\u2014after Hitler\u2019s surprising victory over France. That the German troops\u2014against the predictions of military leaders, who had foreseen a long war\u2014overran France in a few weeks, made Hitler \u2018the greatest commander of all time\u2019 in the eyes of the people, and Goebbels made plentiful use of their approval. The injustice done to Germany by the Allies in 1918, he proclaimed, had now been repaid. Hitler had restored the reign of justice. To make sure everyone \u2018got the picture\u2019, the French delegation was made to sign the armistice in the \u2018railroad car of Compi\u00e8gne\u2019, the same fancy railway carriage in which the Germans had signed the armistice in 1918. Dietrich Bonhoeffer mentioned this event during a trip to Switzerland, about which we shall have more to say, in a text intended for his friends in England.<\/p>\n
At the signing of the ceasefire with France in the Forest of Compi\u00e8gne, 22 June 1940. Left to right: Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Hermann G\u00f6ring, Rudolf He\u00df, Adolf Hitler, Gro\u00dfadmiral Raeder (hidden behind Hitler) and General Brauchitsch<\/p>\n
The deepest reason for the ethical confusion has \u2026 to do with the fact that the greatest injustice, as it is embodied in the National Socialist [Nazi] regime, was able to clothe itself in the garb of relative historical and social justice. The railroad car of Compi\u00e8gne is nothing less than the symbol of how evil feeds on pseudojustice. For those who do not see through the demonic nature of evil manifesting itself in the form of justice, this becomes the poisonous source of all ethical disintegration. That it has been possible for Hitler to make himself the executor of a relative historical justice derives not least from England\u2019s willingness since 1933 to extend to Hitler all those concessions it denied the Weimar Republic. Thereby England\u2014certainly strengthened by the loyalty of broad church circles in Germany toward Hitler\u2014took the side of Hitler against his domestic opposition. Thus both from within and without, Hitler received moral support for his claim to be the God-given executor of historical justice, and only a small remnant was able to perceive, precisely here, Satan in the form of an angel of light. (2 Cor. 11:14; DBWE 16, 530\u201331)<\/p>\n
The conspirators knew, after Hitler\u2019s victory in France, that they would find people prepared to help them among the top ranks of the military only if it was plain that this victory would be followed by catastrophic defeats. And only then would the people have any understanding for a need to overthrow the government.
\nFor a long time Bonhoeffer had simply been one of those who were \u2018in the know\u2019 about the plans for a coup, but now, through his close contact with Hans von Dohnanyi, he was increasingly taking on the role of an adviser. During the discussions of Josef M\u00fcller\u2019s experiences with the Vatican, Bonhoeffer\u2019s connections abroad came under consideration. Very few of the conspirators had close and reliable relationships with influential people in the countries opposed to Hitler. In the Foreign Office there was, notably, Adam von Trott, who made great personal efforts, time and again, to establish contacts between the conspirators and the Western Allies. But some of his former friends in Oxford had conceived a suspicion that he had become a Nazi supporter in disguise, and were warning highly placed people in the United States against him. The secret service there, which kept Trott under surveillance from then on, came to grotesquely false conclusions about him; but their suspicion in turn had its effect in Great Britain. Unjust though this was, it brought about the failure of all the actions undertaken by this highly gifted and steadfast member of the conspiracy.
\nIn arranging a putsch a great deal depended on the reaction of the Western powers, for only with proof that they were prepared to wait and not move against Germany could it still be possible to gain the cooperation of any high-ranking military officer. So it was logical for the resistance group in Military Intelligence to be interested in having Bonhoeffer begin working actively with it.<\/p>\n
Visitations in East Prussia<\/p>\n
On 18 March 1940, Bonhoeffer\u2019s collective pastorate was closed by the police. Once again it was faithful Erna Struwe, the housekeeper at Finkenwalde who had moved with the community to Sigurdshof, who was handed the police order to close the house. But this did not mean that Bonhoeffer was unemployed as a pastor. Contacts between congregations of the Confessing Church had now been made incredibly difficult. The ministers of many such congregations had been conscripted into military service, leaving them without pastoral care of any sort. \u2018Visiting pastorates\u2019 were therefore set up, and no one was better suited to \u2018ride a circuit\u2019 such as this than Bonhoeffer, who was assigned to the Confessing parishes in East Prussia.
\nHe waited anxiously in Berlin for news of the British defeat at Dunkirk, which was really a victory since most of the British troops got across the Channel safely. But Bonhoeffer was concerned about his sister Sabine and her family, fearing that Hitler would immediately order the invasion of Britain. However, the day after Dunkirk, Bonhoeffer and Bethge set off eastwards to Tilsit and Memel. There they could preach in churches filled to overflowing; there they met pastors\u2019 wives who were carrying on with Christian education, and a farmer who, in his capacity as a local church elder, was holding worship services. So they came back from this trip with a proposal to set up training courses for lay preachers within the Confessing Church.
\nOn 17 June 1940, during that first visitation journey, Bonhoeffer and Bethge had arrived in the village of Memel and were sitting in the garden of a caf\u00e9 on the peninsula opposite the town, enjoying the sunshine. Suddenly Franz Liszt\u2019s fanfare came booming from every loudspeaker, signalling a special radio announcement by Goebbels: France had surrendered. Bethge, who was still having trouble behaving in such a way as to disguise his convictions, later wrote:<\/p>\n
The people around the tables could hardly contain themselves; they jumped up, and some even climbed on the chairs. With outstretched arms they sang Deutschland, Deutschland \u00fcber alles and the Horst Wessel song. We had stood up, too. Bonhoeffer raised his arm in the regulation Hitler salute, while I stood there dazed. \u2018Raise your arm! Are you crazy?\u2019 he whispered to me, and later: \u2018We shall have to run risks for very different things now, but not for that salute!\u2019 (DB-ER 681)<\/p>\n
On his second journey to East Prussia, on which Bethge did not go with him, Bonhoeffer ran into trouble. He was at a weekend retreat in Bloestau, sitting with some students from K\u00f6nigsberg, when the Gestapo appeared and asked questions, wrote down the names and addresses of the participants, and dissolved the gathering. Although Bonhoeffer had the feeling that this would not be the end of it, he continued his journey further east, where Soviet troops had been seen across the Russian border and people were worried. While Germany was celebrating Hitler\u2019s victory in the west, Stalin had taken over the areas named in his non-aggression pact with Hitler as legitimately under the influence of the Soviet Union. Bonhoeffer gave up the rest of his planned visitations and a holiday at Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin, Ruth von Kleist-Retzow\u2019s manor, and returned immediately to Berlin to seek Dohnanyi\u2019s advice.
\nWhile Bonhoeffer was in East Prussia, Dohnanyi had clarified with Oster that his brother-in-law was to be brought into the work they were doing, and Oster had secured Canaris\u2019s consent. It was now decided that during Bonhoeffer\u2019s third visitation trip, he would have the protection of a Military Intelligence assignment.
\nOn the way to K\u00f6nigsberg, Bonhoeffer and all the other passengers had to get off the train at Dirschau because the bridge over the Weichsel River had been blown up during the invasion of Poland. The passengers were ferried across; on the other side another train was waiting, but it had fewer carriages and all its seats were soon full. Bonhoeffer would have had to stand in the corridor, together with \u2018elderly women, officers etc.\u2019, had he not firmly demanded that in each second-class compartment the six places be occupied by eight persons. \u2018I did this because a large number of very young people had climbed through the windows into the compartments \u2026 Good manners are going rapidly out of circulation\u2019 (DBWE 16, 72).
\nIn K\u00f6nigsberg Bonhoeffer made sure to visit the Military Intelligence officer, and was more cautious in carrying out his church work. But after only a few days, Superintendent Block telephoned from Schlawe: Bonhoeffer was to report to the police there immediately. When he arrived, a Gestapo officer informed him that, according to orders from the Reich SS Headquarters, he was now banned from public speaking throughout the Reich, on the grounds of \u2018activity subverting the people\u2019. Furthermore he was to report regularly to the authorities in the town where he resided, and inform them beforehand of any travel.
\nIt turns out that the Reich SS Headquarters was reacting to a report that was discovered 50 years later, after the overthrow of the communist East German government, in its state archives. Among the students from K\u00f6nigsberg with whom Bonhoeffer had met during his second East Prussian trip there was a police informer, whom the Gestapo had made a show of interrogating along with the others. His report had been forwarded directly to the SS Headquarters by the Gestapo in K\u00f6nigsberg (DBWE 16, 62ff). In Schlawe, Bonhoeffer wrote down the file number of the order against him, which was not given him in writing, and protested in a letter to the SS that it was not possible for him to submit to the charge of \u2018activity subverting the people\u2019. He cited, as related in Chapter 1, the merits of his ancestors and their service to the fatherland in a suitably dignified manner. He never received a reply.<\/p>\n
As a confidential agent for Military Intelligence<\/p>\n
In a discussion with Dohnanyi in late July 1940, the final decision was made that Bonhoeffer would serve as a V-Mann (Verbindungsmann, or confidential agent) for Military Intelligence under Admiral Canaris. It was possible for Military Intelligence to have him granted a \u2018UK\u2019 classification\u2014\u2018unabk\u00f6mmlich\u2019, indispensable\u2014thus making him unavailable for conscription into the army. But was it wise to employ as an agent a pastor who was already on the Gestapo\u2019s blacklist? At the time, Bonhoeffer heard Colonel Oster use words which he cleverly turned to his advantage later, during his interrogations: \u2018Military Intelligence works with anyone, with Communists and with Jews, so why not also with Confessing Church people?\u2019 But of course there was no point in provoking the Gestapo unnecessarily by assigning Bonhoeffer to the central office in Berlin. So it was decided to send him as far away from Schlawe as possible, to the Military Intelligence office in Munich, where other opponents of the regime, notably his friend Josef M\u00fcller, were already working.
\nIn order to get around the Gestapo, Bonhoeffer\u2019s actual employer, the Old Prussian Council of Brethren, had to release him and at the same time continue to employ him, without telling the Council members the reasons behind this. Their legal advisor Perels, who was in on the Resistance plans, proposed to the Council that Bonhoeffer be put on leave in order to work on his Ethics which he had begun writing, noting that this was also necessary because he was \u2018needed militarily in Berlin\u2019. The Council of Brethren agreed to be satisfied with this, since Bonhoeffer had the absolute trust of all its members. His salary was also continued; but from then on he took 30 to 50 per cent less than the full amount, since it was becoming harder and harder for the Confessing Church to fulfil its financial obligations to the pastors who had been suspended without pay from their pastorates, and to the \u2018illegals\u2019 and their families. Bonhoeffer was never on the Military Intelligence payroll, and would have refused any remuneration as an \u2018agent\u2019. However, he was happy to accept support from his sister Sabine Leibholz and her husband, who still had a bank account in Germany which had not been discovered by the Gestapo. When this combined income was still far less then the salary to which he was entitled, Dohnanyi also helped out. He maintained a special account for the benefit of the Confessing Church, which had been set up for just such purposes, and was replenished from time to time by Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig and one of the leading members of the Resistance, who collected the necessary money in his circle of friends.
\nBonhoeffer was now walking a path that only those who were pursuing the same path were allowed to know about; but that did not mean he had burned all his bridges behind him. He had to lead two lives; but to him this was not a contradiction of his faith, nor did he consider his ministry as a pastor and teacher in the Confessing Church to be over. He had taken the step of joining the Resistance on the basis of an ethical decision.
\nHitler, along with his countless fanatical supporters, had to be prevented from committing further crimes, and the only way of stopping him that was left was to eliminate him altogether. Not only the hordes of Germans who were carrying out his orders, but every individual and every group that quietly suffered these crimes to continue\u2014even the Church\u2014shared in the guilt for what was happening in Germany and in the regions its troops were occupying. The need to keep quiet in order to survive did not excuse anyone. In this situation, the conspirators needed to do everything possible to stop the crimes of the government, to \u2018seize the wheel itself\u2019 and bring it to a standstill, as Bonhoeffer had said in 1933. In his view they were acting on behalf of all Germans, and also on behalf of the churches in Germany.
\nWorking as an agent always means entering a twilight zone, and so it was for Bonhoeffer. He had to deceive the people around him about what he was doing. He accepted this shady aspect for himself personally, and soberly realized that the Confessing Church might someday be in a situation in which it would have to distance itself from him. Even then, he felt that his actions were legitimate for him as a servant of the Church. Until 1939 Bonhoeffer had been contemplating the idea of accepting martyrdom as a conscientious objector to military service. Now, as he took up the role of a confidential agent, it meant that from 1940 onward he was still prepared to sacrifice his life. He could no longer be concerned, now, about his own obedience and personal Christian witness; instead, he must dedicate himself to the destiny of Germany and the destiny of all persons who were threatened by the Reich\u2019s arbitrary and murderous plans.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s ability to keep his mouth shut was not the least of the reasons why he was chosen for this responsibility. None of the Finkenwaldians, with whom he had shared everything he knew about the church struggle, was allowed to know anything about his new assignment. But to him this was no reason to break contact with his former students. He continued his correspondence with them, and it remained an important part of his work until he was arrested. In the days before Christmas 1940 alone, he sent 90 letters through the military post to soldiers in the field.
\nNo other Confessing Church pastor led such an unusual life as did Bonhoeffer in the time between his joining Military Intelligence in October 1940 and his arrest on 5 April 1943. Periods of working completely undisturbed on his theology\u2014in the home of Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, at Ettal in Bavaria, or in his attic room in Berlin\u2014alternated with hectic weeks in which he carried out assignments for the conspiracy, travelling in overcrowded trains that were blacked out at night, or by aeroplane or ferry. In all, he covered well over 30,000 miles.
\nDuring this time he continued, as a pastor, conducting funerals and keeping contact with those of his students who were soldiers and with the few still working as pastors in remote villages. He wrote pastoral letters to the families of his students and friends who had died at the front, and despite being banned from public speaking he held discussions in small groups and helped wherever he could. As a theologian he was not only working on his Ethics, but also taking part in Confessing Church committee meetings and writing expert opinions for the Church.
\nThrough his close contact with Visser \u2018t Hooft in Geneva, Bonhoeffer became by far the most important German partner for the ecumenical movement during these years. Political developments in the Third Reich had caused Bishop Heckel to become discredited; there was no longer any trust in him. Sch\u00f6nfeld on the other hand, who had been the Church Foreign Office\u2019s man in Geneva, was now a supporter of the opposition. Soon after the invasion of Poland, around Christmastime in 1939, he and Bonhoeffer had come closer together. Sch\u00f6nfeld and the Swede Nils Ehrenstr\u00f6m, who also worked in Geneva, had brought Roswell Barnes, an adviser to President Roosevelt, to Germany. At that time the United States was not yet on the opposing side in the war. A secret meeting was held at the Go\u00dfner Mission in Berlin, on the invitation of its director, Hans Lokies, who was Sch\u00f6nfeld\u2019s brother-in-law. On the German side the participants included the teacher and theologian Oskar Hammelsbeck, Helmut Gollwitzer and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Even more important was a second secret meeting between the American and Swedish guests and a \u2018retired general\u2019 whose name they were not told. He gave Barnes and Ehrenstr\u00f6m to understand that in Germany, even in the military, there were strong Resistance movements against Hitler\u2019s policies. This was the first time that anyone on the Geneva staff had heard this.
\nThe fact that Sch\u00f6nfeld was allowed to take part in both conversations showed that at that time he had already cut his inner ties to Heckel and gone over to the opposition; and Bonhoeffer must have known that he had crossed the line, for otherwise he would have refused any contact with Sch\u00f6nfeld.
\nHalf a year later, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer met with Sch\u00f6nfeld in Potsdam and proposed that he, too, take on some work for Canaris\u2019s office, thus in reality for the Resistance. At that point Bonhoeffer was finally convinced that Hans Sch\u00f6nfeld had changed his mind, and Dohnanyi even had the impression that he was grateful to be accepted for such an assignment. This must also have improved Sch\u00f6nfeld\u2019s relationship with Visser \u2018t Hooft, his new boss. Furthermore, in making such a decision it must have helped him greatly that his partner in Heckel\u2019s Foreign Office, Eugen Gerstenmaier, had also quietly decided against the Nazi authorities and in favour of the Resistance group within the Reich Foreign Office.
\nAs a member of the Resistance, Bonhoeffer had to try above all to make contacts with notable persons abroad who could exercise political influence within their countries. Contacts of this sort were easiest to come by through the good offices of Visser \u2018t Hooft. Since the preparations for these conversations also required Bonhoeffer to engage in confidential discussions in Berlin, people increasingly came to trust his advice. He was asked to help in drawing up memoranda for the conspirators, and was included in conversations with Carl Goerdeler\u2014whom they intended to install as Reich Chancellor after the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat\u2014and the former trade union leaders Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s Ethics<\/p>\n
After the war there were still reports, from Kurt Scharf, Wilhelm Niesel and others, that at a Council of Brethren meeting in early July 1940 at Nowawes (today Babelsberg) near Potsdam, Bonhoeffer bowed before Hitler\u2019s success in France as if it were the judgement of God. He is supposed to have said that after this victory it was necessary to accept a totally new situation. This memory, like the impression his words made at the time, is based on a misunderstanding. The Council of Brethren had no idea of the attempts at a putsch that had failed to come off, so it could not be clear to them what Bonhoeffer meant. He knew that, after the invasion of France, it would be a long and tortuous time before hopes of overthrowing the government could be renewed, but he could not give his friends in the Confessing Church the slightest indication that these were his thoughts. The book he was writing, Ethics, sheds light on the real meaning of his words at that time:<\/p>\n
The successful create facts that cannot be reversed. What they destroy cannot be restored. What they construct has, at least in the following generation, the right of existence. No condemnation can make good the wrong that the successful commit \u2026 The judges of history play a sad role alongside those who make history; history rolls over them. (DBWE 6, 88\u201389)<\/p>\n
Yet this formulation as such is not unambiguous. It is only the next paragraph that shows clearly what Bonhoeffer wanted to say:<\/p>\n
Where the figure of a successful person becomes especially prominent, the majority fall into idolizing success. They become blind to right and wrong, truth and lie, decency and malice \u2026 Success per se is the good. This attitude is only genuine and excusable while one is intoxicated by events. After sobriety returns it can be maintained only at the cost of deep inner hypocrisy, with conscious self-deception. (DBWE 6, 89)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer did not give even a moment\u2019s thought to going over to the \u2018successful\u2019 side. Another temptation was much greater: to withdraw into one\u2019s own inner world, and\u2014hoping in God\u2014to leave the outer world to the Evil One. In those days it was not only Christians who were choosing to \u2018migrate within\u2019. That Bonhoeffer was not considering this option either is proven by his decision to join the conspirators. They, however, for a long time after Hitler\u2019s astonishing victory in France, were stunned and struggling to get their wind back. This was even true of Hans von Dohnanyi, who was suffering attacks of depression. It helped him during that time that Helmuth von Moltke made contact with him. Moltke had also joined the staff of Military Intelligence at the beginning of the war and was working in the department of international law. He was able to turn Dohnanyi\u2019s attention to the time after Hitler\u2019s regime, for which it was essential to prepare. During that period, he and his wife often met socially with the Dohnanyis.
\nBecause Dohnanyi did not want to take any risks in arranging Bonhoeffer\u2019s move to the Munich office, he recommended to his brother-in-law the working holiday at Ruth von Kleist\u2019s home, Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin, which has already been mentioned, so that all might be ready ahead of time in Munich. This took place in October 1940. So when Bonhoeffer arrived on 30 October to take up his new duties, he had just completed four weeks of intensive work on his Ethics. Teaching Christians how to conduct themselves in the world according to the will of God had been a topic that had occupied him since his time in Barcelona. His plan to write a book on ethics seems to date from the beginning of the war.
\nHitler\u2019s success in the invasion of France, as we have seen, had aroused entirely new thoughts in him, and further insights during the course of his work in the Resistance affected the conception and style of the book. Unfortunately, Bonhoeffer was never able to finish what was, to him, his most important work. Four drafts exist of the first chapter, followed by thirteen or fourteen further sections which had to be fitted together, like a jigsaw puzzle, after the war. Some are complete chapters, while others are only fragments. His work was interrupted at irregular intervals by missions on behalf of the conspiracy.
\nThus Bonhoeffer\u2019s Ethics was \u2018written and lived\u2019 by turns, and this makes it a fascinating book to this day. It is not a reference work in which one can \u2018look up\u2019 what one should do in this or that situation, but in any case that was not the sort of book Bonhoeffer wanted to write. The fragments we possess have nonetheless retained a relevance that is often astounding, even for us today.
\nAt one point Bonhoeffer had considered \u2018Preparing the Way and Entering in [Wegbereitung und Einzug]\u2019 as the title for this book. He was as much opposed to an idealistic, above-the-world, view of reality as to a positivist view that tends to divest the world of value. For him, the reality of the world was its reality as reconciled by Christ (2 Corinthians 5:19). In Christ, God accepted the world, and it is because of God\u2019s Yes to it that it can become the place in which human beings assume responsibility, make peace, protect life and overcome murder, violence and atrocities. If this is the way we see reality, we cannot uphold any principles, standards or duties as eternally valid for other persons, but can only encourage them, in every historical situation, to listen anew to God\u2019s commandments and to follow Christ. Thus during the Resistance\u2014to name only two, very serious examples\u2014Bonhoeffer took the view, on one hand, that Hitler must be eliminated by assassination because it had become impossible to arrest and imprison him. On the other hand, in the case of euthanasia, he adhered strictly to the commandment \u2018Thou shalt not kill.\u2019 Only a Christian who understands that he or she is free can make the right ethical decisions.<\/p>\n
The relationship between God and human beings that has been realized [verwirklicht] in Jesus Christ is the ultimate reason why this is the case. Jesus stands before God as the obedient one and as the free one. As the obedient one, he does the will of the Father by blindly following the law he has been commanded. As the free one, he affirms God\u2019s will out of his very own insight, with open eyes and a joyful heart; it is as if he re-creates it anew out of himself \u2026 Obedience has tied hands, freedom is creative. In rendering obedience, human beings observe God\u2019s decalogue (Ten Commandments); in exercising freedom, they create new \u2018decalogues\u2019. (DBWE 6, 287)<\/p>\n
While Bonhoeffer was at Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin working on his Ethics, beginning with a section entitled \u2018Christ, the Reality and the Good\u2019 in which he asked basic questions about what an Ethics could accomplish, a generation of British fighter pilots, at the cost of tremendous sacrifices, was defeating Hermann G\u00f6ring\u2019s Luftwaffe and thus preventing Germany\u2019s invasion of Britain. Only a few years before, as students at Oxford, they had declared in a spectacular battle of words that they were \u2018not ready to fight for king and country\u2019. Now they had beaten their German opponents in the \u2018Battle of Britain\u2019, of which Churchill said in Parliament that \u2018Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.\u2019 Bonhoeffer wrote to his parents, with a veiled reference to this battle: \u2018While outdoors a mighty autumn storm is ripping the leaves from the trees \u2026 I\u2019m sitting here quietly at my work.\u2019<\/p>\n
With the Benedictines in Ettal<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer set off for Munich in the hope that he would be able to do theological work there as well. First of all, however, he had to see whether Dohnanyi\u2019s plan to fit him in there would work. An aunt, Countess Christine von Kalckreuth, whose home in the Schwabing district was a gathering place for actors and artists, took him in pro forma, since he had to be registered with the police at a Munich address in order for Military Intelligence to have him, as a new citizen of Munich, classified \u2018indispensable\u2019 with the Military Registration office there. \u2018Ninne\u2019, as his aunt was called within the family, kept a room available for him to spend the night whenever he had business in Munich. The place where he was really to stay was to be found outside the city. When he finally received his \u2018UK\u2019 classification on 14 January, a period of nervous tension was over, since he now no longer had to report on his movements in Schlawe.
\nJosef M\u00fcller had offered to find lodgings for Bonhoeffer outside Munich, and it seems to have been Paula Bonhoeffer who asked him whether the monastery in Ettal might be a possibility for her son. For several reasons, M\u00fcller found this an ideal solution. The Benedictines of Ettal were opposed to Nazism. One of them, Father Johannes, maintained a close contact with the conspirators. So Bonhoeffer would be in surroundings in which he would not have to become involved in conversations with people he did not know. Though he was good at finding his way quickly in changed situations, his new duties were unfamiliar and he needed some quiet in order to prepare for them. As for his theological work, there was no better place than the monastery, with its sizeable library. At night he would not be disturbed by air raid sirens, and no one would ask out of curiosity what a healthy young man was doing out of uniform in Munich in the middle of a war. There were eventually some questions asked, even in the little town of Ettal, but the monks knew how to handle them.
\nBonhoeffer was very happy with this proposal. The abbot, who had to extend the invitation, was taken into the conspirators\u2019 confidence. The guest was given a room in the hotel Ludwig der Bayer opposite the monastery. He was invited to meals with the monks, and was even given a key for the closed area of the monastery where guests were normally not allowed. He could work in the library any time he liked.
\nAfter the weeks of tension with the ban on public speaking and obligation to report his movements, Bonhoeffer could not have found a better place to be than this monastery in the mountains, where the worship, the daily prayer offices and conversations with the Fathers were congenial and many things reminded him of Finkenwalde. He was not completely unknown to his hosts, as the abbot and some of the monks had read Life Together and wanted to discuss it with him. At mealtimes, silence was observed while a monk read aloud; during the Christmas season, the readings were from Discipleship.
\nIn Ettal, Bonhoeffer wrote the chapter on \u2018Ultimate and Penultimate Things\u2019, one of the strongest parts of his Ethics. The distinction between \u2018ultimate\u2019 and \u2018penultimate\u2019, as we have seen, had already appeared in one of his sermons in Barcelona. By now Bonhoeffer had more experience at a personal level with this distinction and could develop the theme fully.<\/p>\n
The origin and essence of all Christian life are consummated in the one event that the Reformation has called the justification of the sinner by grace alone. It is not what a person is per se, but what a person is in this event, that gives us insight into the Christian life. Here the length and breadth of human life are concentrated in one moment, one point; the whole of life is embraced in this event \u2026 The dark tunnel of human life, which was barred within and without and was disappearing ever more deeply into an abyss from which there is no exit, is powerfully torn open; the word of God bursts in. In this saving light, people recognize God and their neighbors for the first time. The labyrinth of their previous lives collapses. They become free for God and for one another. (DBWE 6, 146)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer is speaking here about the faith which can never be a community experience, only an individual one. But can the person of faith live by this experience of the ultimate alone? Can faith\u2014and that doesn\u2019t mean \u2018the memory of past faith, or of repeating articles of faith\u2019, but rather true faith\u2014be \u2018realised daily and hourly\u2019 (DBWE 6, 152)? No; during this life there are only \u2018moments of the ultimate\u2019. God lets human beings live in the penultimate. But they must always be on the lookout, throughout its length and breadth, for the ultimate. The \u2018penultimate\u2019 is life as human beings live it in a \u2018time of God\u2019s permission, waiting and preparation\u2019. Even the person of faith lives in this \u2018penultimate\u2019, and for Bonhoeffer it included, not least, everything having to do with the conspiracy. It also meant that, even when one had to live in such a terrible time as the Second World War, it was perfectly all right to enjoy one\u2019s life and happy times spent with friends, but knowing always that \u2018there is an ultimate time that judges and breaks off the penultimate\u2019 (DBWE 6, 151).
\nWhen we realize that Ettal very soon became anything but \u2018shut away from the world\u2019 for Bonhoeffer, we can only marvel that he had any time to write while he was there. Five days after he arrived, his sister Christine appeared with her three children, who were to go to boarding school in Ettal so as to be safe from the bombings. She herself immediately returned to Berlin, but when she later visited she was able to carry news back and forth. No sooner was she gone than her younger son Christoph von Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer\u2019s godson, now a world-famous orchestral conductor, went down with a bad case of influenza. His uncle took him to his hotel room and cared for him until he was well again.
\nAround the same time, other \u2018evacuees from the bombing\u2019 arrived in Ettal\u2014a hundred schoolgirls from Hamburg with their teachers. Bonhoeffer felt that even in Catholic Bavaria they should not do without Protestant religious instruction. He discussed the matter with Bishop Meiser in Munich, whom he would never have consulted during the Finkenwalde years because of Meiser\u2019s refusal to support the \u2018destroyed\u2019 churches on the Dahlem side in the church struggle. The bishop sent a member of his staff, Hermann Dietzfelbinger, to Ettal once every fortnight to hold a worship service for the youngsters and give them religious instruction. So there were constant problems, great or small, to interrupt Bonhoeffer\u2019s work. But, as in Finkenwalde, he was helped by his ability to concentrate and to write down his thoughts at speed.
\nBonhoeffer was still concerned about the Confessing Church. He used his connections to try and reduce the number of Confessing pastors who were being conscripted into military service without any choice in the matter. Until then, the indescribable Mr Werner saw to it that only German Christian pastors were granted exemptions as \u2018indispensable\u2019. Dohnanyi got Justice Minister G\u00fcrtner, whose son was also at the boarding school in Ettal, to enter into negotiations with Religious Affairs Minister Kerrl. When G\u00fcrtner came to visit his son at the school in December 1940, Bonhoeffer went for a long walk with him and expressed his wishes in this regard; G\u00fcrtner indicated in response that that he had already held an initial conversation with Kerrl and hoped to be able to do something for the Confessing Church. Eberhard Bethge was also present; he had come to Ettal for the Christmas holidays, and the two friends had been skiing almost every day. But the day of the conversation with G\u00fcrtner was so icy cold that he and Bonhoeffer exchanged anxious glances, because for so long the minister made no sign of being ready to turn back. Since the G\u00fcrtners also spent Christmas in Ettal with their son, a joint family celebration was held with the Dohnanyis, Bonhoeffer and Bethge at the hotel.
\nG\u00fcrtner\u2019s unexpected death in January 1941 was a heavy blow not only to his family, but also to his friends. Hitler\u2019s Minister of Justice was a tragic figure. He had struggled desperately to keep Germany in obedience to its own laws, but for seven years had put his signature to orders that represented violations of the law. He stayed at his post because he knew that if he resigned, he would only make way for one of Hitler\u2019s \u2018terrible lawyers\u2019. To Dohnanyi he had been a fatherly friend. G\u00fcrtner was a Catholic, but to the outrage of the Benedictine fathers in Ettal the Catholic Church refused him a church burial. Bishop Meiser therefore conducted a Protestant funeral, which was attended by the abbot, Father Johannes and Bonhoeffer from the Ettal monastery. Christine von Dohnanyi, whose husband was in Italy on business, came from Berlin and, with her children, stood by Mrs G\u00fcrtner and her son.
\nIt had not been possible for G\u00fcrtner to gain agreement from Kerrl to grant exemptions from military service to pastors of the Confessing Church along with the others. So the only way left was to help in individual cases. At Bonhoeffer\u2019s request, Dohnanyi and Oster were able to gain exemptions for Niesel, Perels and Rott, whose work was indispensable to the Confessing Church.<\/p>\n
Christmas 1940 in Ettal. Left to right: Klaus von Dohnanyi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barbara and Christoph von Dohnanyi, Eberhard Bethge<\/p>\n
After the war the two were reproached with having endangered the Resistance movement unnecessarily by pursuing such measures, and in fact these exemptions were among the accusations raised against them after they were arrested and charged. But Dohnanyi and Oster were aware of this danger and accepted it as necessary. They were thinking of the time beyond the assassination of Hitler. In a postwar Germany the Confessing Church would be needed, and therefore the people who had worked in the most responsible positions within it could not be sacrificed.
\nOne person whose help was most important in this matter was Lieutenant Colonel Groscurth, a pastor\u2019s son from Bremen, who served as Military Intelligence\u2019s liaison officer to the Military High Command. At Bonhoeffer\u2019s request he agreed to see pastors Kurt Scharf and Wilhelm Niesel and hear their report on the lack of pastors in the Confessing Church. Afterwards, he was able to convince Army Commander in Chief Brauchitsch to help in gaining \u2018UK\u2019 status for a number of pastors.
\nGroscurth was in the inner circle of conspirators in Military Intelligence. After the invasion of Poland, he had sought out one commander after another on the western front and told them about the atrocities in Poland, in order to mobilize them to oppose such crimes. Hitler and Himmler found out about this and were furious, as Major General Jodl reported in his diary. Groscurth was transferred to the western front as commander of an infantry battalion, which amounted to a demotion. This was a great loss to the conspirators in Military Intelligence. During the invasion of Russia, Groscurth was made chief of staff of an army corps, was taken prisoner in Stalingrad and died in Siberia of typhus in 1943.
\nThe issue of \u2018legalization\u2019 of \u2018illegal\u2019 pastors also continued to occupy Bonhoeffer for a long time to come. After the first year of the war, when the majority of younger Confessing Church pastors had served half a year or more with the fighting troops (Frontbew\u00e4hrung), it became evident that those in power had no intention of honouring the dedication they had shown. \u2018Golden bridges\u2019 were being built for the \u2018illegal\u2019 pastors to entice them to the consistories, but Werner and his people would not give up insisting on their complete subjection. No pastor who refused to renounce the Confessing Church was exempted from further military service, and his family remained without support beyond what the Confessing Church could raise from donations. Younger pastors judged \u2018unfit\u2019 for military service, together with women pastoral assistants in the Confessing Church, were sent to work in factories. In this situation, Bonhoeffer did not break off contact with those who did go over to the consistories. But he kept counselling his former ordinands until the last to remain true to the resolutions of the Dahlem synod.
\nAfter the war, the few \u2018illegals\u2019 who were still living and had never submitted to the consistories of the \u2018official\u2019 church were welcomed by the consistories and accorded all the rights of \u2018legal\u2019 pastors. The view was not taken that those pastors and church officials who had sworn the oath of loyalty to Hitler, and made various other compromises, had to \u2018return to legality\u2019; rather, those who had borne the burden of the church struggle were granted equal status with them.
\nDuring the years of the church struggle, hopes had been nourished in Finkenwalde and the other seminaries for a renewal of the Church and new forms of pastoral work. But the consistories made sure, in 1945, to begin again where they had left off in 1933, as indeed the Federal Republic of Germany was doing, to a large extent, in the era of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
\nThe ecumenical movement had long been understood as international cooperation among churches of different confessions. The Catholic Church had never participated, as a matter of principle, and did not reverse its principled refusal until 1961. In the years before the Second World War there was no contact between Germany\u2019s two major churches. They had never considered it desirable. The persecutions that increasingly affected both after 1933, however, began to bring about changes, and it was now that the first encounters took place. Bonhoeffer\u2019s relations with Catholics while he was in Ettal were part of this development. He came into close contact with Prelate Neuh\u00e4usler in Munich, with the abbot of Metten Monastery, and above all with Father Johannes in Ettal, who became a friend of the Bonhoeffer family; when he was in Berlin he was glad to come to the Bonhoeffer parents\u2019 home for confidential conversations.
\nWe should know nothing about all this had not the extremely lively letters exchanged between Bonhoeffer and Bethge during that time been preserved. But even these, of course, do not reveal a word of what would interest us most, that is, what was truly being discussed in each of these conversations. Prelate Neuh\u00e4usler, who was later Suffragan Bishop of Munich, enjoyed his relations with Bonhoeffer because, among other things, the latter always knew the latest political jokes. In response to Bonhoeffer\u2019s questions, Neuh\u00e4usler told him about recent developments in Catholic ethics, arranged for him to meet theologians, and helped obtain books for both him and Bethge, who had been working at the Go\u00dfner Mission in Berlin since the autumn of 1940. Bonhoeffer had advised his friend that, as \u2018inspector of missions\u2019, he should make contact with Catholic institutions for both foreign and home missions and study their writings. Neuh\u00e4usler was pleased, and when an important book was no longer available, he immediately sent Bethge his own copy in care of Bonhoeffer. Thus it was a blow to Bonhoeffer as well when, soon afterwards, Neuh\u00e4usler was sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he remained until the war was over. But it was a comfort to his many friends to hear that he not only had a cell to himself, but also shared a common sitting-room with two Catholic priests and Martin Niem\u00f6ller.
\nBonhoeffer was working on the problem of euthanasia for his Ethics; it was Nazi policy at the time to put chronically and mentally ill persons to death. This was done on personal orders from Hitler, and was terribly confusing and disturbing to the German people. If a disabled family member had been placed in an institution, and soon afterwards the news arrived that the person had died suddenly of pneumonia, those who received such messages found it hard to believe them. Rumours soon began to circulate that such people were being murdered by their doctors. Goebbels had a film specially made, entitled \u2018I accuse [Ich klage an]\u2019, suggesting to audiences that it was cruel to let people with serious disabilities go on living. In T\u00fcbingen, medical students sat in the back row at the cinema and held their caps in front of the projector, so that it became impossible to show the film. As \u2018officers who had fought on various fronts\u2019, they wanted to force an open discussion on this topic.
\nBonhoeffer had arranged a conversation in Berlin between his father, Friedrich von Bodelschwingh and his colleague Paul Braune, director of the Lobethal Institute. For the two visitors, the important thing was to save their mentally ill patients in Lobethal and Bethel. Braune was sent to a concentration camp shortly thereafter because of a memorandum in which he protested against the euthanasia measures. But the protests were not in vain, notably that of Count Galen, the Catholic Bishop of M\u00fcnster; Hitler was obliged to order the measures stopped within the Reich. Bonhoeffer\u2019s contacts with the Benedictine Monastery of Metten appear also to have had to do with the euthanasia problem. The abbot of Metten was an especially knowledgeable person with whom to discuss it. Bonhoeffer wrote to Bethge: \u2018I find Catholic ethics in many ways very instructive and more practical than ours. Up to now we have always dismissed it as casuistry. Today we are grateful for much\u2014precisely on the topic of my present theme\u2019 (DBWE 16, 126).
\nBonhoeffer found euthanasia in any form reprehensible, with the exception of cases in which a patient of completely sound mind clearly expressed the wish to die. But, in order to avoid any chance of being misinterpreted, he treated this problem under the heading of suicide.<\/p>\n
First journey to Switzerland<\/p>\n
After his third trip through East Prussia, Bonhoeffer had written reports to serve as a basis for approval of his work for Military Intelligence. Not only did these reports need to be formulated with great care and checked by Dohnanyi, word for word; Bonhoeffer also had to learn how to conduct himself within Military Intelligence. In its offices there were fanatical Party members. Some of these people did not trust Oster, and trusted Dohnanyi even less, and such feelings could only be strengthened by having a politically discredited Confessing Church pastor working for them.
\nHowever, the Resistance\u2019s main opponents were not those in Military Intelligence, but rather people in the Reich SS Headquarters, whose second in command, Reinhard Heydrich, had already demanded in 1936 that the political Intelligence Service be exclusively under SS control. Admiral Canaris, according to Heydrich, should confine himself to purely military reconnaissance work outside the country. After vehement arguments and long negotiations, Canaris and Heydrich had arrived at an agreement which was referred to as the \u2018Ten Commandments\u2019. Heydrich interpreted it very strictly, while Canaris had no intention of refraining from gathering \u2018military political information\u2019. As a result, fresh quarrels constantly erupted, until Heydrich forced Canaris, in a meeting at the castle in Prague, to sign an agreement that defined the \u2018Ten Commandments\u2019 much more narrowly. A few days later, Heydrich was assassinated\u2014he had been made Deputy High Protector of Czechoslovakia, residing in Prague Castle, and two members of the Czech Resistance threw a bomb into his open car.
\nWhen Bonhoeffer, who really knew nothing about military matters, was carrying out assignments for Military Intelligence, there was always the danger that Canaris would be suspected of disregarding once again the boundaries between the jurisdiction of the Reich SS Headquarters and his own. This alone gave Bonhoeffer\u2019s superiors good reason to \u2018comb\u2019 his reports with the greatest care.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s first official assignment had to do with reconnaissance in Switzerland. On 24 February 1941 he travelled from Munich to Basel. It was the time of Hitler\u2019s first setbacks after his victory over France, when the conspirators\u2019 hopes were reviving. The German forces had not dared try to invade England. Mussolini, who had entered the war on Hitler\u2019s side toward the end of the invasion of France, suffered a fiasco in his attack on Greece, and German troops had to be sent to the Balkans to relieve him. This obliged Hitler to put off his planned invasion of the Soviet Union. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been re-elected President of the United States, and was showing clear sympathy for Churchill\u2019s resolute stance.
\nAll this offered the conspirators a new opportunity to win over military command posts for an overthrow of the government. First, however, the Allies had to be informed that such an attempt was again being planned, and consulted as to what conditions they would set for a peace, both requirements of paramount importance in winning the support of military leaders. So Josef M\u00fcller was again negotiating with the Vatican, while Bonhoeffer was entrusted with making the necessary contacts through Protestant circles in the Anglo-Saxon countries.
\nOster\u2019s confidential agent in Switzerland, Hans-Bernd Gisevius, the vice-consul in Z\u00fcrich, was expressing grave reservations about having a pastor involved, an amateur on this difficult terrain and therefore a risk. He managed to have Bonhoeffer\u2019s trip delayed considerably. Gisevius expected to have a monopoly on all contacts made by the Resistance via Switzerland, and had made several disparaging comments about Dohnanyi, who was getting in his way in this regard. Christine von Dohnanyi was right when she reproached Gisevius after the war.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s trip to Switzerland was entirely justified, since no one else among the conspirators had such good and reliable friends among British or US church people. We have already mentioned how Adam von Trott\u2014who, like Bonhoeffer, had returned of his own free will from the United States, in 1940\u2014had encountered a lack of trust among his friends in Britain which he could not overcome, in all his attempts at contacts there. Even Visser \u2018t Hooft, who supported Trott and carried a memorandum from him to London, could not help. On the contrary, the British Foreign Office proposed that such \u2018strange birds\u2019 as Visser \u2018t Hooft should no longer be granted entry visas. And when Sir Stafford Cripps asked that care be taken not to endanger Trott, the high official in the British Foreign Office who read the memorandum decided that he would probably be of more use to Great Britain as a \u2018martyr\u2019 than if he remained alive. Trott\u2019s English biographer is right to speak of a \u2018German tragedy\u2019 here.
\nThere had been no difficulty in obtaining a passport and foreign currency for Bonhoeffer\u2019s first trip to Switzerland, but the Swiss entry visa took a long time, and even when he had it, the Swiss border police asked him for a guarantor in Switzerland. Bonhoeffer named Karl Barth, who later said that the matter had seemed very odd to him. A man whom the Gestapo considered an \u2018enemy of the state\u2019 was crossing the Swiss border with valid papers, in the middle of a war? He sent word to Bonhoeffer to come and see him. On the way back, Bonhoeffer stopped in Basel and had a completely open and unreserved conversation with Barth, allaying the latter\u2019s fears that he had become a \u2018turncoat\u2019 (DB-ER 727).
\nBut first he had carried out his assignments in Geneva and Z\u00fcrich. By far the most important conversation he had was with Visser \u2018t Hooft. As a result of the fortunate bond they had spontaneously formed in 1939 on Paddington Station, they could speak with one another as friends. Visser \u2018t Hooft, deeply touched by this surprise visit from Bonhoeffer, wrote immediately to Bishop Bell:<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer was a week with us and spent most of his time extracting ecumenical information from persons and documents. It is touching to see how hungry people like him are for news about their brothers in other countries, and it is good to know that he can take back so much which will encourage his friends at home.
\nOn the other hand, we learned a lot from him. The picture which he gave is pretty black in respect to the exterior circumstances for the community [the Confessing Church] which he represents. The pressure is greater than ever. (DB-ER 729)<\/p>\n
However, he could also report that Christians in Germany were \u2018as eager as ever for fellowship\u2019 and \u2018really have the same reaction to all that has happened and is happening as you or I have\u2019. Of course Bonhoeffer made use of the opportunity to correspond freely with England, and wrote not only to his sister but also to Bell.
\nFor the ecumenical community it was crucial that Visser \u2018t Hooft had been able to get a personal picture of the situation. After talking with Bonhoeffer he knew what had happened in Germany up to that point, that there had been plans to assassinate Hitler and why they had failed. Siegmund-Schultze and other people Bonhoeffer knew, whom he saw again during this trip, had been finding it hard to go on believing in the opposition when there was no news of any attempt at a putsch.
\nWhen Bonhoeffer returned to Germany on 24 March\u2014after visiting his friend Erwin Sutz, who had been making it possible for the Bonhoeffers to stay in contact with the Leibholz family since the beginning of the war\u2014he was able to report to those who had given him his orders that the connections had been made just as they had wished. Bonhoeffer\u2019s friends in Geneva had fulfilled all the conspirators\u2019 requests, with reports going off immediately to England and the United States.
\nM\u00fcller\u2019s negotiations at the Vatican and Bonhoeffer\u2019s first trip to Switzerland mark the beginning of what the American historian Klemens von Klemperer termed the \u2018war behind the war\u2019, in which not only the conspirators in Germany, but also a number of influential Christians in Western countries tried to get people to realize that, in contrast to the First World War, the Second World War was not just a conflict between opposing nations, but involved a battle of life and death between two irreconcilable world views. It is part of the tragedy of the German Resistance movement that British public opinion, Winston Churchill first and foremost, did not want to believe that the conspirators in Germany were fighting for the same principles as the peoples of Great Britain and the USA. Churchill wanted to destroy the power of the German state, and it was easier to do so if he declared that all Germans supported the Nazi government. Only in the churches, in England and the United States, were there people who saw at the time that this was not truly the case.<\/p>\n
Banned as a writer<\/p>\n
When Bonhoeffer stopped over in Munich on the way to Berlin, two letters were waiting for him from the Reich Writers\u2019 Guild. The first informed him that he had to pay a fine because he had published writings without being a member of the Guild. The second said that his application of November 1940 for membership in the Guild had been turned down, because he was already banned from public speaking due to his \u2018activities subverting the people\u2019. He was now prohibited from all activity as a writer, effective immediately.
\nIn his application for membership Bonhoeffer had expressly referred to the clause that until then specialists writing in their fields had been excused from becoming members. The ban, as he soon discovered, was also extended to other theologians, and it did not make much of an impression on him. He nevertheless made a side trip to Halle, on the way to Berlin, to consult about this new situation with Ernst Wolf, who had published several of his essays. In any case he would clearly be unable to publish his Ethics as long as Hitler was in power; nevertheless he did not hesitate to continue work on the manuscript.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer and the Jews<\/p>\n
It is sometimes said that, after his essay on the \u2018Jewish question\u2019 in 1933, Bonhoeffer did little to help the Jews. But from the files in Geneva, and most recently from the correspondence of Gertrud Staewen, we know that he must have done a great deal more than was previously known. However, since being initiated into the conspiracy he had to be extremely careful to cover his tracks when taking part in such actions.
\nDuring Bonhoeffer\u2019s first trip to Switzerland, daily discussion took place in Geneva concerning how to help persecuted Jews, and an entire day was devoted solely to this issue. To such discussions Visser \u2018t Hooft invited dependable staff members and friends. These included Adolf Freudenberg, the former counsellor to the German Legation in London who, after being displaced by the Nazi racist policies, had come to Geneva to organize refugee work and aid to Jews for the Provisional World Council of Churches; Professor Jacques Courvoisier, who chaired the Committee for Relief of Prisoners of War; and Charles Guillon. Through Guillon, Bonhoeffer learned about the work of the French Resistance and what it was doing for Jews. Perhaps he also heard of the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, a centre of the French Protestant Church which became famous after the war; under its pastors, Andr\u00e9 Trocm\u00e9 and \u00c9douard Th\u00e9is, its entire population was organized throughout the war to rescue and shelter Jews fleeing across the border to Switzerland.
\nWhen Bonhoeffer got back to Berlin he reported to a small circle of dependable friends meeting in Bethge\u2019s apartment, including Gertrud Staewen, about his experiences. She wrote to her friend Charlotte von Kirschbaum, Karl Barth\u2019s assistant, that \u2018Dietrich sent an invitation, and for five hours we hung on his every word \u2026 It\u2019s been a long time since I felt so happy.\u2019 Shortly before his second trip to Switzerland, Bonhoeffer must have met with Staewen in Munich or Innsbruck and asked her if she were willing to be the one who aided Jews in Berlin, and to be the contact person for Freudenberg in Geneva. Provost Heinrich Gr\u00fcber, who had been directing the Confessing Church\u2019s aid office for Jewish Christians, had been sent to a concentration camp for protesting against the persecutions, the same fate shared later by his colleague, Werner Sylten. Sylten was murdered in the concentration camp by the SS.
\nThough shaken by the proposal that she should be the one to continue the work of Gr\u00fcber and Sylten, Gertrud Staewen gave Bonhoeffer her consent, writing to her friends in Switzerland that they must surely have heard from Dietrich about her new special assignment. But she still felt hesitant. Then theologian Helmut Gollwitzer, who was doing military service as a medical orderly, came on leave and was able to advise her. She had assumed she must decide between her job on the staff of the church in Dahlem and the task of aiding persecuted Jews. Gollwitzer assured her that it was not necessary to choose, because in both cases she would be continuing her work of pastoral care.
\nIn the years that followed, at the risk of her life, Gertrud Staewen looked after the needs of Jews and Jewish Christians. She supported those who were facing deportation. Through the contacts in Switzerland that Bonhoeffer had provided, she saw that people being deported received food packages, and, together with other courageous Berliners, she helped a number of Jews to go underground. She had women helping her, some of whom had to serve long prison sentences, but she herself never attracted the notice of the Gestapo, though Jews were going in and out of her house. Bonhoeffer and Staewen remained in contact, while observing extreme precautions. He could not allow any risks to his work in the Resistance, because he was now so far initiated into the conspiracy that his arrest would have put it in great danger.<\/p>\n
The eastern front and the second journey to Switzerland<\/p>\n
After his first trip to Switzerland, Bonhoeffer stayed at his parents\u2019 home and worked on his Ethics, except for spending Easter at Friedrichsbrunn and a summer holiday at Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin. It was believed that the planned coup d\u2019\u00e9tat was imminent and he wanted to be in Berlin for that. From March 1941, a flow of weapons and war materials was reaching the British military command from the USA under Lend-Lease. British troops landed in Greece and tied up parts of the German army in the Balkans for years to come.
\nHitler was already committed to attacking the Soviet Union. He had revealed his plans to his commanders on 30 March 1941 and given them the notorious \u2018commissar order\u2019. When Russian political officers or \u2018commissars\u2019 fell into German hands, they were to be liquidated without any legal proceedings, and the invasion in general was to be carried out with the most extreme cruelty. Field Marshal Keitel, whom people called \u2018Lakeitel\u2019 (lackey Keitel) because, out of principle, he would never gainsay Hitler, explained that this command was justified because Germany was fighting on behalf of its world view against that of communism. As commander of the armed forces, Brauchitsch was besieged with pleas from within them to contradict Hitler or to resign, but once again he could not bring himself to take a clear position.
\nOnly a few commanders condemned Hitler\u2019s criminal intentions, but the number of those who were becoming more amenable to the arguments of the conspirators was increasing. On 16 June a discussion was held with General Ludwig Beck as to how best to make use of this new situation. But on 22 June, before a plan could be developed, German troops pushed eastwards across the Russian border and made enormous progress in a few days. Once again luck seemed to be on Hitler\u2019s side. This time, however, the conspirators did not become discouraged. Despite the early successes of the invasion in Russia, they were confident it would soon become clear to the more prudent army leaders where Hitler was taking them.
\nNevertheless, the mutual assistance pact agreed by Churchill and Stalin on 12 June 1941, and the \u2018Atlantic Charter\u2019 which Roosevelt and Churchill signed on 14 August, made the aspect of the plot in which Bonhoeffer was involved that much more complicated: namely, gaining an agreement between the conspirators and Germany\u2019s enemies.
\nOn 29 August, Bonhoeffer left on his second trip to Switzerland. Visser \u2018t Hooft\u2019s account:<\/p>\n
The German army was making incredible progress in Russia, and there seemed no reason why it might not march right on through Asia. So when [Bonhoeffer] entered my office and said \u2018Well, now it\u2019s all over, isn\u2019t it?\u2019 I couldn\u2019t believe my ears. Was he greeting me with the news of Germany\u2019s victory? He saw that I was taken aback and said: \u2018No, I mean, this is the beginning of the end; Hitler will never get out of there.\u2019 (DB 824)<\/p>\n
Neither Bonhoeffer nor those who gave him his orders had any illusions about the possibilities that were still open to them at this point. Before the invasion of France, despite the atrocities in Poland, they would still have been able to negotiate an honourable peace agreement, as soon as Hitler had been overthrown and brought before a court. But after the further injustices he had committed and was continuing to commit in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark and Norway, much harsher peace conditions would certainly be demanded. And from June 1941 onwards, those who could set conditions for a peace included Joseph Stalin. Basically, the possibility of a peace agreement now seemed to have been excluded. Nevertheless, could Germany still have its place in the Allies\u2019 ideas of a Europe at peace?
\nIn Geneva, Bonhoeffer was handed Bishop Bell\u2019s book Christianity and World Order. In it, he read these words, which corresponded exactly to his own thoughts: \u2018I have no doubt in my own mind that the results of a victory by Hitler would be so disastrous, morally and spiritually, that Christians ought to do their utmost to defeat him.\u2019 However, Bell continued, one could not call the war \u2018Christian\u2019 or a \u2018holy war\u2019, and certainly not a \u2018crusade\u2019. Instead, one should take care \u2018not to let slip any genuine chance of a negotiated peace which observes the principles of Order and justice \u2026\u2019<\/p>\n
Links should be strengthened between the Churches in warring countries on both sides in any way that is possible through the help of the Churches in neutral countries \u2026 It cannot be wrong for Christians in one belligerent country to seek such opportunities as may be open, to discover through neutral channels, in every way possible, from fellow-Christians in another belligerent country, what terms of peace would be likely to create a lasting peace and not lead to a further poisoning of international relationships \u2026<\/p>\n
Although Bell\u2019s book had already been published in 1940, it gave Bonhoeffer fresh hope, because he was doing precisely that which Bell was calling for. Once again though, his optimism was to be dampened by Siegmund-Schulze, when Bonhoeffer visited him in Z\u00fcrich. The British embassy in Bern had just refused to accept a document from Goerdeler containing peace proposals, having received express orders from London not to do so.
\nChurchill\u2019s attitude was radically different from that of Bell, who kept insisting that Germany could not be equated with Nazism. For Churchill there was only \u2018Hitler Germany\u2019, the enemy which must be defeated. Lord Vansittart hammered home his message in the British press, and this opinion came increasingly to prevail, even though the British churches, at a great assembly on 10 May 1941 presided over by Cardinal Hinsley, the Archbishop of Westminster, had called for a just and honourable peace.
\nIt was another English book which incited Bonhoeffer, as a German and a member of the Resistance movement, to intervene in the debate in Britain. William Paton, the English co-secretary of the \u2018Provisional World Council of Churches\u2019, published The Church and the New Order in July 1941. Since Paton offered thoughts on a future world order, which was then the subject of a lively discussion, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, Bonhoeffer decided to write a response while he was in Geneva and have it sent to London.
\nThis statement showed that Bonhoeffer\u2019s ideas of a new German state, like those of most of his fellow conspirators, had such a \u2018conservative and patriarchal\u2019 effect that it would not have been possible to submit his text to representatives of the Western powers. Visser \u2018t Hooft worked with him on a thorough revision, which Bonhoeffer accepted at once, even though, unlike his Dutch friend, he believed that a democratic system on the Western model would not yet be possible for Germany so soon after the failure of its republic and the years of dictatorship under Hitler. In principle he was nevertheless in favour of a democratic form of government, as can be discovered in a letter of 20 September 1941 that he wrote from Z\u00fcrich, in English, to his friend Paul Lehmann in the United States:<\/p>\n
[You will not misunderstand me,] USA domination is indeed one of the best solutions of the present crisis. But what is to become of Europe? What, for instance, of Germany? Nothing would be worse than to impose on her any anglosaxon form of government\u2014as much as I should like it. It simply would not work. (DBWE 16, 281)<\/p>\n
The crucial issue for Bonhoeffer, in this context, was how a majority of Germans who were still cheering Hitler on could be brought back to respect for the law. The words \u2018as much as I should like it\u2019 show that he was not against democracy, but that he considered a long educational process to be indispensable. The thought that the United States could become the sole world power, which the letter also mentions in passing, did not greatly inspire him. In the English version of his position paper which he and Visser \u2018t Hooft edited, he says:<\/p>\n
It is no coincidence that a book like this does not come out of Germany today. The absolute insecurity of human existence there leads nearly everywhere, even among Christians, to the total abandonment of any thought of the future, which in turn results in a strongly apocalyptic stance. Under the impression that judgement day is at hand, attention to the historical future is easily lost. In turn, the German reader of Paton\u2019s book might miss the total absence of an eschatological perspective. (DBWE 16, 529)<\/p>\n
In the passage that follows, however, Bonhoeffer does not shrink from making strong political statements:<\/p>\n
It may be that consideration of the internal political situation in Germany is not possible in the official formulation of the peace aims; nevertheless, we must be clear that the demand for the unilateral disarmament of Germany, recently emphasized particularly strongly by English radio propaganda, is having an adverse effect on the internal political situation. Since, in terms of sheer power, only the military is capable of removing the present regime (any worker revolt would lead to a bloody suppression by the SS), one must take this into consideration when broadcasting these peace aims to Germany. The little that to date has reached Germany concerning the great church discussion of the new order has made a very favourable and powerful impression in important political oppostion circles. Why is English radio propaganda silent about this in its broadcasts to Germany? (DBWE 16, 529\u201330)<\/p>\n
Certainly the theological aspects of the statement were important to Bonhoeffer, and at the end of his discussion he returned to expressing them. But even more important for him was to give concrete indications that there was a Resistance movement, and also of the difficulties that it had to overcome in order to succeed. Visser \u2018t Hooft, who sent the statement on to recipients in Great Britain and the United States, especially emphasized this aspect in his covering letters, for example in this one to Hugh Martin of the Ministry of Education in London: \u2018You must accept my word for it that all that we say about the next steps and the urgency of the situation is not based upon wishful thinking on our part, but on actual developments in discussion with responsible people in the country concerned.\u2019 An answer to this statement was absolutely necessary for these responsible people in Germany, he said. Bonhoeffer thought a reply might be received even before he left Geneva on 26 September. But William Paton and his friends didn\u2019t understand how important this communication was to Bonhoeffer and Visser \u2018t Hooft. It took Paton until January 1942 to write back that the very influential people with whom he and others had spoken were not convinced that there was an opposition in Germany that could be taken seriously.
\nDuring this time in Switzerland, Bonhoeffer again made use of the opportunity to visit old and newer friends. After a visit to Erwin Sutz, who was to be married soon, Bonhoeffer wrote to him:<\/p>\n
Over the years I have written many a letter for the wedding of one of the brothers and preached many a wedding sermon. The chief characteristic of such occasions essentially rested in the fact that, in the face of these \u2018last\u2019 times, (I do not mean this to sound quite so apocalyptic), someone dares to take a step of such affirmation of the earth and its future. It was then always very clear to me that a person could take this step as a Christian truly only from within a very strong faith and on the basis of grace. For here in the midst of the final destruction of all things, one desires to build \u2026 in the midst of widespread misery, one desires some happiness. And the overwhelming thing is that God says yes to this strange longing \u2026 And now I wonder whether for you here, it is something quite different, something quieter, stiller, as it once was for us as well? Yet I can scarcely believe that. How difficult it surely is to understand one another! (DBWE 16, 220\u201321)<\/p>\n
This \u2018not understanding\u2019 did not refer to matters in the immediate foreground. Bonhoeffer\u2019s friends, united in their uncompromising disapproval of Hitler, were equally united in their conviction that not all Germans, by far, were Nazis. But then, for a German, everything had to look quite different from the way Swiss people saw it. In Z\u00fcrich Bonhoeffer spent an evening at Pestalozzi\u2019s, in a group of people with whom he could speak completely openly. Visser \u2018t Hooft, who had come especially from Geneva, asked him the question, \u2018What do you pray for in the present situation?\u2019 He reports that Bonhoeffer answered, \u2018Since you ask me, I must say that I pray for the defeat of my country, for I believe that this is the only way in which it can pay for the suffering which it has caused in the world.\u2019
\nIn his biography of Bonhoeffer, Eberhard Bethge comments:<\/p>\n
This was a statement people did not like to hear repeated in postwar Germany, but its essential content can hardly be denied \u2026 More than anything, it proved how absurd and extraordinary the situation was under Hitler, when the true patriot had to speak unpatriotically to show his patriotism. It is a reaction that defies normal feelings in normal times; it may be a good thing that it has been passed on without defence or explanation, so that one confronts it directly and relives the incredible sentiments in those days. It is abundantly true that the best people of that era lived with the constant thought that they had to wish for Germany\u2019s defeat to end the injustice. (DB-ER 744)<\/p>\n
Bethge wrote this towards the end of the 1960s, and it shows how long it took, in postwar Germany, for Germans as a people to be ready to admit the whole truth about Hitler\u2019s Germany.<\/p>\n
The first deportations of Jews and \u2018Operation 7\u2019<\/p>\n
The news with which Bonhoeffer was greeted in Berlin on returning from his second trip to Switzerland could only dampen his high spirits over the results of his visit to Geneva. On 2 September 1941 the decree had been issued which obliged all Jews to wear a yellow star. It was in effect from 19 September onward. That something like this was coming, Bonhoeffer had heard from Dohnanyi some time previously; still, it was a shock to him to see for the first time, on the train to Berlin, people wearing such stars. Much worse, however, was to find out that deportations of Jews were imminent. These began with \u2018evacuation\u2019 notices sent to large numbers of Jewish families. The people who received them were taken from their homes on 16 and 17 October and transported to the occupied areas in the east.
\nBonhoeffer and Perels began immediately collecting all the information they could find about these proceedings. A clue to their secret work is given by the fact that Military Intelligence sent one of them on a brief trip to the Rhineland, where deportations had also already begun; friends there seem to have had precise information about how the Gestapo and the SS were carrying out these operations. To ask about it on the telephone or in a letter would have been the height of foolishness. How closely these good friends, Bonhoeffer and Perels, were already working together can be seen from the fact that when Bonhoeffer fell ill, Perels wrote up the reports they had jointly prepared.
\nOn 18 October 1941 the first documentation was compiled for the leaders of the military opposition, followed on 20 October by a second, more detailed report, which may possibly have been intended to be sent to Geneva as well. Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer may have hoped for a military intervention on the basis of these reports, but it is more likely that they were just trying to do their part to hasten the plans for a coup attempt. Today, Bonhoeffer\u2019s and Perels\u2019 reports, which include one on the ominous legal situation faced by people of mixed race, the so-called \u2018half-breeds\u2019, are considered the earliest documents proving that the German Resistance concerned itself with the deportation policies of the SS, the Gestapo and the Reich government ministries. Since it is still being said today that the churches did not protest against the deportations of Jews, it is only right to mention these exceptions.
\nThere was also Bonhoeffer\u2019s former mentor, Superintendent Diestel, who wrote a letter of protest to the High Council of the Evangelical Church, which resulted in his being taken away and interrogated several times by the Gestapo. This was shortly before Diestel\u2019s 70th birthday, and the letter of thanks Bonhoeffer sent to him on that occasion indicates that he seems to have known about Diestel\u2019s action, since he concluded the letter with these words: \u2018I have heard that precisely in these days you have once again been experiencing many trials. But surely the experience of the community, love and gratitude \u2026 will be more important and powerful for you than all the hardships that now surround you\u2019 (DBWE 16, 368).
\nThe conspirators, in order not to put their attempt to get rid of Hitler at risk, had to keep quiet about these most recent crimes. Most other Germans were keeping quiet for other reasons. Only the Confessing Church, at the last Confessing Synod of the Old Prussian Union on 16 and 17 October 1943 in Breslau, dared to state what it thought about these monstrous proceedings. Bonhoeffer had already been in prison for months when the Synod adopted a resolution on the commandment \u2018Thou shalt not kill\u2019, in which it condemned racism and the \u2018Final Solution\u2019 of the Jewish question by murder. A pulpit proclamation for the Day of Repentance 1943 says: \u2018Woe be unto us and our people \u2026 when it is considered justifiable to kill human beings because they are not considered worthy to live or because they belong to another race.\u2019 As we shall see, Bonhoeffer played an important role in preparing this statement.
\nAside from the Breslau Synod\u2019s declaration, for which the synod members were prepared to risk their freedom and their lives, there were only individual actions. Bishop Wurm, like Count Galen, had condemned euthanasia of human beings in his sermons; he now also took a position against the murder of the Jews. His sermons were widely circulated through clandestine channels. Harald Poelchau, a prison chaplain in Berlin, with help from people of all social classes, concealed Jews who were scheduled for deportation. Those in hiding had to to keep moving from house to house in order to look like relatives of those giving them refuge, only there for a short visit. In W\u00fcrttemberg some seventy pastors\u2019 families carried out similar actions, with the invaluable help of dependable members of their congregations, all at the risk of their own lives, since they were defying Nazi orders. One pastor and his wife, Eugen and Johanna St\u00f6ffler, played an outstanding role. Their parsonage had known so many visitors over the years that the Jews who stayed with them for weeks on end made no impression in their village.
\nIn the east of the country people had to work in other ways. In Naseband, Pomerania, Pastor Karl-Heinz Reimer, whom Bonhoeffer knew, had Jews hidden in his house. His patron, Ewald von Kleist, couldn\u2019t hide them on his estate, for too many people there would have asked who they were, but he arranged the provision of necessary food supplies. In K\u00f6nigsberg, East Prussia, Pastor Horst Symanowski and his wife saved the lives of 40 Jews.
\nIn Essen, west Germany, Pastor Johannes B\u00f6ttcher and his wife took seven Jews into their home, who managed to survive the war in their cellar; Dr Gustav Heinemann (who later became president of the Federal Republic of Germany), his wife and other acquaintances collected the needed food ration stamps. Another pastor in Essen, Heinrich Held (who after the war was the first president of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland) and his wife hid Jews in their house. The story of these humane actions has by now been researched and documented, but only in part. The whole story will never be known, for hardly any of those involved talked about or took credit for such actions after the war, since they all felt that so much more should have been done.
\nAt the time when he heard about the deportation of Jews from the Rhineland, Bonhoeffer also found out that a trial was being prepared there of several Confessing Church pastors who had taken part in \u2018illegal\u2019 examinations of theological students and candidates for ordination. After his arrest, a note regarding his report on this was found among the Military Intelligence papers and used against him in interrogations. Bonhoeffer\u2019s report had in fact led to an intervention by the Armed Forces High Command to have these trials in the Rhineland put off \u2018until after final victory\u2019 in the war, in order not to alarm the population unduly. Bonhoeffer\u2019s writing of this report, however, represented another serious offence by Military Intelligence against Heydrich\u2019s \u2018Ten Commandments\u2019, according to which Canaris\u2019s office was not allowed to work inside the German Reich.
\nBut Military Intelligence, too, became involved in saving a group of Jewish persons, on the initiative of Hans von Dohnanyi and with the express consent of Admiral Canaris. Seven persons were expected to be included at first, hence the name \u2018Operation 7\u2019, but eventually fourteen were rescued. \u2018Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world\u2019, says an old Jewish proverb. Persons who performed such acts at that time are now honoured, at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, as \u2018the righteous among the nations\u2019. For more than a year, Hans von Dohnanyi devoted energy, cunning and an enormous amount of work to having these 14 persons taken off the deportation lists and then having them sent, under false pretences, to Switzerland. Not only the Reich SS Headquarters, but a number of other authorities tried repeatedly to undo the plan or to delay it. Even the Swiss authorities proved less than cooperative and could only be persuaded through tough negotiations to take in these 14 refugees.
\nIn Canaris\u2019s office Count Moltke gave his help. Bonhoeffer and Wilhelm Rott arranged for influential Christians in Switzerland, such as Karl Barth and the president of the Swiss Church Federation, Alphons Koechlin, to come forward and insist that entry visas be granted. At that time, such visas were only obtainable if travellers could prove they were not staying in Switzerland but going on further. Among those Bonhoeffer was able to include in the group and thus save from deportation was Charlotte Friedenthal, a staff member of the Confessing Church.
\nThere were people on the staff of Military Intelligence who thought that \u2018Operation 7\u2019 could be a pretext finally to get rid of Dohnanyi; many still hated him as an outsider who had been brought in over their heads instead of rising through the ranks. They tried to leak Military Intelligence papers on \u2018Operation 7\u2019 to the SS Headquarters. With people finally getting wind of a possibility for levering Canaris\u2019s entire office out of the High Command, the net began to tighten around Military Intelligence.<\/p>\n
An involuntary rest break<\/p>\n
At the beginning of November 1941 Bonhoeffer went down with severe pneumonia. He could not attend the Confessing Synod of the Old Prussian Union, which had to meet outside Prussia, in Hamburg, because by then many of its members were banned from various provinces in Prussia. In those days, any Confessing Church members who attracted the disapproving attention of the Gestapo were banned from residing in or visiting the province in which they were accused of carrying out illegal activities. We have already seen that Bonhoeffer could not stay anywhere in Berlin except in his parents\u2019 home. Hundreds of pastors were affected by such bans.
\nIn absentia, Bonhoeffer was elected by the synod in Hamburg to a committee which was to prepare a draft resolution on \u2018The Meaning of the Signs of the Times [Zeichen der Zeit]\u2019. The \u2018signs of the times\u2019 were to show, according to a saying of Jesus (Matthew 16:1\u20134), when the \u2018end time\u2019 was to come, that is, in the New Testament they had an eschatological meaning. But in Germany this concept had long ago acquired a proverbial meaning, referring to the negative characteristics of any age. The text to be prepared was to speak especially about the way the Nazi Party was de-Christianizing Germany; from the first drafts, it shows a close relationship with texts by Bonhoeffer, for example the ones he prepared for military officers about the deportations. Since he was not there to participate, another member of the committee, presumably Perels, must have had his writings available to work with in Hamburg.
\nBonhoeffer was so seriously ill, in those days before antibiotics, that it took him a long time to recover. He was able to take much-needed rest in the home of his Pomeranian friends, the Kleist family in Kieckow, where he had enough to eat and could regain his strength. As soon as he was able to work again, while there, he wrote another chapter of his Ethics.<\/p>\n
New hopes and the Kreisau circle<\/p>\n
For the opposition it was a time of mighty efforts. The number of those who wanted to bring the rule of Hitler to an end was gradually increasing. Dohnanyi was hurrying from one discussion to the next. The strengthening of the opposition filled him with new hope. He and Bonhoeffer must have had a great many conversations during this period about the most crucial issues for the Resistance.
\nIt was at this time, Bethge reports (DB-ER 625), that Dohnanyi asked his brother-in-law whether it was permissible for Christians to be involved in a murder, given that God\u2019s commandments expressly forbid it: \u2018For all who take the sword will perish by the sword\u2019 (Matthew 26:52). Bonhoeffer is said to have replied as follows: Murder is still murder, even when, as in the case of Hitler, it is absolutely necessary. One must be prepared to take the guilt for this sin upon oneself. Bonhoeffer added that if he could get near enough to Hitler, he would throw the bomb himself.
\nIn his earlier lengthy conversation with Hans Oster, in 1940, Bonhoeffer had declared that \u2018treason\u2019 could be morally necessary, if it meant staying the hand of a criminal and thus preventing further atrocities like those Hitler had committed in Poland. But even Bonhoeffer could speak in this way only after a considerable inner struggle. This is plain from his wondering, in 1941, whether he could still be a pastor after the assassination. Even though he could not throw the bomb himself, if it succeeded he would belong to those who had Hitler\u2019s blood on their hands. He wondered whether someone who had helped plot to kill another human being should still be allowed to administer Holy Communion. Today we can hardly imagine the scruples that the conspirators had to overcome. That Bonhoeffer had fought his way to clear answers was the fruit of his work on the Ethics, and it made an important contribution to the inner fortitude of the co-conspirators with whom he was in contact.
\nThe Resistance now consisted of a number of different groups, with principles and intentions that were no longer easy to coordinate. The most distinctive of these groups, and one that had only recently come together, was referred to by Judge Roland Freisler, during the trials that followed the coup attempt of 20 July 1944, as the \u2018Kreisau Circle\u2019. It was assembled during those months in 1941 by Count Helmuth James von Moltke (1907\u20131945), who held three of its meetings at his manor in Kreisau, Silesia. Many more meetings took place in Berlin, where the majority of its members were working.
\nWhile Dohnanyi\u2019s group was working towards the assassination of Hitler, that of Moltke, with Adam von Trott zu Solz (1909\u20131944), Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg (1904\u20131944), Father Alfred Delp (1907\u20131945), Eugen Gerstenmaier (1906\u20131986), Hermann Maa\u00df (1897\u20131944), Carlo Mierendorf (1897\u20131943) and others, was asking what Germany might be like after Hitler was gone. In trying to imagine the future, this group was developing ideas on the basis of which it was criticizing especially the thinking of men like Carl Goerdeler, whose political ideas went back to the period before Hitler, if not to the time before the First World War. Goerdeler (1884\u20131945) had politicians and diplomats from the Weimar Republic such as Ulrich von Hassell (1881\u20131944) and Johannes Popitz (1884\u20131945) on his side, as well as the retired generals led by General Ludwig Beck.
\nThus there was an opposition between \u2018older\u2019 and \u2018younger\u2019 members of the Resistance. The Kreisau group wanted to avoid anything that might give its plans for the future a \u2018reactionary\u2019 character. There were also differences in thinking about the plans for the coup. Even the members of the \u2018Kreisau circle\u2019 were not of one mind at first. Moltke was decidedly against the assassination, and in this regard Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were wholly on the side of the \u2018older\u2019 men who were in favour of it.
\nAmong those who were untiring in their efforts, at this stage in the Resistance, to arrange contacts and reconcile differences were Bonhoeffer\u2019s brother Klaus and his sister Ursula\u2019s husband, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher. It took time until all groups reached agreement, around the beginning of 1942, to recognize General Beck, who in 1938 had honourably resigned as Chief of the General Staff, as leader of the political opposition. Like Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer refrained from getting involved in these discussions. As we shall see, he was indeed interested in planning for the time after Hitler, but he did not seek contact with the \u2018Kreisau Circle\u2019. His reservations about Gerstenmaier as a member of Heckel\u2019s staff may have played a role in this, as well as Dohnanyi\u2019s wish not to create any more contacts than were absolutely necessary. So Bonhoeffer\u2019s place was at the side of those who, during these months, were hoping to reach their goal by assassinating Hitler.<\/p>\n
Assassination plans and dangers\u2014guilt and responsibility<\/p>\n
In October 1941, Colonel Henning von Tresckow, the General Staff officer of the Central Army group in Russia, sent his adjutant, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, from Smolensk to Berlin to ask Colonel Oster whether they could jointly undertake steps towards ending the Nazi regime. Tresckow felt that the atrocities committed by SS units following the German line of advance, and Hitler\u2019s constant interference in the plans for operations, with its devastating consequences for the troops, had created a situation in which the need to overthrow him was finally beginning to make sense to many high-ranking officers. Such an enquiry was just what the conspirators had been longing to hear.
\nShortly thereafter the attack on Russia was brought to a standstill, outside Moscow, by the arrival of winter weather. A number of General Staff officers swiftly recognized that the invasion was a lost cause, and even Brauchitsch seems to have aroused the impression that he had gone over to the side of Hitler\u2019s critics. The conspirators may therefore have hoped that, in the event of a successful coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, he\u2014as the only one who could do so\u2014would be ready to give orders to the army.
\nSo the conspiracy seemed on the threshold of success when, on 19 December 1941, the news broke that Hitler had dismissed Brauchitsch and made himself the highest commanding officer of the army. With this, the conspirators\u2019 entire plan was once again left in shambles, and needed to be rebuilt from the ground if they hoped to get anywhere. Only the army could eliminate Hitler and at the same time keep Germany from descending into chaos. But now that Hitler was commander in chief of the army, the entire High Command was ruled out as a source of order and control during the period after the assassination. The conspiracy was therefore confronted with the difficult question of how, at that point, they would gain the power to command. Although Brauchitsch had never stood high in their estimation, his fall from power came as a severe shock to them. Still, they did not give in to discouragement, but kept on working feverishly.
\nOn 7 December 1941 the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the Second World War. As an ally of Japan, Germany therefore declared war on the USA on 11 December. For the conspiracy, this meant that they had to carry out their strike against Hitler before the expected consequences of this new state of affairs got under way. The Germans were still the masters of continental Europe. But, as in the First World War, the Americans would soon be sending entire armies across the Atlantic, throwing their military superiority onto the other side of the scales.
\nBonhoeffer was still in Kieckow working on his Ethics when the news came that Brauchitsch had been fired and the United States had entered the war. What he wrote at that point constitutes one of the deepest reflections we have from him. If, after Germany was defeated\u2014and it was now only a matter of time\u2014there was to be a new beginning, then the first words to be spoken must be about the guilt which had led to murder and to war. Bonhoeffer asked: What is this guilt about, and who are those who can take it upon themselves, so that justice may be restored and renewal may begin? For Bonhoeffer, the Church had to take the guilt upon itself, without any ifs or buts, because it was guilty of sin against the body of Christ.<\/p>\n
Confession of guilt happens without a sidelong glance at the others who are also guilty. This confession is strictly exclusive in that it takes all guilt upon itself. When one still calculates and weighs things, an unfruitful self-righteous morality takes the place of confessing guilt face to face with the figure of Christ. (DBWE 6, 136)<\/p>\n
The Church is the place where each person who counts himself or herself a member can give up looking to the left or the right at neighbours in the pews and confess that \u2018We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done\u2019. As ever, Bonhoeffer speaks very concretely here:<\/p>\n
The church confesses that it has witnessed the arbitrary use of brutal force, the suffering in body and soul of countless innocent people, that it has witnessed oppression, hatred and murder without raising its voice for the victims and without finding ways of rushing to help them. It has become guilty of the lives of the Weakest and most Defenceless Brothers and Sisters of Jesus Christ. (DBWE 6, 142)<\/p>\n
He deliberately capitalized the last few words\u2014even the adjectives, which are not usually capitalized in German\u2014to emphasize that they referred to Jesus\u2019 brothers and sisters in the flesh, namely the Jews. As with the commandment \u2018Thou shalt not kill\u2019, he goes on to speak in his text about each of the Ten Commandments in turn and relates them to the guilt of the church in Germany and its members, including first and foremost his own guilt, for<\/p>\n
in confessing its guilt, the church does not release people from their personal confession of guilt, but calls everyone into a community of confession. Only as judged by Christ can humanity that has fallen away exist before Christ. The church calls all whom it reaches to come under this judgement. The church and the individual, convicted in their guilt, are justified by the one who takes on and forgives all human guilt, namely Jesus Christ. (DBWE 6, 142)<\/p>\n
Of course, \u2018the West\u2019, as Bonhoeffer calls the renewed Europe for which he hopes, cannot be justified and renewed in the same way. \u2018For the nations [V\u00f6lker] there is only a scarring over [Vernarbung] of guilt in the return to order, justice and peace and in granting freedom to the church to proclaim Jesus Christ\u2019 (DBWE 6, 143).
\nWhile Bonhoeffer was occupied with such radical thinking, there in Kieckow, he took time to read a lecture given by Rudolf Bultmann, the New Testament scholar at the University of Marburg, for the newly founded Society for Protestant Theology. Not until the postwar years did this lecture have its chance to blow the world of theology wide open. Bonhoeffer had not been able to attend the conference on 1 June 1941, but in this era when hardly any works of theology could still be printed he had been enthusiastic about the idea of keeping scholarly debate alive through meetings. The instigator, Ernst Wolf from the University of Halle, and the members of the Society all belonged to the Confessing Church and were more or less influenced by Karl Barth. Bultmann\u2019s lecture was entitled \u2018New Testament and Mythology\u2019 and contained his programme for \u2018demythologizing the New Testament\u2019 which was later to be discussed by theologians around the world.
\nBultmann\u2019s thesis was that many events reported in the New Testament, such as Christ\u2019s ascension, were actually myths. They did hold truths still valid for today, but these were to be discovered by \u2018existential interpretation\u2019, after being found hidden within the myths that enveloped them.
\nThe lecture soon gave rise to a first wave of vehement criticism in Germany\u2014Hans Asmussen apparently was especially alarmed\u2014but Bonhoeffer, while he also had criticisms of Bultmann\u2019s fascinating programme, began by expressing agreement with it. Being under the ban, he could not have any public statement appear in print, but he wrote to one of his students in a military hospital in Marburg:<\/p>\n
I belong to those who have welcomed [Bultmann\u2019s] writing \u2026 To put it bluntly, Bultmann has let the cat out of the bag, not only for himself but for a great many people (the liberal cat out of the confessional bag), and in this I rejoice. He has dared to say what many repress in themselves (here I include myself) without having overcome it. He has thereby rendered a service to intellectual integrity and honesty. Many brothers oppose him with a hypocritical faith [Glaubenspharis\u00e4ismus] that I find deadly. Now an account must be given. I would like to speak with Bultmann about this and open myself to the fresh air that comes from him. But then the window has to be shut again. Otherwise the susceptible will too easily catch cold. (DBWE 16, 347)<\/p>\n
This letter, written in July 1942, proves that in spite of his new tasks Bonhoeffer remained as passionate a theologian as he had ever been. In the same way, he did not give up any opportunity for sports or music-making during this period, and his nieces and nephews remember that \u2018Uncle Dietrich\u2019 also managed to take time for them now and then.
\nWe should not romanticize the \u2018second life\u2019 that Bonhoeffer was leading as a series of adventures out of a spy novel. For him, his activities on behalf of the conspiracy were a necessary evil, a contribution he had to make because there was no one else who could do it, and which had to be made to bring about peace and to stop the Nazis\u2019 crimes. The nervous tension with which he had to live, the fear that the plans for overthrow would be discovered, were part of the price that had to be paid, and Bonhoeffer was too intelligent to be without fear. The group around Colonel Oster knew that it had enemies very close by. In mid-February 1942 Dohnanyi received a tip from friends that his mail and telephone were under surveillance.
\nNo less oppressive for Bonhoeffer than the danger to his own life and those of his friends in the Resistance was apprehension about what was taking place on the eastern front, the news of which was suppressed in official army reports but which people back home read aloud to one another from letters received through the military postal service. Erich Klapproth, one of the most gifted of his Finkenwalde ordinands, wrote to Bonhoeffer shortly before being killed in action:<\/p>\n
Our clothes have been sticking to our bodies\u2014we reckon it is minus 45\u00b0 [Celsius] outside, but we keep them on even in the overheated farmhouses\u2014since the beginning of the year. For days at a stretch we cannot even wash our hands, but go from dead bodies to a meal and from there back to the rifle. All one\u2019s energy has to be summoned up to fight against the danger of freezing, to be on the move even when one is dead tired. Sometimes when we are away from the mess hall for a long time, we invade the farmhouse after the fighting and slaughter geese, hens and sheep, get filled and overfilled with sides of bacon, honey and the nice Russian potatoes \u2026 We often dream of being relieved, but we are now reduced to forty men instead of 150, still more we dream of Germany\u2014I dream of the \u2018calm and quiet life in all godliness and integrity\u2019. But we do not, any of us, know whether we shall be allowed to go home again. (DB-ER 704)<\/p>\n
Ruth von Kleist-Retzow<\/p>\n
Even more horrifying was a letter from another Finkenwaldian, who was also to be killed in action, because it showed Bonhoeffer what a destructive effect the Russian invasion was having on the thoughts and the language of his students:<\/p>\n
Here the war has cast traditional conceptions about the treatment of others to the winds. In mid-January, a unit of our detachment had to shoot fifty prisoners in one day, because we were on the march and could not take them with us. In districts where there are partisans, women and children who are suspected of supplying partisans with provisions have to be killed by shooting them in the back of the neck. Those people have to be got rid of like that, because otherwise it means the lives of German soldiers \u2026 Over against all these experiences stands the promise, \u2018I have called you (faceless person [Massenmensch], slaughtered and shot like cattle) by your name; you are mine!\u2019 God says \u2018thou\u2019 to each person. God has promised each one eternal life and resurrection of the body. And to us soldiers the promise comes from the Sermon on the Mount, \u2018Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy\u2019 [Matthew 5:7]. The contradictions are enormous, for many, no doubt, unbearably great. (DBWE 16, 251\u201352)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer spent Holy Week and Easter 1942 at Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin with Ruth von Kleist. She had become even more passionately interested in theological questions, and was happy whenever Dietrich could visit her. At first she had questioned his being granted a draft exemption in order to work for Military Intelligence, feeling that such a man as he ought not to be sitting around while others had a much harder fate to bear. But, indomitable opponent of Hitler that she was, she revised her judgement of the matter as soon as she began to realize how things actually stood. The ideas that Bonhoeffer was developing during this period bear the stamp of a sober awareness of his responsibility at that moment in history, in which every other consideration had to be subjected to the plans for the assassination.<\/p>\n
Extraordinary necessity appeals to the freedom of those who act responsibly. In this case there is no law behind which they could take cover. Therefore there is also no law that, in the face of such necessity, could force them to make this rather than that particular decision. Instead, in such a situation, one must let go completely of any law, knowing that here one must decide as a free venture. This must also include the open acknowledgement that here the law is being broken, violated; that the commandment is broken out of dire necessity, thereby affirming the legitimacy of the law in the very act of violating it. In thus giving up the appeal to any law, indeed only so, is there finally a surrender of one\u2019s own decision and action to the divine guidance of history. (DBWE 6, p. 274)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer was saying yes to the deed on which everything now depended, and formulating the standards which now must govern the actions of the assassin himself and all his co-conspirators.<\/p>\n
With Helmuth James von Moltke in Oslo<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer was expecting to make a third trip to Switzerland when Dohnanyi called him back to Berlin and told him, on the Wednesday after Easter, that he would be going to Oslo with Helmuth James von Moltke. The Norwegian Resistance against the occupation regime that had been put in place by Prime Minister Quisling, the Nazi collaborator, had brought about a church struggle. Quisling had declared Provost Fjellbu of Trondheim Cathedral deposed for making statements against the occupation. All the bishops in Norway thereupon resigned from their duties in the state church. They were followed shortly thereafter by the pastors of the local churches, when it became clear that Quisling and the occupation powers which stood behind him were not prepared to listen to an appeal from the Church. When a Nazi youth organization was to be set up in Norway, a thousand Norwegian teachers resigned.<\/p>\n
Count Helmuth James von Moltke with his son Helmuth Caspar, Christmas 1938<\/p>\n
As organizer of the church Resistance movement, Bishop Eivind Berggrav was interrogated and placed under house arrest, then taken to prison. It was generally expected that he would be tried before the People\u2019s Court in Berlin, and since the charges against him were \u2018incitement to insurrection and contacts with the enemy\u2019 he was expected to receive a death sentence. Theodor Steltzer, a close friend of the \u2018Kreisau\u2019 group, was a lieutenant colonel in the occupation army in Norway, and had agreed to telegraph Moltke immediately if Berggrav were arrested. When the telegram arrived, it was decided in the Military Intelligence central office to send Moltke and Bonhoeffer to Norway together. Bonhoeffer was known to the Norwegian bishops and could assure them that they could speak openly with Moltke. His and Moltke\u2019s official assignment, of course, was to assess the Norwegian church struggle and the possible threat it represented for the occupying German troops, as a front for their real intention to give support to the Norwegian Resistance and to save Berggrav\u2019s life.
\nCount Moltke considered the most important aspect of his work for Military Intelligence to be ensuring that prisoners of war were dealt with according to international treaties to which Germany was a party. He also made efforts to hinder the increasing practice of shooting hostages, which was contrary to international law. It was hardly possible any longer to do very much for prisoners of war. However, he wore himself out continuing to travel to the occupied countries, where his first move was always to gain the cooperation of the officers he knew personally. Then he worked on the commanders of the occupying armies; as the grand-nephew of the great Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, who won three wars for Bismarck, his name could open all doors. Among those with whom he talked, he was able to persuade many that the orders they had received to shoot hostages constituted a grave violation of international law. To those who proved immune to this argument, he described the danger to German troops from carrying out such shootings, since this could provoke acts of revenge by Resistance groups in the occupied lands. Even though he did not always succeed, there must have been thousands of people, by the end of the war, who owed their lives to Helmuth von Moltke, without knowing that he had been their advocate.
\nBonhoeffer and Moltke had met only once, at a large gathering. There were similarities between them: both were reserved by nature and tended to be solitary; both had trouble enduring meaningless chatter and were shrewd judges of human character. Like Bonhoeffer, Moltke had dependable and influential friends in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Since his mother\u2019s father had presided over the highest court in South Africa, he had studied law in England as well as in Germany. His closest friend at that time was Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, to whom Bonhoeffer was related through his mother, and whose wife, Countess Marion Yorck, had been a classmate of Bonhoeffer\u2019s in Grunewald.
\nIt was important, in the Resistance, to be able to size up in a few moments people whom one did not know, and in doing so it helped if one knew friends of theirs. Bonhoeffer had written \u2018The Church and the Jewish Question\u2019 in 1933; from that time, Moltke had been an attorney working tirelessly on behalf of Jews who were in trouble. So why should not the two of them immediately feel a bond?
\nSome people found the tall, somewhat taciturn Count Moltke rather brusque and haughty, though his friends and the letters he left behind indicate that this was not actually so. Even if it had been, Bonhoeffer would have been comfortable with him. Countess Marion D\u00f6nhoff wrote that he was a Christian Scientist, but this is erroneous. His father had been an ardent member of that church, but the son had asked to be confirmed in the Lutheran Church, in Gr\u00e4ditz, near Kreisau, at age 15, and as a young adult had given up Christian Science altogether. In the late 1920s he had become associated with an unusual group of friends, including intellectual Jews, socialists, writers and scholars in the most varied fields, who for the most part did not belong to the nobility. All these persons were interested in building a new society, and like them Moltke had become convinced that Christianity had outlived its time and had nothing more to contribute to such an endeavour. But the German church struggle, from 1933 onward, taught him to think better of the Church. On the trip back from Oslo he wrote a letter to a fatherly friend, Lionel Curtis, one of the most influential people in England though not a public servant:<\/p>\n
Perhaps you will remember that in a conversation before the war I argued that belief in God was not essential in order to come to where we are now. Today I know that I was wrong, wholly and utterly wrong. You know that from the first day I have struggled against the Nazis, but the level of danger, and the readiness for self-sacrifice which is demanded of us today, and perhaps tomorrow, demands more than good ethical principles, especially when we know that the success of our struggle will probably mean the total collapse of national unity. But we are ready to face this \u2026<\/p>\n
So on this point as well, he and Bonhoeffer were in agreement; yet they did not become friends. First of all, at Sa\u00dfnitz on the German island of R\u00fcgen in the Baltic Sea, they missed the ferry to Trelleborg, Sweden.
\nThe ferry did not make the crossing the next morning either, because of drifting ice, so the two emissaries had time on 11 April 1942 to go for a five-and-a-half-hour walk, during which they did not encounter another soul except for a single woodsman. Moltke wrote to his wife that they discussed which of them would do what task in Norway, while from Bonhoeffer we have only a brief remark, as reported by Bethge (DB-ER 755): \u2018Stimulating, but we are not of the same opinion.\u2019 Of course it did not take them five and a half hours to agree on what was to be done in Oslo, and Bonhoeffer would have found that aspect of the conversation necessary, but certainly not \u2018stimulating\u2019. Regarding their assignment, the two were in such agreement that they submitted a joint report afterwards, which only Moltke signed. During Dohnanyi\u2019s interrogations later, he was accused of not having Bonhoeffer submit a report on this assignment, suggesting that the assignment couldn\u2019t have been real intelligence work, but only a way of keeping him out of military service.
\nHelmut von Moltke and \u2018his companion\u2019, as the pastor travelling with him was referred to in Norway, did a splendid job together in Oslo, but since their conversation on R\u00fcgen a certain distance had emerged between them. Here were two of the most prominent Protestant Christians in the Resistance, but they had opposing views how to resist Hitler. We have already mentioned the \u2018Kreisau\u2019 group\u2019s strong reservations concerning the older men in the conspiracy, especially Goerdeler. The \u2018Kreisau\u2019 members were convinced that his ideas would only lead to further failure after the war, while Bonhoeffer had a high opinion of Goerdeler. The conversation during Moltke\u2019s and Bonhoeffer\u2019s walk together must have been about him and some of the other conspirators and their differing conceptions of the Resistance.
\nThe strength of the \u2018Kreisau\u2019 group lay in its planning for the future, while the group around Oster and Dohnanyi concentrated on the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat itself. This difference had led Moltke and Dohnanyi to break contact with each other. It may also have been a topic in that conversation between Moltke and Bonhoeffer, since lack of unity between different groups in the Resistance endangered all the conspirators. It took a long time, until a discussion on 8 January 1943, to get them all in agreement once again on recognizing the former Chief of General Staff, General Ludwig Beck, as the leader of the Resistance. But the much more explosive difference between Bonhoeffer and Moltke was that Bonhoeffer was for and Moltke was against the assassination of Hitler.
\nWe have seen how important the word \u2018decision\u2019 was in Bonhoeffer\u2019s life, beginning with his first sermon. But an overview of the entire 16 volumes of his works shows that from 1940 onwards Bonhoeffer scarcely used the word, not because it no longer had any significance for him, but because the central decision of his life, to which everything else had been leading, had finally been taken. For years he had gone back again and again over all his decisions\u2014we need only remember the one in New York\u2014and re-examined them, but not this final one. In prison, after the failed coup of 20 July 1944, Bonhoeffer wrote: \u2018It is the advantage and the essence of the strong that they are able to pose the great decisive questions and take clear positions on them. The weak must always decide between alternatives that are not their own\u2019 (DBWE 8, IV\/184). In the face of the innumerable victims of Hitler\u2019s arbitrary state, all conscientious reservations about assassination were silenced. There was nothing more to re-examine, only the deed to be done. Bonhoeffer says in his Ethics: \u2018Here it is apt to cite Goethe\u2019s statement that the person who acts is without conscience\u2019 (DBWE 6, 259). If you let your scruples tempt you into brooding about it, you will miss the moment that calls for action.
\nMoltke too was of strong character and was capable of bold decisions. Everything he did in those days gives proof of his readiness to stand up unreservedly for Hitler\u2019s victims. During the 1920s, he had read these words by a politician: \u2018The fate of a nation might really be decided for the better by a single murder. The historical justification for believing this could be, for instance, that a people is languishing under the tyranny of some prodigious oppressor \u2026\u2019 But the book from which this passage comes made the young man a determined opponent of Nazism, and he could no more accept these words than any others it contained. The book was Hitler\u2019s Mein Kampf, and here too the author\u2019s characteristic venom is in evidence. The passage continues: \u2018Only the republican spirit of some guilty little scoundrel would see such a deed as detestable, whereas our nation\u2019s greatest singer of freedom knew how, in his Tell, to glorify such actions.\u2019 However, in December 1941 Hitler had banned Schiller\u2019s play William Tell from being performed at all.
\nLet us remind ourselves that in Barcelona Bonhoeffer said, \u2018There are no acts that are bad in and of themselves; even murder can be sanctified\u2019 (DBWE 10, 367). These were rather dubious words, out of the mouth of a pastoral assistant, but now they had become appallingly true and had to be put into action. Even then, however\u2014and this explains the difference between the two walking companions\u2014Moltke could not agree with this conviction. For him there could be no such thing as a \u2018sanctified murder\u2019. On the contrary; he questioned putting an end to a murderous regime precisely by committing murder. Nevertheless, his widow reported after the war that, in view of the enormous and ever-accumulating evidence of scandalous Nazi crimes, her husband no longer remained opposed in principle to the assassination. And in fact his friend Yorck joined Count Stauffenberg in the attempt on 20 July 1944. But on the day that Stauffenberg came to see Count Yorck, Moltke had been arrested. Roland Freisler, the presiding judge of the People\u2019s Court, had to admit during the trial in January 1945 that Moltke was not among those planning the assassination, but was nevertheless absolutely determined to sentence him to death. Noting that a Jesuit father, Alfred Delp, had been at the meetings in Kreisau, Freisler screamed at the defendant:<\/p>\n
And who was there? a Jesuit father, of course\u2014a Jesuit father! and it was with him that you were discussing civil resistance! And his Jesuit superior, you know him too \u2026 one of the highest officials of Germany\u2019s most dangerous enemies, comes to see Graf von Moltke in Kreisau. There was a Protestant clergyman, too, three people who were later sentenced to death for taking part in the coup of 20 July! And not a single Party member! There all can I say is, the mask is off!<\/p>\n
In Count Moltke\u2019s farewell letters to his wife, he speaks of this:<\/p>\n
In the end, this pointed emphasis on the involvement of church people is appropriate to the inner meaning of the matter, and shows that F[reisler] is, even so, a good political judge. This has the immense advantage that we are now being put to death for something that a) we have done and b) is worth doing. But that I should die a martyr for St Ignatius of Loyola\u2014and that is what it comes down to, because everything else was considered secondary\u2014is really a joke, and I\u2019m already trembling in anticipation of Papi\u2019s fatherly wrath, he was such an anti-Catholic. Otherwise he would accept everything, but that? Mami, too, would probably have a hard time with it.<\/p>\n
We must image the writer smiling as he penned these words. Both his parents were dead, and Moltke was toying with the idea of their reproaches to him in the world beyond. He was opposed to assassinating Hitler because he was deeply convinced that the German people were lost if they were taken in once again by a \u2018stab-in-the-back myth\u2019, instead of confronting, at last, the truth of their history. For him there could only be a new beginning after the total collapse of the regime. But to make it possible, everything must be ready; this was the real aim of the \u2018Kreisau Circle\u2019. During Bonhoeffer\u2019s conversations with Karl Barth in Basel, Barth had been saying similar things.
\nIn telling his wife about the trip to Oslo, Moltke expressed his admiration for the Norwegians for whom Steltzer had arranged secret meetings with him. They included C. B. Svendsen, later a bishop, who immediately after the war was especially helpful to the churches in occupied and divided Berlin, and in the Soviet-occupied zone of the country that later became the communist German Democratic Republic (DDR). But in order for these meetings not to attract notice, Moltke had to spend a lot of time with the German officers, while his \u2018companion\u2019 Bonhoeffer could go on meeting with the Norwegian church representatives, who were very impressed with him. At the end of their visit, each of the two emissaries had a long talk with one of the Norwegian churchmen. That was when Moltke learned that the protesting pastors had been threatened with having to leave their parsonages if they did not end their strike. Bishop Berggrav\u2019s reaction, according to his biography:<\/p>\n
Splendid. Just take your wives and children along and travel the roads with a handcart. Hold a parish meeting every evening. I am sure that if Norway\u2019s thousand pastors set out that way, the men in Berlin will understand fast enough how foolish this whole business is. (DBWE 16, 268)<\/p>\n
The plan to save Bishop Berggrav\u2019s life succeeded. SS leader Heinrich Himmler telegraphed German Reich Commissar Terboven in Oslo to ask why the Norwegian bishop had been arrested, and Hitler\u2019s secretary Bormann ordered Berggrav\u2019s immediate release. This was probably arranged through General Falkenhorst, who headed the German High Command in Norway and had met several times with Moltke. Berggrav was instead placed under house arrest and had to spend the rest of the war in a remote chalet in the mountains. The two German visitors flew back to Berlin from Malm\u00f6 by way of Copenhagen, without having seen the bishop at all.<\/p>\n
Third trip to Switzerland<\/p>\n
Soon after returning from Norway, Bonhoeffer left on the journey to Switzerland that he had actually planned to make soon after Easter. He was in Z\u00fcrich on 12 May 1942 and, on the 14th, in Geneva, but he did not find the people there who were important to him. He especially missed seeing Visser \u2018t Hooft, who had flown to England. At the end of April, Adam von Trott had given Visser \u2018t Hooft a memorandum from the Resistance group in the Foreign Office, which he wanted to deliver personally and urgently support and recommend.
\nSo Bonhoeffer was only able to take care of one last matter for \u2018Operation 7\u2019: the visa for Charlotte Friedenthal had not yet been received. This faithful servant of the Confessing Church subsequently became the first of the group to travel to Switzerland. At the beginning of September, she received word in Dahlem to go to the Gestapo office, on Alexanderplatz several miles away, to receive her completed passport. Since she could not travel on public transport wearing her yellow star, she rolled up her coat and only put it back on when she arrived. After waiting a long time, she was finally called: \u2018Jewess Friedenthal!\u2019 Then, on the way from Dahlem to the railway station, she was to go to the Swiss consulate to have the passport stamped; initially she was told to go \u2018without the star\u2019, but an hour before she left, Dohnanyi came to tell her to wear it after all. She had already taken it off her coat and had to sew it back on quickly. On the train she sat on her coat, carefully rolled up, after finding a seat in a compartment where there were \u2018Aryans\u2019. After many hours the train finally left Weil, the last German station, and Charlotte Friedenthal put on her coat, to horrified looks from the other passengers in the compartment. At the Swiss border all her papers were taken away but, after a few fearful moments, returned to her. She arrived in Basel so dazed that Gisevius had to point to the yellow star still on her coat and tell her she didn\u2019t need it any more. After hearing of her safe arrival, the rest of the group successfully made the journey four weeks later.
\nWhile in Z\u00fcrich, Bonhoeffer obtained from Karl Barth\u2019s publisher the galley proofs of Barth\u2019s latest Dogmatics volume, and took them, along with other literature, to a quiet guesthouse by Lake Geneva to do some work. He wanted to be able to report to his friends and students back home on the latest developments in theology; many German theologians were eagerly awaiting the continuation of Barth\u2019s Church Dogmatics.
\nDuring this time in Switzerland, Bonhoeffer had a personal experience of the twilight zone in which a secret agent lives. His first two trips there had aroused doubts in many quarters. This time, in Z\u00fcrich and Geneva, Bonhoeffer heard rumours that Karl Barth was among those who were to some degree suspicious of him. He wrote Barth a letter of entreaty, saying that at first he had laughed at this, but after continuing to hear it had become uncertain.<\/p>\n
In a time when so much simply has to rest on personal trust, everything is lost if mistrust arises. I can, of course, understand that this curse of suspicion gradually afflicts us all, but it is difficult to bear when for the first time it affects one personally. Yet it must also be terrible for you\u2014perhaps even worse than for me\u2014to be compelled suddenly to be suspicious. Our conversations must have been simply unbearable for you. And I never perceived this and cannot imagine it, even in reflecting back on them. (DBWE 16, 278)<\/p>\n
Barth\u2019s assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum, replied immediately: \u2018What a pickle to be in! Above all, please be assured that we too are laughing at this matter.\u2019 It was among the \u2018signs of the times\u2019 that such a tumult was even possible. \u2018We should be glad if you would come and see us\u2019 (DBWE 16, 279f).
\nWhile in Geneva again, Bonhoeffer heard by chance that Bishop Bell had flown to Stockholm and planned to be there for three weeks. Presumably he also heard that Sch\u00f6nfeld had left for Sweden, a neutral county in the war, to meet with the bishop. He decided spontaneously to leave Switzerland right away, and proposed to Dohnanyi to have him sent to Sweden. Bell was to be there only until 2 June, so it had to be arranged in the greatest hurry, and with extreme discretion. To travel to neutral Switzerland or to the army occupying Norway was one thing, but a meeting with a member of the British House of Lords was quite another, namely high treason.
\nOn 25 May, Bonhoeffer had his last visit with Karl Barth. During their conversation in the afternoon, they heard on the BBC news from London that Molotov had arrived there to sign the British-Soviet treaty. When it was mentioned that the treaty precluded either country from making a separate peace with Germany, Bonhoeffer said, \u2018Well, now it\u2019s all over!\u2019 (DBWE 16, 286, note 2).
\nThe trip to Sweden was decided, and the technicalities arranged, within three days. General Beck himself gave the order for it. The order stated that Bonhoeffer was to give Bell the names of the conspirators who were in charge of the coup: Chief of Staff General Beck, General Kurt von Hammerstein, Lord Mayor Goerdeler, and the union leaders Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser. None of them was in active service any longer, but their names were internationally known and their integrity was uncontested. That they could hope to have the right to give orders after Hitler\u2019s death was confirmed by the names of G\u00fcnther von Kluge, Fedor von Bock and Georg von K\u00fcchler, who were still active Field Marshals, top commanders, and whose trustworthiness was vouched for by the Resistance leaders. Bonhoeffer was to make it clear that the intentions of this group were peaceful, although for camouflage purposes their names could not be made public immediately after the coup; and he was to ask Bell to convey to the British government their request not to make use of the moment of overthrow for an attack, so that the new government would be able restore order within Germany.<\/p>\n
The meeting with Bishop Bell<\/p>\n
On 30 May Bonhoeffer flew from Berlin to Stockholm, carrying the courier pass No. 474 that Adam von Trott had obtained for him that morning from the Foreign Office. The flight was a torment due to rough weather. In Stockholm he found out that Bell was staying in Sigtuna, the ancient Swedish royal city. It had become the centre of the church renewal movement in Sweden, with the Evangelical Academy founded by Manfred Bj\u00f6rkquist and an adult education centre. Sigtuna was also an ecumenical centre, where efforts were being made to break through the isolation that the war had imposed on Sweden, so Bell was a very welcome guest there. Bonhoeffer travelled on there immediately, and discovered that Sch\u00f6nfeld had already arrived before him. There was now so much trust in Sch\u00f6nfeld that the Resistance group in the Foreign Office had sent him as a messenger to Bishop Bell. He must have been as surprised as the bishop when Bonhoeffer turned up in Sigtuna.
\nSch\u00f6nfeld and Bonhoeffer were no longer adversaries, but they had very different ideas about the future of Germany. Because of his friendship with Gerstenmaier, Sch\u00f6nfeld was close to or affiliated with the \u2018Kreisau\u2019 group, but on many issues he argued more along the same lines as Goerdeler. Bonhoeffer very clearly belonged to the Resistance group in Military Intelligence. However, in the actual message that the two were carrying on this occasion there were no differences. Each of them had been given, before his departure, very precise instructions by Hans Bernd von Haeften. So each gave the bishop the same names of those involved in the conspiracy, and their accounts of how the actual putsch was to proceed also concurred.
\nIt was only in assessing the power relationships in Europe, and in describing the aims of the conspiracy, that they showed serious differences. Sch\u00f6nfeld had already had two conversations with Bishop Bell before Bonhoeffer arrived, and he had raised the possibility that the conspirators\u2019 putsch might be preceded by a mutiny of the SS; the actual coup by the conspirators would then follow. He had spoken further of Germany\u2019s military strength and even of the German colonies, and seemed to think that the opposing side would regard a Germany prepared to respect human rights as a partner that they could accept without further ado.
\nDuring their first joint conversation with Bishop Bell, Bonhoeffer interrupted him to say that God must pass judgement on Germany and on the German people. He said it was wrong to hope for a seamless transition to peace, and spoke instead of repentance and assuming the guilt for what had happened, ideas he had developed in the context of his Ethics.<\/p>\n
The world was to understand that the coup which the German conspirators were preparing had a theological significance transcending even Sch\u00f6nfeld\u2019s invocation of the dimension of human rights. The coup, then, had to take place as part of the \u2018punishment by God\u2019 and had thus to be recognized as the Germans\u2019 acceptance of guilt and repentance.<\/p>\n
This was Klemens von Klemperer\u2019s comment on the discussion. It makes clear once again the degree to which Bonhoeffer really lived his ethics. And for Bishop Bell, these were the thoughts that he found most persuasive. This was the young friend who, with his precise information years ago in London, had drawn Bell into the German church struggle and made him the Confessing Church\u2019s most important ally. The conspirators could not have done better than to send Bonhoeffer after Sch\u00f6nfeld, for through him Bishop Bell was made a spokesman on their behalf who gave his all to fighting for their cause in Great Britain. Bonhoeffer and Bell also had a private meeting. Still the fatherly friend, the bishop carried back a loving message from Bonhoeffer to his twin sister and her family and listened to all the news about the situation in the Confessing Church. He must have said to Bonhoeffer, during this conversation, that immediately after the war he would press for a meeting of representatives of the churches, and at such a conference it would be important that Germans, too, be able to contribute their ideas for a new beginning in peace and justice.
\nThe three ecumenical visitors were hosted in Sigtuna by the theologian Harry Johansson. He followed exactly the guidelines published by Visser \u2018t Hooft for cooperation among the churches during the war. During the conversations he was present part of the time, and offered his help as an intermediary in case there were messages to be delivered. However, his superiors subsequently decided it was too risky for a Swede to serve as contact person between Great Britain and the German conspirators. Because of its geographical position, Sweden needed to take care to remain strictly neutral, so Johansson had to withdraw his offer. But after the war, he was among those who helped Bell see that the Evangelical Church in Germany was quickly taken back into the ecumenical community. Bonhoeffer signed Johansson\u2019s guest book only with his initials, DB. He was very aware of the delicacy of his mission in a neutral country like Sweden: that it was an El Dorado for spies and secret agents.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s report was eagerly awaited in Berlin. Such a direct contact between the conspirators and the government of an enemy country as Bell could make, as a member of the House of Lords, could not be hoped for even through the Vatican, where Josef M\u00fcller had been conducting further negotiations. Perhaps Oster, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer had too high hopes for the conversation with the bishop, but no Englishman could have been found who would represent their cause more emphatically than did Bishop Bell. Dohnanyi arranged for the report Bonhoeffer wrote for General Beck to be kept top secret. Not even Josef M\u00fcller was to be allowed to see it. But Bonhoeffer found this too rigorous a precaution, and he passed information to M\u00fcller through Bethge, so that the results of his trip to Sweden could be used in the discussions at the Vatican.
\nThis meeting with Bishop Bell was Bonhoeffer\u2019s most important contribution to the Resistance, and also the most dangerous. But that, as a Lutheran theologian, he clarified issues of conscience for his friends in the Resistance must also have been of great importance especially to Oster and Dohnanyi. None of the conspirators carried out their missions thoughtlessly, or would have contented themselves with easy solutions to the ethical problems they were confronting.<\/p>\n
Maria von Wedemeyer<\/p>\n
It is characteristic of Bonhoeffer that at the beginning of June 1942, right after the debriefing of his trip to Sweden, he went back to Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin to continue working on his Ethics. As always during his visits there, he had long conversations with his motherly friend Ruth von Kleist. Her 18-year-old granddaughter, Maria von Wedemeyer, was also visiting at the time, having just finished her university entrance exams at her boarding school in Wieblingen, near Heidelberg. The headmistress of Maria\u2019s school, Elisabeth von Thadden, was the sister of Reinhold Thadden, one of the staunchest supporters of the Confessing Church in Pomerania; she was later executed for her ardent opposition to Hitler.
\nAs a child, Maria had sometimes attended church at Finkenwalde with her grandmother, and since then had occasionally seen \u2018Pastor Bonhoeffer\u2019 when he was visiting. When Maria was 13 her grandmother had asked him to question her to see if she was ready for confirmation class; he concluded that she wasn\u2019t. Maria felt at the time that she had failed, and also found him quite severe. But this time, when he came down from the attic room in which he worked, he and her grandmother encouraged her to join in their conversations and to say what she thought. She must have made a deeper impression on Bonhoeffer than he was ready to admit; for, once back at his desk, he found his thoughts again and again wandering away from theology and back to her.<\/p>\n
From Christian to man for his time<\/p>\n
Let us look back again at the stages which Bonhoeffer had traversed on his \u2018journey to reality\u2019 by June 1942. They were all characterized by more or less rigorous decisions he had taken. We see first the 14-year-old deciding to study theology; then the high-flyer among the theology students in Berlin, discovering Karl Barth and standing with Barth versus his teachers in Berlin, but demanding, more sternly than Barth, a \u2018concrete commandment\u2019. We see the pastor who, from the beginning of the church struggle, belonged to the radical wing of the Confessing Church, and in 1933 was already confronting Christians in Germany with the question of their attitude toward the Jews. We read of his demands that the ecumenical movement support the church struggle, because no cause could be closer to that of ecumenical Christianity. We find him at Finkenwalde as director of a seminary, sharing the fate of the \u2018illegal\u2019 ordinands and pastors and, not least because of this, deciding not to marry. Only the path of radical obedience is the path that God wills for him. To go, \u2018knowingly\u2019, another way is to \u2018separate oneself from salvation\u2019. We see him deciding to refuse military service, even at the cost of his life. We find him in New York in 1939, having already escaped such a consequence, but then nevertheless deciding to go back to share in Germany\u2019s fate.
\nWe have already seen how, immediately on returning from the United States to a remote corner of East Pomerania, Bonhoeffer began working on an interpretation of Psalm 119; but we have not mentioned that this theological work marks the beginning of the third phase in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bethge speaks here of Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018turning point from Christian to man for his times\u2019.<\/p>\n
To want to be only a Christian, a timeless disciple\u2014that now became a costly privilege. To become engaged for his times, where he stood, was far more open to misinterpretation, less glorious, more confined. Yet this alone was what it now meant to be a Christian \u2026 The earthly and national future, the realm of citizenship, demanded responsibility. (DB-ER 678)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer did not simply leave the time of making \u2018decisions of faith\u2019 behind him. What he had discovered and learned during that time, he took with him into this new, final stage of his life. But the word \u2018decision\u2019 takes on a new emphasis. The earth has its rights over us, and we are not entitled to dream away the lifetime which is given to us, says Bonhoeffer\u2019s great meditation on Psalm 119. But there is much more to say about this, and it is anything but a coincidence that Bonhoeffer made the first discoveries on his new path from working with this particular Psalm, which speaks as no other does about God\u2019s law and God\u2019s commandments. A few sentences will suffice to make that clear.<\/p>\n
With God we do not take up a stance\u2014we walk along a path. It goes forward, otherwise we are not with God. God knows where the path goes, throughout its length; we know only the next step and the ultimate destination \u2026 To know the way, to be going the right way, never spares us any of the responsibility and guilt, but only makes them harder to bear. God\u2019s children do not have any special rights, except that they know God\u2019s grace and that this is God\u2019s path \u2026 (DBW 15, 508)<\/p>\n
Even my most devout decisions and chosen paths can lead me to destruction, but never God\u2019s commands. Not my devotion, but God alone preserves me from shame and dishonour. (DBW 15, 512)<\/p>\n
Life itself is God\u2019s aim for us. If it becomes a means to an end, then a contradiction has entered into our life which makes it a torment. For then we are seeking the aim of our life, the good of it, somewhere beyond it, and that can only be purchased by denying life itself. That is the condition we are in before we receive our life in God, and we have been taught to call this condition good. We learned to hate and despise life and to love and worship ideas. (DBW 15, 526)<\/p>\n
[I too must ask myself:] am I perhaps already living so much on the bare bones of my own principles that I wouldn\u2019t even feel it if, some day, God were to take his living commandment away from me? Perhaps then I should still be acting in faithfulness to my principles, but the commandment of God wouldn\u2019t be with me any longer. (DBW 15, 531)<\/p>\n
Nothing marks the change in Bonhoeffer\u2019s thinking better than the fact that, from the autumn of 1939 onward, the concepts \u2018earth\u2019 and \u2018reality\u2019 are found more and more at the centre of his thoughts, and that the \u2018world\u2019 in its negative meaning as the evil world, at enmity with God, fades out and the \u2018world that God loves\u2019 comes to the fore. It is not by chance that from now on the word \u2018reality\u2019 occurs almost twice as often and the word \u2018earth\u2019 around three times as often as previously.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s decision to forgo marriage in the interest of the Confessing Church was no longer binding upon him. As a commandment he had taken upon himself, this renunciation would now only be part of the \u2018bare bones of his principles\u2019. But whether the time was now right for him to become engaged to be married was another matter.
\nHis work on the Ethics was now more and more closely connected with his assignments for the Resistance, rather than a separate compartment of his life. Travelling on a military train to Munich on 25 June 1942, he wrote this in a letter to Bethge:<\/p>\n
My recent activity, which has largely been in the worldly sector, gives me much to think about. I am amazed that I am living, and can live, for days without the Bible; I would then perceive it not as obedience but as autosuggestion, if I were to force myself back to it. I understand that such autosuggestion could be and is a great help, but I fear that I would thereby falsify an authentic experience and in the end still not be experiencing authentic help. When I then open my Bible again, it is new and delightful to me as never before, and I only wish I could preach again. I know that I need only open my own books to hear all that can be said against all this. I do not wish to justify myself either, for I realize that I have had much richer times in the \u2018spiritual\u2019 sense. But I sense how an opposition to all that is \u2018religious\u2019 is growing in me. Often it amounts to an instinctive revulsion, which is surely not good either. I am not religious by nature. But I must constantly think of God, of Christ; authenticity, life, freedom and mercy mean a great deal to me. It is only that the religious clothes they wear make me so uncomfortable. Do you understand? None of these are new thoughts and insights at all. Because I believe that I am on the verge of some kind of breakthrough, I am letting things take their own course and not resisting. This is the sense in which I also understand my present work in the worldly sector. (DBWE 16, 329)<\/p>\n
These were thoughts that Bonhoeffer was only able to pursue later, in his prison cell in Tegel. Until then he had no time. Dohnanyi came to Munich on 26 June to travel with him to Italy. During the trip, Maria von Wedemeyer continued to occupy Bonhoeffer\u2019s mind. He had spoken of her to Bethge and admitted what she meant to him. The letter quoted above, written on the train, says further:<\/p>\n
I have not written to Maria. It is truly not time for that yet. If no further meetings are possible, the pleasant thought of a few highly charged moments will no doubt melt away again into the realm of unfulfilled fantasies that is already well populated in any case. On the other hand, I do not see how a meeting could be contrived that would be unobtrusive and inoffensive for her. One cannot expect that of Frau von Kleist either, in any case not as an idea of mine, for I am not really at all clear and decided about it as yet.<\/p>\n
The \u2018war behind the war\u2019 continues<\/p>\n
Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer first had to discuss some matters with Wilhelm Schmidhuber, also attached to the Munich Military Intelligence office, who met them in Venice. They then travelled on with him to Rome by way of Florence. There Bonhoeffer had a long conversation with Prelate Kaas, who until 1933 had been chief of the Centrist Party in Germany. He also met with Father Leiber, the secretary of Pope Pius XII, and with Father Zeiger, Rector of the Collegium Germanicum; with both of them he had talked far into the night at Christmastime 1940 in Ettal. Josef M\u00fcller describes in his memoirs how these conversations included lively discussions as to whether it might be possible, after the war, for their two churches to make a new beginning by looking back to pre-Reformation times. While Pius XII was opposed to ecumenical relations, two members of his staff who were close to him seem to have had quite different views, even at that time.
\nFrom the Vatican, Bonhoeffer wrote an optimistic letter to his twin sister: \u2018It won\u2019t be long until we see each other again.\u2019 But the answer from the British government to the questions Bishop Bell had conveyed to it on behalf of Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi, and which, by unspoken agreement, they hoped to receive before they had to leave Rome, did not arrive at the Vatican. On 10 July the two brothers-in-law made their way homeward.
\nAgain Bonhoeffer went back to Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin to keep working on his Ethics, but soon the Council of Brethren called him to take part in a session in Magdeburg on 10 August 1942; a working group of which he was a member was to present an exegesis, for the present day, of the commandment \u2018Thou shalt not kill\u2019. Here again, Bonhoeffer was interested in how the forthcoming synod could express and promote this commandment, not as \u2018eternal truth\u2019 but as a \u2018concrete commandment\u2019 for the year 1942, in which persecution of the Jews had worsened and \u2018euthanasia\u2019 killings were taking place. He therefore agreed to prepare a paper for the second session of the working group, to be held on 15 March 1943, on the doctrine of primus usus legis, the primary use of the law.
\nThe expression primus usus legis goes back to the leaders of the Reformation, who said that the commandments were given us by God for three reasons: first, to maintain law and order among human beings according to the will of God; second, to bring humans to an awareness of their sin and guilt; third, to show humankind the way to a new life in God. However\u2014and his friends in the Confessing Church had not expected it to be otherwise\u2014what Bonhoeffer presented in March 1943 went far beyond what had been said previously. He addressed the situation in the Confessing Church, which was being persecuted and no longer had a public voice, saying:<\/p>\n
But even the congregation in the catacombs never has the universality of its mission taken from it. In preaching law and Gospel, it professes this mission and thereby keeps alive its responsibility for the world. The congregation can never content itself with cultivating its own life; to do so means denying its Lord. Even in places where it can still preserve the iustitia civilis only among its own members, because its word is not received by the world, it does this in service to the world and as part of its universal mission. Its experience will be that the world is in trouble and that the reign of Christ is not of this world, but precisely here it will be reminded of its mission to the world; otherwise it would become a religious club. (DBWE 16, 597\u201398)<\/p>\n
Here, Bonhoeffer had left far behind him the image of the Christian community as a \u2018sealed train in foreign territory\u2019. His lecture became the decisive step leading to the Breslau Synod, which spoke out, half a year later, against the murder of the Jews.
\nThe meeting at Magdeburg in August 1942 was also significant for Bonhoeffer because there he was able to see Carl Goerdeler again and to have a substantive conversation with him. Bonhoeffer knew that the \u2018Kreisau\u2019 group disapproved of Goerdeler. But even some of Goerdeler\u2019s close friends were becoming irritated by the optimism with which he kept saying, in spite of everything, that the opposition would soon succeed. They found this attitude rather heedless. It was the reason why Stauffenberg later left him out of the conspirators\u2019 contact network. But Bonhoeffer defended Goerdeler\u2019s optimism. In his reflections on New Year\u2019s Eve 1942 there is a passage on optimism, and as Bonhoeffer wrote it he was thinking of Carl Goerdeler among others.<\/p>\n
It is more sensible to be pessimistic; disappointments are left behind and one can face people unembarrassed. Hence, the clever frown upon optimism. In its essence, optimism is not a way of looking at the present situation, but a power of life, a power of hope when others resign, a power to hold our heads high when all seems to have come to nought, a power to put up with setbacks, a power that never abandons the future to the opponent but lays claim to it. Certainly, there is a stupid, cowardly optimism that has to be frowned upon. But no one ought to despise optimism as the will for the future, however many times it is mistaken. It is the health of life that the ill dare not infect. (DBWE 8, Prologue)<\/p>\n
Goerdeler felt Bonhoeffer\u2019s sympathy for his views, and invited Bonhoeffer and Bethge to visit him the next day at his hotel in Berlin. He was happy to talk with anyone about the future beyond the military work that had to be done.
\nToward the end of August 1942, Hans von Dohnanyi completed all the preparations for \u2018Operation 7\u2019 that could be done from Germany. The final agreements in Switzerland were still to be concluded, and these he also wanted to attend to himself. Bonhoeffer came especially to Berlin from Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin to see him off. He gave his brother-in-law a letter to send to Bishop Bell, in which he indicated how hard it was becoming for him and his friends to wait so long for a reply from London. But then Dohnanyi found the answer waiting in Geneva, in the form of a telegram: \u2018Interest undoubted, but deeply regret no reply possible. Bell\u2019 (DB-ER 765).
\nIt was a bitter disappointment. Dohnanyi knew better than almost anyone about the crimes being committed everywhere on the battlefronts and behind the lines. He could well understand a government\u2019s unwillingness to settle for anything but the unconditional surrender of Germany. But a positive answer might have changed the mind of one or another of the German commanders. Now the conspirators had to go forward without such backing.
\nBell had thought over very carefully every word of his telegram. What he did not and could not speak of was the various means by which he had tried to move the government in London to a positive reply. While the British Foreign Office called him \u2018our good German bishop\u2019, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden spoke of him with Shakespeare\u2019s words, \u2018this pestilent priest\u2019. Bell was a man who wouldn\u2019t take no for an answer. Right after returning from Sweden he had written a detailed report of his meeting with the two German pastors and visited the Foreign Office to hand it to Eden personally. The Foreign Minister appeared to be impressed, but after a time he replied: \u2018Without casting any reflection on the bona fides of your informants, I am satisfied that it would not be in the national interest\u2019 to send any reply to the German conspirators. Stalin was already annoyed that the Western Allies were taking their time attacking the European mainland, and Churchill\u2019s government did not want to do anything that might further irritate their Soviet ally.
\nIn addition, a certain scorn for the \u2018treasonous\u2019 actions of the German conspirators was unmistakable. London was simply not ready to acknowledge the \u2018war behind the war\u2019 and the German conspirators as allies in the struggle for law and human rights. That this was no longer a war between enemy nations, but rather a fight for total annihilation between irreconcilable world views, nobody in Britain saw as clearly as Bishop Bell. Bell had already witnessed during the church struggle how hard it was to defend oneself against the Nazi state, and during the war was getting an exact picture\u2014with the help of Gerhard Leibholz, Bonhoeffer\u2019s brother-in-law\u2014of what was going on in Germany. Leibholz wrote at the time: \u2018Basically, the traditional liberal democratic policy of non-intervention belongs to a world that has passed away.\u2019 This was Bell\u2019s thinking too, and because the Foreign Office refused to act, he said in a speech to the House of Bishops of the Canterbury Convocation of the Church of England:<\/p>\n
I could wish that the British government would make it very much clearer than they have yet done that this is a war between rival philosophies of life, in which the United Nations welcome all the help they can receive from the anti-Nazis everywhere\u2014in Germany as well as outside \u2026<\/p>\n
Bell sought out the US ambassador in London, told him about the meeting in Sweden and asked him to transmit the conspirators\u2019 request to the government in Washington. Finally, he entered into a duel of words with Lord Vansittart in the House of Lords, whose contention that all Germans were Nazis he vehemently denied. After the coup attempt of 20 July 1944 he wrote to Eden, pointing out that after his trip to Sweden he, Bell, had named beforehand the names of the men who had now been put to death in Berlin or were on trial in the \u2018People\u2019s Court\u2019. At the time, no one had wanted to give him any sign of encouragement, but couldn\u2019t something be done now, at least? In the House of Lords Bishop Bell also sharply criticized the air raids directed at the German civilian population, and Churchill never forgave him.<\/p>\n
The Wedemeyers<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer spent the week 18\u201325 August in Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin working on his Ethics. He was there when the news came that Hans von Wedemeyer, Maria\u2019s father, had been killed on 22 August, as an officer preparing for the siege of Stalingrad. Before 1933, Hans von Wedemeyer had been one of Reich Chancellor Papen\u2019s closest colleagues. When Hitler took power, Wedemeyer was disappointed in Papen\u2019s attitude and withdrew from politics to devote himself to his estate of P\u00e4tzig. The new rulers, aware of what he thought of them, had put him on trial for \u2018oppression of agricultural workers\u2019, but the case was thrown out. The court found working conditions at P\u00e4tzig exemplary.
\nHans von Wedemeyer and his wife were ardent supporters of the \u2018Berneuchen Brotherhood\u2019, a church movement founded by Wilhelm St\u00e4hlin which aimed to renew worship by reforming the liturgy. Several \u2018Berneuchen\u2019 annual conferences had been held at P\u00e4tzig. Bonhoeffer did not feel any sympathy for this renewal movement. His declaration that \u2018Only those who cry out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chant\u2019 has become well known. St\u00e4hlin and his friends loved the ancient liturgical chants, and though in their thinking they rejected Nazism, they tried to avoid political disputes. This was not an attitude that could earn Bonhoeffer\u2019s respect. But he felt a tie to the Wedemeyers through his close friendship with Ruth von Kleist, and he had confirmed their eldest son, Max. In his condolence letter to the widow, Ruth von Kleist\u2019s daughter, he recalled her husband\u2019s visit to him at Finkenwalde to discuss the confirmation instruction for his son.<\/p>\n
I have never forgotten that meeting. It accompanied me throughout the period of instruction. I knew that Max had already received and would continue to receive what was decisive from his parents\u2019 home. It was also clear to me what it means for a boy today to have a godly father who at the same time stands in the thick of life. When in the course of those years I then came to know almost all your children, I was often extremely impressed by the power of the blessing that emanates from a father who believes in Christ \u2026 This blessing is, of course, not something purely spiritual, but something that works its way deep into earthly life. Under the right blessing, life becomes healthy, secure, expectant, active, precisely because it is lived out of the source of life, strength, joy, activity. (DBWE 16, 351\u201352)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer made two short visits to Klein-Kr\u00f6ssin on 1 and 22 September. No one has recorded the reason, but it is not hard to guess. Ruth von Kleist had long been afflicted with a serious eye disease and was afraid of going blind. Presumably Bonhoeffer asked his father for the name of a doctor who could treat her. On the first visit Bonhoeffer would have noted her symptoms, and on the second he told her that she could have an operation in the next few days at St Francis Hospital in Berlin. Ruth von Wedemeyer sent her daughter Maria along to take care of her grandmother and read to her, since after the operation her eyes had to remain bandaged for quite awhile. Maria was surprised to see how often Pastor Bonhoeffer came to visit her grandmother. He held a brief prayer service with the two of them, and Maria noted in her diary the main things he said. Then he invited Maria to an evening at the Schleichers\u2019, a farewell party for his nephew Hans-Walter, who was leaving for military service the next day. There, Bonhoeffer had a conversation with Maria about military service, about which she also wrote in her diary.<\/p>\n
He said it was a tradition with us that young men should volunteer for military service and lay down their lives for a cause of which they mightn\u2019t approve at all. But there must also be people able to fight from conviction alone. If they approved of the grounds for war, well and good. If not, they could best serve the Fatherland by operating on the internal front, perhaps even by working against the regime \u2026 Oh, it\u2019s all so logically clear and obvious. But isn\u2019t it terrible, when I think of my father?<\/p>\n
The Freiburg group<\/p>\n
Hitler\u2019s early successes in the war had blinded the German people to what was truly going on. Most of the population was labouring under a fantasy, and it was only the devastating defeat at Stalingrad, and the shock wave it caused, that inclined any who were prepared to entertain second thoughts to do so. This was far from being a majority. Many still believed the propaganda about \u2018secret weapons\u2019 which were soon to turn the situation around. And any who didn\u2019t believe this tissue of lies had many reasons to fear even harbouring second thoughts, not to mention opening their mouths. These fears were encouraged not least by the justice system. The death penalty for listening to enemy radio stations was prescribed by law. It was considered \u2018undermining military strength\u2019 even to express doubt that Germany would be victorious in the end, and one could be hanged for doing so. People were even put to death for giving a foreign worker a loaf of bread. Hundreds of thousands of people in the occupied countries had been rounded up and brought to Germany for forced labour, taking the place of soldiers in the labour force. The courts were ruthless in their sentencing and everyone knew it. Year after year German judges condemned to death not only foreigners, but thousands of Germans as well, for petty reasons.
\nThat in such a situation it would have been irresponsible to plan simply for the overthrow of the government, and not also for what needed to happen afterwards, was plain not only to the \u2018Kreisau\u2019 group, which was then just beginning its work, but also to the group around Oster and Dohnanyi. Negotiations with the Allied powers would be difficult even if they had the backing of the population, and there they could only count on very limited support. Within the Military Intelligence group, it was especially Bonhoeffer who stood for the idea that things could not just be allowed to happen; especially since the majority of the German population had its head in the sand, plans must be carefully made for the future. In this he came closer to the thinking of the Kreisau group than did Dohnanyi.
\nBut his meeting in Sweden with Bishop Bell had shown him that people in the Western countries would ask about the Confessing Church as soon as the first contacts were made. In Great Britain there was a church \u2018Peace Aims Group\u2019, and Bell must have asked Bonhoeffer whether the Confessing Church had assigned this task to a comparable working group. The partner churches abroad would listen to its ideas and plans for the renewal of Germany, and would help to make sure that Germany could not be shut out of the community of nations again, as it had been after the First World War. Bonhoeffer did know from his talks with Visser \u2018t Hooft that there were such study groups in England, in the United States and in Sweden. But he must have been shocked to realize how much Bishop Bell was expecting of the Confessing Church, which was thinking more about the approaching armageddon than about being together with people of other nations in a Europe of the future.
\nAs he worked on his Ethics, Bonhoeffer thought about these things. The \u2018future of the Western world\u2019 occupied him. But in this he was far ahead of the Confessing Church. Oster and Dohnanyi, however, were among those who had a sense of the importance of these reflections, and Dohnanyi must have been glad that here were people working on plans for the future who did not need to be initiated into the plans for the assassination of Adolf Hitler.
\nBonhoeffer could speak with the Confessing Church leaders about what would need to be done after the war without revealing that he was talking about ideas that came from Bishop Bell, and without saying a single word about the conspiracy. Thus he was able, with the agreement of the conspirators, to accept an assignment from the Council of Brethren to speak with a group about writing a memorandum on Germany\u2019s role after the war. A group of professors in Freiburg were named as the right sort of people to do this. All of them had been members of the Confessing Church since 1933.
\nOn 9 October 1942, Bonhoeffer was in Freiburg for a lengthy conversation with the jurist Eric Wolf, who brought along his friend Constantin von Dietze. Both were prepared to accept this assignment from the Confessing Church and to ask dependable colleagues to work with them. It was agreed that the memorandum would present, from a German viewpoint, statements on economic issues, on the new ordering of the state, on cooperation in Europe, on the role of the Church, on justice, and in particular on human rights. The historian Gerhard Ritter, professional business managers Walter Bauer and Friedrich Karrenberg, theologians Otto Dibelius and Hans Asmussen and the jurist Franz B\u00f6hm were to work with the group, as well as Walter Eucken, who like Constantin von Dietze was an economist, and Friedrich Justus Perels, who was to participate as a legal expert along with Wolf. Carl Goerdeler too, who was a friend of Gerhard Ritter\u2019s, took part in at least one session.
\nThe Freiburg group is sometimes erroneously referred to as the \u2018Bonhoeffer group\u2019, but Bonhoeffer was only involved in getting it started; further contact could have endangered the conspiracy. However, his initiative had a considerable long-term effect, since the text of the memorandum was presented to the founding Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948 as a preparatory document from Germany. That its initiator had been put to death at Flossenb\u00fcrg, and that other participants had been arrested by the Gestapo because of the memorandum and had only been saved by the ending of the war from meeting the same fate, gave the document a particular weight. Among those who participated, besides Bonhoeffer and Goerdeler, Friedrich Justus Perels also did not survive. He was severely tortured, and later murdered, because he was found to be in possession of a text that was part of the Freiburg memorandum.<\/p>\n
The beginning of a difficult engagement<\/p>\n
Only a week after 18 October, the day on which Bonhoeffer held a prayer service for Ruth von Kleist and her granddaughter, the news came that Maria\u2019s brother Max, to whom she had been especially close, had also been killed in action on the eastern front. Because Bonhoeffer had confirmed Max, Ruth von Kleist invited him to the funeral, but Ruth von Wedemeyer telephoned and asked him not to come. She was afraid the grandmother\u2019s influence on the granddaughter was becoming inappropriate at this point, so she took the risk of a conflict with her powerful, though universally beloved and respected mother. She felt that her daughter especially needed to be left in peace after the deaths of her father and brother.
\nBut Maria found out that Bonhoeffer had been asked not to come to the funeral, and was shocked. She wrote to him spontaneously and tried to explain the ins-and-outs of her family, and added the sentence: \u2018But all that has nothing whatever to do with the two of us.\u2019 Bonhoeffer reacted as though all he had read was her words, \u2018the two of us\u2019, referring to herself and him, and wrote back that he hoped they would see each other again \u2018soon, very soon\u2019. That had not been the meaning Maria had intended, so she showed the letter to her mother, and the mother asked Bonhoeffer not to write to her daughter for the time being. She said she would be glad to explain the reasons face to face. Bonhoeffer took up this invitation right away, travelled to P\u00e4tzig on 24 November 1942, spent the night there, and reported to Bethge two days later on the outcome of the conversation:<\/p>\n
From Tuesday through Wednesday noon I was at Mrs Wedemeyer\u2019s. Contrary to my fears that the house would have an excessively spiritual tone, its style made a very pleasant impression. She herself was calm, friendly and not overwrought, as I had feared. Gist of the discussion she requested: a year of total separation to enable Maria to find some peace. No fundamental objection to the whole thing, but given the enormity of the decision, etc.\u2026 My response: these days a year could just as well become five or ten and thus represented a postponement into the incalculable; that I understood and respected her maternal authority over her daughter, but future circumstances themselves would show whether such a stipulation could be followed \u2026
\nI am not yet decided about my next move; for now I shall remain silent. At this point there is no hurry; first the storm must pass somewhat. I think that if I wanted to, I could prevail. I can argue better than the others and could probably talk them into it. But that seems dreadful to me; it strikes me as evil, like an exploitation of the others\u2019 weakness. Through the loss of her husband, thus precisely in her weakness, Mrs Wedemeyer is stronger than if I would have had to deal with him. It would be wrong of me to give her the feeling of defencelessness now\u2014that would be deplorable. But this makes my situation more difficult. (DBWE 16, 374\u201375)<\/p>\n
Eberhard Bethge, who wanted to become engaged to marry Bonhoeffer\u2019s 17-year-old niece Renate Schleicher, was in a similar situation. Her parents were also talking of a rather long separation, at which Bonhoeffer sighed, \u2018Everywhere the same\u2014old-fashioned\u2014ideas hearkening back to past times\u2019 (DBWE 16, 375).
\nIt was an understandable reaction, but not a fair one. The motive on the P\u00e4tzig side had not been simply to cleave to outmoded custom. Wanting only the best for her daughter, Ruth von Wedemeyer could not do otherwise than insist on a time to think it over. Her daughter had lost both of the two people to whom she was closest, her father and her elder brother. Didn\u2019t she need some time to recover? Ruth von Wedemeyer saw that her own mother longed for nothing so much as to see her granddaughter united with this Pastor Bonhoeffer whom she esteemed so highly, while the 18-year-old, very strong-willed girl herself had not yet really decided that this was what she wanted.
\nBonhoeffer was almost twice Maria\u2019s age, had been in conflict with the state over his ministry, and had no secure employment. He worked as a civilian for the military, but no one was allowed to know in what role. Ruth von Wedemeyer did find it right and good that he was a pastor and that he was opposed to the Nazi state. She knew that he was a man of faith, and this must have been one of the fundamental prerequisites that she wanted to see in a son-in-law. She was deeply impressed with Bonhoeffer as a person and would be able to accept him as a son. On one point only was she not to be moved: her daughter must be allowed first of all, without influence or pressure from whomever it might be, to become clear about what she really wanted.
\nThough Bonhoeffer had imagined all this entirely differently, he had to go along with her wishes. And so the time passed by during which he and Maria would have had the possibility of seeing one another freely. Ruth von Wedemeyer later reproached herself severely for being the cause, but her daughter Maria and Dietrich Bonhoeffer both knew that, from her point of view, she could not have acted otherwise.<\/p>\n
The beginning of the end for Hitler<\/p>\n
While the Freiburg group was working on its memorandum, Dohnanyi and his comrades-in-arms, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, entered a final period of feverish activity. Seen from outside the country, it was the time when Hitler was at the height of his power. Rommel\u2019s army in North Africa was about to reach the Nile, and would soon be able to blockade the Suez Canal and thus cut off the British supply lines. In Russia, German troops were in the Caucasus and had reached the Volga. Halder, who had urgently appealed to Hitler not to stretch the front so far, was removed from his post as General Chief of Staff. The south of France had until then not been occupied, according to the terms of the ceasefire, but these terms were violated by the total occupation of the country. Switzerland now lay exposed to attack by Hitler\u2019s forces, and its government had thus become vulnerable to blackmail.
\nBut this zenith of Nazi power was also the beginning of its downfall. On 23 October 1942, General Montgomery attacked the German line near El Alamein. After a 12-day battle he succeeded in breaking through, and Rommel\u2019s army was lost. The Allies landed in Morocco and Algeria and pushed on towards Tunisia. On 19 November the battle for Stalingrad began. On the days when Bonhoeffer was in P\u00e4tzig talking with Ruth von Wedemeyer, the Russian city was completely encircled and 22 German divisions were caught inside the ring. Hitler had forbidden the German commander, General Paulus, to make any attempt to break out. He consciously accepted the tragedy that was about to take place, and promoted Paulus, whom he expected to fight until the last of the trapped men perished, to the rank of field marshal.
\nOn 14 January 1943, the Allied summit at Casablanca agreed to pursue the war until Germany was forced into unconditional surrender. This also affected the conspirators. They had been fighting above all, since the the invasion of Russia was launched, to stop Hitler\u2019s murderous machinery once and for all by means of assassination. Their work must go on, even though the hopes they had held after Bonhoeffer\u2019s meeting with Bishop Bell had now vanished. In a fanatical speech at the Berlin Sports Palace on 18 February 1943, Goebbels proclaimed all-out war, and was frenetically applauded by an audience carefully selected for him by the Party, the SS and government ministries.
\nThis was the day on which the students of the White Rose anti-Nazi movement in Munich were caught distributing their flyers and arrested. Freisler gave them short shrift at their trial. Only four days later, on 22 February, Hans and Sophie Scholl, brother and sister, were executed. From that moment, every thoughtful person could see that the verdicts of Roland Freisler were judicial murders, and that he was not even following the rules for conducting trials. And the German people learned for the first time that there were persons who had the courage to confront Hitler.
\nIn the autumn of 1942 the office of customs investigations in Prague had arrested a currency smuggler who claimed at his hearing to have been doing a job for Consul Schmidhuber. Schmidhuber was the man with whom Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer had met and travelled in Italy; he belonged to the Military Intelligence office in Munich. Currency smuggling was not unusual among Party chiefs, but for anyone else it was an offence punishable by death. The Reich SS Headquarters immediately smelled a chance to get not only the Munich office, but the whole of Military Intelligence under Admiral Canaris, involved in this affair, and thus finally to rid itself of its rival in the military.
\nNeither the Admiral nor his leading colleagues realized how the net had already tightened around Canaris\u2019s office. But Hans von Dohnanyi knew that he had enemies among his colleagues, and that there was a danger that the SS, investigating Schmidhuber\u2019s case, would come across \u2018Operation 7\u2019. However, in SS Headquarters itself there was at least one person associated with the conspiracy\u2014SS Major General Arthur Nebe, the head of the Reich Criminal Investigation office. Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were warned by Nebe that they were in danger. In this situation, the two of them profited for a while from the jumble of jurisdictions in Hitler\u2019s system of government, which allowed the dictator to play off one institution against another and thus maintain his own power.
\nCurrency violations were supposed to be investigated by the SS head office, but before its people could begin their probe of Military Intelligence they had to have the consent of Field Marshal Keitel as head of the Army High Command. This raised the question of whether, in a trial of Military Intelligence staff members, things might be brought to light that were supposed to remain secret in the interest of national security. While the tug-of-war over this issue dragged on for weeks, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer had time to arrange, as far as possible, for safeguards and could agree on how to proceed in case of hearings. Dohnanyi went to Switzerland to make sure nothing untoward could happen during interrogations of the 14 Jews who had been rescued regarding their financial affairs. Bonhoeffer had been planning a longer trip abroad and already had his visas, but Dohnanyi and Oster decided it was best for him not to go in case he should be arrested at the border.
\nIt was crucial to make sure the exemptions from military service which Military Intelligence had granted were on record in the files and thus properly validated. When it became evident that major military defeats were on the way, all service jobs and factories were combed through for able-bodied men; the people called this \u2018pinching heroes\u2019. Canaris\u2019s staff had to be able to document absolutely correctly why men like Niesel, Rott, Bethge and especially Bonhoeffer, all of whose professional qualifications were theological, had been indispensible for their work in military intelligence. For example, Bethge wrote a description of his relations with church mission circles abroad. Since Bonhoeffer could become entangled in the Schmidhuber case, great care needed to be exercised on his behalf particularly. After thoroughly discussing it with Dohnanyi, he wrote a letter to Dohnanyi on Max Krause stationery, which had not been available in the shops since 1940, and dated it 4 November 1940. This predated letter has been preserved.<\/p>\n
Dear Hans, when we were discussing ecumenical matters recently, you asked me whether I would not be prepared, if need be, to make available my knowledge of foreign countries and my connections with people in public life in Europe and overseas, to assist in the acquisition of reliable information about foreign countries. I have been thinking the matter over. In the context of the problems you are interested in, the special feature of the ecumenical work is, of course, the fact that leading political personalities in various countries are interested in the movement, in which all the larger churches of the world, except the church of Rome, have joined together. So it really might not be difficult to learn the views and judgements of these personalities by way of such ecumenical relationships. Beyond that, I think it is quite within the realm of possibility that one might establish fresh contacts that could perhaps be of use in dealing with specialized questions \u2026 (DB-ER, 783)<\/p>\n
He then named a number of prominent foreign leaders such as Sir Stafford Cripps and Lord Lothian, for whose journal he had once provided an article on the church struggle. Lord Lothian was now dead, but had been living in 1940 at the time the letter was supposed to have been written, so his name helped make the false date credible.
\nLater in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote an essay entitled \u2018What does it mean to tell the truth?\u2019 This short treatise places his conduct during his hearings, and what he had already done in this fictitious letter, in the proper light. He was last person who would have assumed that he had the right to tell lies just for any reason he might think of.<\/p>\n
If one then asserts that a lie is the conscious deception of others, to their harm, this also would include, for example, the necessary deception of the enemy in war or in analogous situations. (Kant, of course, declared that he was too proud ever to tell an untruth, yet at the same time he was compelled to extend this assertion ad absurdum by declaring that if a friend sought refuge with him, he would feel obliged to provide truthful information to a criminal in pursuit of the friend) \u2026 (DBWE 16, 606\u201307)<\/p>\n
How do I speak a true word? 1) by recognizing who calls on me to speak and what authorizes me to speak; 2) by recognizing the place where I am standing; 3) by putting the subject I am speaking about into this context. (DBWE 16, 608)<\/p>\n
The fictitious letter he had written is clearly an \u2018analogous situation\u2019 to the necessity of deceiving the enemy in a time of war.
\nSo that their opponents would not notice that he and Dohnanyi had been warned, Bonhoeffer had to continue preparing for his intended travel abroad. It was to begin with a brief side trip to Switzerland. The journey was now set for January 1943, to demonstrate that Bonhoeffer\u2019s contacts were indispensable to Military Intelligence. This was also part of \u2018deceiving the enemy\u2019. Before the warning was received, he had been planning to travel, over three months, to Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy and Turkey, coming back to Berlin for debriefing after each journey. Around this time, Josef M\u00fcller went to Switzerland and then on to Rome. Since the expected strike by the SS against Canaris\u2019s office seemed not to be coming, the conspirators began to feel more confident again. But this was an illusion.<\/p>\n
The engagement<\/p>\n
At this moment of extreme tension, Maria von Wedemeyer decided not to wait out the \u2018year of separation\u2019 any longer, but rather to give Bonhoeffer her Yes. It would never have occurred to her to take such a step without telling her mother, but she was determined to have her way. Ruth von Wedemeyer gave in to her strong-willed daughter, but asked the engaged couple please not to announce their engagement yet, and especially to put off setting a date for their wedding. The letter in which Maria declared to Dietrich Bonhoeffer that she had decided to share her life with him reveals a remarkable strength of mind.<\/p>\n
Dear Pastor Bonhoeffer,<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve known ever since arriving home that I must write to you, and I\u2019ve looked forward to doing so.
\nI spoke with my mother and my uncle [Hans-J\u00fcrgen von Kleist Retzow] from Kieckow. Now I can write to you and ask you to answer this letter.
\nI find it hard to have to tell you in writing what can scarcely be uttered in person. I would rather disown every word that demands to be said on the subject, because it makes things that were better conveyed quietly sound so crude and clumsy. But, knowing from experience how well you understand me, I\u2019m now bold enough to write to you even though I\u2019ve really no right whatever to answer a question which you have never asked me.<\/p>\n
Maria von Wedemeyer after the Second World War<\/p>\n
With all my happy heart, I can now say yes.<\/p>\n
The day on which this letter was written, 13 January 1943, was henceforth regarded by the couple as the day they became engaged. Yet Maria von Wedemeyer had agreed to her mother\u2019s wish that they keep to the agreed-upon year of separation, because, as she wrote to Bonhoeffer, she felt she \u2018still needed some time to think\u2019.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s reply, in which he wrote \u2018Dear Maria\u2019 instead of \u2018Dear Miss Wedemeyer\u2019, overflowed with joy: \u2018\u2026 my heart is opening wide and brimming over with gratitude and confusion and still can\u2019t take it in\u2014the \u201cyes\u201d that is to determine the entire future course of our lives\u2019. And of course, he said, she must have whatever time and quiet she needed for her inner thoughts. \u2018With your \u201cyes\u201d, I too can now wait patiently; without that yes I was finding it hard, and would have found it increasingly so. Now that I know what you want and need, it\u2019s easy.\u2019<\/p>\n
The assassination attempts in March 1943<\/p>\n
It was in October 1941 that Major General Henning von Tresckow, Chief of Staff of the Central Army Group, made the first concrete plans, together with the Resistance Group in Military Intelligence, for an overthrow of Hitler. Even as retired General Chief of Staff, General Beck was able to keep the high commanders of this portion of the front\u2014first Field Marshal Bock and later Field Marshal Kluge\u2014surrounded by officers whom he trusted. Tresckow had worked doggedly to convince his superior, and in October 1942 Carl Goerdeler went to Smolensk for a confidential discussion with the procrastinating Kluge. At first there had been high hopes for Halder, but since Hitler had removed him all Resistance hopes were now concentrated on the group around Tresckow, all the more so when it became known that Hitler was planning to visit the Central Army Group of the Russian front. The decisive measures that would have to be taken from Berlin after a successful assassination would be in the hands of General Olbricht, head of the army office and a friend of Oster\u2019s.
\nAfter Hitler had postponed his visit to Smolensk several times, in February 1943 Fabian von Schlabrendorff appeared in Berlin with the news that Hitler was expected in Smolensk on 13 March. Dohnanyi immediately went there to make final arrangements with Tresckow. It was Bethge who drove him, in Karl Bonhoeffer\u2019s car (to which he was entitled as a doctor), to the night train to K\u00f6nigsberg, unaware that in Dohnanyi\u2019s suitcase was a newly developed English explosive which Military Intelligence had been able to obtain. The bomb was to be assembled in Smolensk. From East Prussia, Canaris and Dohnanyi flew to Kluge\u2019s headquarters, where the Admiral had arranged a meeting of all intelligence officers in the army group. Dohnanyi delivered the explosive, settled with Tresckow the code for notification of the plot\u2019s success, and returned immediately to Berlin.
\nWhen Hitler boarded his plane on 13 March, to fly back from Smolensk to his \u2018wolf\u2019s lair\u2019 in East Prussia, the conspirators had managed to smuggle aboard a small package containing the bombs disguised as two bottles of Cointreau. But although the time fuse worked, for reasons unknown to this day the bombs failed to explode, and Hitler\u2019s plane landed safely at his East Prussian headquarters. Schlabrendorff succeeded in retrieving the potentially fatal evidence, and those who knew about it celebrated this as a success in itself; but a tremendous opportunity for the conspiracy had passed. Hitler\u2019s death at such a distance from his assassins would have been nearly impossible to explain, and the centres of power in the Nazi government, the SS, the secret police and the Party apparatus would have been overwhelmed before they had a chance to protect themselves. But the conspirators did not lose a moment to discouragement. They did not even change the sequence of the plan, for only a few days later, on 21 March 1943, there would be an opportunity in Berlin for another attempt to kill Hitler.
\nIn Bavaria meanwhile, Bonhoeffer received a summons to report for induction into the military. On 22 March he was to appear in Munich with all his papers in order. This absolutely had to be prevented so that he would not become separated from Dohnanyi in what was a critically dangerous situation. For one last time, Dohnanyi\u2019s office connections worked and the summons was withdrawn. What the conspirators did not know, however, was that the SS had finally prevailed over the military and gained the consent of Keitel, chief of the Army High Command, for an investigation into the Schmidhuber case under the rubric \u2018deposit account\u2019.
\nThe 21st of March was Heroes\u2019 Remembrance Day, a Sunday. At the Schleichers\u2019 house in Marienburger Allee, the Bonhoeffer children, their spouses and the grandchildren, led by Eberhard Bethge, were rehearsing the cantata by the blind organist Helmuth Walcha, Lobe den Herrn, den m\u00e4chtigen K\u00f6nig der Ehren (Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation), for Karl Bonhoeffer\u2019s 75th birthday. In many Christian families at the time, the original chorale of 1680 by Joachim Neander of D\u00fcsseldorf was sung as a birthday hymn. On 31 March the Bonhoeffers were to perfom the cantata with instrumental accompaniment. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was at the grand piano, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher and Emmi Bonhoeffer played violin, Klaus Bonhoeffer cello, and everyone else made up the choir. A year later, Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter, smuggled out of the prison, to Bethge: \u2018That you succeeded, for instance, in getting Hans and Christel to sing with us is one of your best and most amazing accomplishments, and truly also a form of asserting yourself!\u2019 (DBWE 8, II\/117)<\/p>\n
Praise to the Lord, who o\u2019er all things so wondrously reigneth,
\nShieldeth thee under his wings, yea, so gently sustaineth,
\nHast thou not seen how thy desires have been
\nGranted in what he ordaineth \u2026<\/p>\n
So sang the little choir, while Hans von Dohnanyi kept looking at his watch, and his wife Christel whispered to her sister Ursula, \u2018It must go off any moment now!\u2019 In front of the house, Dohnanyi\u2019s official car was waiting to take him to the operations centre.
\nIn the Zeughaus, the Prussian war museum in the city centre, Hitler had arrived for a state ceremony. The conspirators had obtained his timetable beforehand. The solemnities were to be followed by an inspection tour of the Central Army unit\u2019s trophies. Colonel Gersdorff, Military Intelligence officer for the unit, was to conduct Hitler. He had a bomb hidden in his coat pocket, and planned to jump on the dictator and blow himself up with him. Gersdorff was one of several officers who had said they were prepared to carry out such an attack at the sacrifice of their own lives. But Hitler hurried through the exhibition in a few minutes, and left before the 10-minute fuse had time to work. Gersdorff had only a couple of minutes to reach the lavatory and defuse the bomb.
\nFor Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi, that Sunday morning was the high point in their lives. They had given their all to \u2018seize the spokes and stop the wheel\u2019, to change decisively the course of Germany\u2019s history. On that day, Hitler\u2019s fate hung on a knife\u2019s edge. Everything that was to take place after his death was planned in detail. After that morning, nothing was the same any longer. The cantata was performed for Karl Bonhoeffer\u2019s 75th birthday; but five days later, on 5 April 1943, Hans and Christine von Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were arrested. From then on they had to fight not only for their own lives, but above all to keep the conspiracy from being discovered. As Bethge says:<\/p>\n
The most promising period of the German resistance was over. Costly work had been done in vain, while fresh crimes and suffering mounted. What Stauffenberg was to say shortly before 20 July 1944 was already true: the overthrow can no longer change anything in the hopeless political and military situation. (DB-ER 780)<\/p>\n
11. In Prison (1943\u20131945)<\/p>\n
The arrests and first interrogations<\/p>\n
The head of the army legal department, Dr Lehmann, had assured Canaris at the beginning of April that nothing serious would happen in Dohnanyi\u2019s case in the next few days; he was hoping to get the matter out of the hands of the Gestapo. What he did not say was that, in February, Criminal Commissioner Franz-Xaver Sonderegger had written a report on the Schmidhuber case in which Josef M\u00fcller, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were all significantly implicated.
\nHeinrich M\u00fcller, the Gestapo chief, had agreed with Colonel Manfred Roeder, the investigating judge in the War Court, that he himself would pass this report to Himmler at the SS, while Roeder was to pass it on to Field Marshal Keitel, chief of the Army High Command. On the way to Keitel the report came first to Lehmann, who had two colleagues read it, and they concurred with him that the real target was Canaris. Lehmann telephoned Keitel, who agreed that the matter must be pursued, but if at all possible it should be done through the military justice system and not through the Reich SS Headquarters. Lehmann recommended to Keitel that the case be assigned to Roeder, because the SS would be satisfied and in this way the matter would stay within the jurisdiction of the War Court.
\nOn the morning of 5 April, Roeder appeared with Sonderegger at Canaris\u2019s office and announced that he had come to arrest Dohnanyi. Visibly shaken, the Military Intelligence chief showed him the way, and since Dohnanyi\u2019s office could only be entered through Oster\u2019s office, Oster also learned what Roeder\u2019s business was. He curtly demanded that Roeder arrest him as well, since Dohnanyi had not done anything without his knowledge. Dohnanyi, for his part, had cleared out his office thoroughly\u2014a fairly large sum of money belonging to the Confessing Church had been taken away to safety only a few days previously\u2014but it was a terrible shock to him when Roeder, Sonderegger, Oster and Canaris appeared in his office unannounced. His secretary later reported that he was still quite pale when he was led away.<\/p>\n
Criminal Commissioner Franz-Xaver Sonderegger directed the preliminary investigations and was assigned to work with the investigating judge, Roeder<\/p>\n
Roeder told Dohnanyi briefly that he was under arrest, and began to search the room. In the process something happened which was referred to, in the accounts that circulated after the war, as the \u2018Zettel affair\u2019. A Zettel, in German, is a slip of paper used for brief notes. Although Dohnanyi had cleared all incriminating papers out of his office, Roeder found, and laid on Dohnanyi\u2019s desk with a bundle of other files, a grey file folder marked with a Z, with notes on three topics that Dohnanyi had prepared for a meeting that afternoon. One concerned the situation of the Confessing Church; the second was the authorization by Military Intelligence of M\u00fcller\u2019s and Bonhoeffer\u2019s trip to Rome, planned for 9 April; the third appeared to give more details about Bonhoeffer\u2019s assignment there, though for those \u2018in the know\u2019 it was really about the work of the professors in Freiburg. The two emissaries were to explain in Rome that the coup attempts on 13 and 21 March had failed; what the note gave was their cover story, that the \u2018representative of a group of German Protestant clergymen who were discussing the concept of peace was to seek to influence the pope\u2019s Christmas peace message, which was expected to set forth the Catholic Church\u2019s ideas about peace, respected worldwide\u2019.
\nDohnanyi wanted to have this \u2018code message\u2019 approved by Canaris, and tried to pull the grey folder with these notes out of the pile Roeder had put on his desk, but Roeder stopped him. However, because a few minutes earlier Dohnanyi had whispered to Oster, \u2018Send my wife a note [Zettel]!\u2019 and Oster apparently caught only the word \u2018Zettel\u2019, the latter tried to pick up the note unobserved and put it in his coat pocket. Sonderegger saw him and pointed this out to Roeder, who ordered Oster to hand over the note and leave the room. The same day Roeder was able, with Keitel\u2019s consent, to have Oster suspended from his office on suspicion of being an accessory after the fact, and placed under house arrest. On 16 April he was dismissed as chief of staff for Military Intelligence and transferred to the officer reserves. Without realizing it, Roeder had paralysed the centre of the Resistance.<\/p>\n
Dohnanyi was taken to the military officers\u2019 prison, next to the Lehrter Railway Station, under top secret arrangements and confined there under a false name. The proceedings against him were to be classified and carried out as top secret. Roeder thought that in these \u2018Zettel\u2019 he had proof of high treason on Dohnanyi\u2019s part, a suspicion that seemed confirmed when Oster stated during an interrogation that he had never seen these notes, and had never signed the one he had tried to take, although it was found to have an initial O. on the back.<\/p>\n
Senior Military Prosecutor Manfred Roeder<\/p>\n
At noon that day, 5 April, at his parents\u2019 home, Bonhoeffer had tried to telephone his sister Christine; when an unfamiliar voice answered the phone, the thought flashed through his mind: her house is being searched! Without disturbing his parents, he went next door, where his sister Ursula prepared a hearty midday meal for him. Then he went to his study in the attic to ensure that every precaution had been taken should it be searched, and thereafter waited, with Ursula and R\u00fcdiger Schleicher as well as Eberhard Bethge, for whatever was to happen. About four o\u2019clock in the afternoon, his father came over and said, \u2018There are two men up in your room who would like to speak to you.\u2019 The two, Roeder and Sonderegger, had already arrested Christine von Dohnanyi, and they soon drove away with Bonhoeffer. In Munich that same day, Josef and Anni M\u00fcller were also arrested.
\nMaria von Wedemeyer was at the time in training as a nurse with the Red Cross in Hanover. Soon after that day she sealed the diary she had been keeping, and it was not opened again until after her death, when her correspondence with Bonhoeffer, the Love Letters from Cell 92, was being prepared for publication. On 5 April 1943 she had written, \u2018Has something bad happened? I\u2019m afraid it must be something very bad.\u2019 On 18 April she had leave to go to P\u00e4tzig for the confirmation of her brother Hans-Werner. While out for a walk with her brother-in-law, Klaus von Bismarck, she told him that despite the promise to her mother she was determined to see Dietrich. When the two of them returned to the house they met Maria\u2019s uncle, Hans-J\u00fcrgen von Kleist, who told them that Bonhoeffer had been arrested. As a sign of her commitment to her fianc\u00e9, Maria then insisted that their engagement be made public. Her mother agreed to this; she understood that her daughter could not now do otherwise.
\nThe conspirators\u2019 centre of operations had been destroyed in an instant by Dohnanyi\u2019s arrest and Oster\u2019s house arrest, and with others also arrested, they knew that their personal safety depended on how the prisoners stood up to interrogation. They could depend on the legal skills of Hans von Dohnanyi and Josef M\u00fcller, and their wives could credibly affirm that they themselves had known nothing. But would a clergyman, who could not deny that he had been involved, see through the cunning questions that a man like Roeder might ask in order to trap him? Bonhoeffer had been present at important discussions. His meeting with Bell had not only been approved by Beck; the general had himself ordered Bonhoeffer to give the names of all the Resistance leaders to the English bishop.
\nRoeder was known to be both clever and brutal. There was no doubt that the other conspirators would now have regarded Bonhoeffer as the weakest link in the chain. Only if he reacted correctly during interrogation could they construct a new centre of operations and begin their plans over again. If he failed to do so, they would all find themselves in Freisler\u2019s People\u2019s Court. Would Bonhoeffer stand up to physical pressure? As soon as Roeder found out that he had someone before him who was hiding important knowledge while pretending to be an unsuspecting pastor, he would have this prisoner tortured. Bonhoeffer would by no means be the first of Roeder\u2019s victims to receive such treatment. For the next few weeks, the fate of the Resistance movement depended upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
\nManfred Roeder, the man to whom the \u2018Dohnanyi case\u2019 had been assigned, and with whom Bonhoeffer too would have to fight out his case, belonged to the Air Force and liked to mention in passing that he was a regular visitor to Karinhall, G\u00f6ring\u2019s country palace. He had been the chief prosecutor against the \u2018Rote Kapelle\u2019, a Resistance group that had contacted the Soviet Union in the hope of overthrowing Hitler with the help of Russia. Only by mentioning Roeder\u2019s name had G\u00f6ring been able to get Hitler\u2019s consent to holding their trial in the War Court instead of the People\u2019s Court. Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer, too, were to be tried in the War Court, but the SS promised in advance to give Roeder its full support. For the SS Headquarters, it was only a side issue to get rid of these men as \u2018enemies of the State\u2019. The crucial goal was to eliminate Canaris\u2019s office, so as to incorporate Military Intelligence at last into the SS Headquarters. For this purpose a room in the SS Headquarters had been assigned to Roeder, who had ties to several high-ranking SS officers; Sonderegger, who had investigated the Schmidhuber case in Munich, had been assigned to work for him.
\nRoeder had secured 45 death sentences in the trial of the \u2018Rote Kapelle\u2019, and was still proud of it after the war. He was unscrupulous to the point of having Liane Berkowitz beheaded only a few days after the birth of her first child, and after the war it was said that he had even had pregnant women put to death. The former Prussian Minister of Culture and later director of Northwest German Radio, Adolf Grimme, was also caught up in this trial. He said after the war that Roeder proved to be \u2018one of the most inhuman, cynical and brutal Nazis\u2019 he had ever encountered.
\nThe \u2018Rote Kapelle\u2019 was not recognized as a Resistance group until long after 1945, because it had maintained contacts with the Soviet Union. The group had operated through secret radio transmitters; such operators were known among newscasters as \u2018pianists\u2019, hence the nickname \u2018Rote Kapelle [Red Band]\u2019. The group had been broken up because of inadequately coded Soviet messages containing addresses, which the Gestapo had been able to decode. The first 12 death sentences were handed down on 19 December 1942 and carried out rapidly, one every three minutes, three days later at Pl\u00f6tzensee Prison. Hitler had had the trials of Mildred Harnack and Countess Erika Brockdorff transferred to another panel of judges in the War Court, so that their sentences could be changed from the penitentiary to death sentences.
\nThe prosecution of subgroups of the \u2018Rote Kapelle\u2019 was still going on while Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were being interrogated. So Dohnanyi had to resolve to face a hard struggle, and everything depended on Bonhoeffer\u2019s keeping exactly to the rules on which they had agreed for such an eventuality. One of these was that whenever a subject looked to him like dangerous territory, he must say it was Dohnanyi\u2019s responsibility; the latter would be best able to see through and defend himself against the question.
\nRoeder saw Dohnanyi as his real opponent, and presumably thought that a clergyman would in any case be no match for him. In this way he played into the hands of both prisoners. The first stage of Bonhoeffer\u2019s imprisonment mirrored the situation of his brother-in-law, who became the subject of his first interrogations. To make it clear that he was to be considered the truly responsible party, Dohnanyi gave up his chance to write an Easter letter to his family and wrote instead, on 23 April, a letter to Bonhoeffer which was really intended for Roeder\u2019s censoring eyes:<\/p>\n
My dear Dietrich, I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll be allowed to send you this greeting, but I\u2019ll try. Outside, the church bells are ringing for the service \u2026 You can\u2019t imagine how unhappy I am to be the reason that you, Christel, the children and our parents should have to suffer like this, and that my dear wife and you should have your freedom taken away \u2026 If I knew that you all\u2014that you personally\u2014did not think badly of me, I\u2019d feel so relieved. What wouldn\u2019t I give to know that you were all free again; what wouldn\u2019t I take upon myself if you could be spared this affliction. It was wonderful to be able to see you. I\u2019ve been allowed to see Christel too\u2014but what can you say in front of other people \u2026 No one can know what it means not to be able to be with her in this time of trial. It certainly does not help in the matter \u2026 (DB-ER 800\u20131)<\/p>\n
The style of the letters Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer wrote in prison is nothing if not admirable. They had to admit what their position was as captives in the hands of their persecutors. At the same time, they wanted to show the recipients of their letters: we are keeping our composure, just as you are. What we shall have to endure, we can bear, and we are not giving up the fight for our future. Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer replied in the same vein. After their first visit to Dietrich, his father wrote:<\/p>\n
It has definitely been very reassuring for us to be able to speak with you the other day, to see with our own eyes that you are physically quite well, and that you are bearing the awful trial that has been imposed upon you with internal composure and the confidence that comes from a clear conscience. (DBWE 8, I\/21)<\/p>\n
Roeder treated Dohnanyi from the beginning as a criminal who was guilty of high treason. He gave hints that there was interest in this case at the highest levels of the Reich, and indeed not only Keitel had been informed, but also Gestapo chief M\u00fcller, Central Security chief Kaltenbrunner and Himmler as head of the SS, the Party general secretary Bormann and even Hitler himself\u2014not just about the investigation leading to the prosecution but equally about the course of the proceedings themselves. Roeder refused to have Dohnanyi\u2019s statements correctly recorded, took documents away from him that were intended for his defence and even tried to keep him from engaging a defence lawyer. Even so, after months of effort, Roeder still had not succeeded in bringing charges against him that would hold water. As a jurist he was simply not Dohnanyi\u2019s equal.
\nChristine von Dohnanyi was released from the women\u2019s prison, sick and miserable, on 30 April. As her husband\u2019s closest confidante she had such an exceptional knowledge of his affairs that she could mobilize help immediately when it was needed. First she gave her attention to the \u2018Zettel affair\u2019. There had been precise discussion and agreement as to how communications were to be maintained in such a situation, so it was not long until Oster was informed, through a secret message from Dohnanyi, as to why it was crucial for all concerned that he acknowledge the content of the notes about Bonhoeffer\u2019s intended trip to Rome. He immediately retracted his former statement and acknowledged the Zettel with the \u2018O.\u2019 on the back as having been initialled by him. Soon afterwards, Dohnanyi, Oster and Canaris were able to make Roeder accept the version that the Zettel was a normal, encoded Military Intelligence document.
\nIn the background the struggle was continuing between the two opposing groups within Military Intelligence. Oster\u2019s and Dohnanyi\u2019s main opponents among their colleagues were the office manager, Colonel Johannes Toeppen, and the director of the legal affairs group, Walter Herzlieb. Both these men hated Oster, and especially Dohnanyi, because of the position of trust they enjoyed with Admiral Canaris, so Toeppen repeatedly provided Roeder with material that would arouse fresh suspicions against Dohnanyi. Meanwhile Klaus Bonhoeffer\u2019s brother-in-law Justus Delbr\u00fcck, Baron Karl-Ludwig von Guttenberg and others were helping Canaris to refute Roeder\u2019s points for his charges against Dohnanyi. Roeder was not in the good graces of his superior, Dr Lehmann, head of the Army legal department, who was able to keep the accused prisoners from being expelled from the military. This was important, because otherwise they would have been turned over to the SS immediately.<\/p>\n
The members of the ZB (Foreign Policy Reporting) office in the Military Intelligence Central Office: (left to right) Baron Karl-Ludwig von Guttenberg, Hans von Dohnanyi and Justus Delbr\u00fcck. Photo from Hans Oster\u2019s birthday party in 1942<\/p>\n
What was simply decisive, however, was the help of Justice Karl Sack of the General Staff, with whom Dohnanyi had already collaborated on the Fritsch case. R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, in his uniform as a member of the Air Force legal department, could go in and out of Sack\u2019s office without attracting attention. It was more dangerous for Perels as a civilian, but he too received information and warnings from Sack, on an ongoing basis, to take to the Bonhoeffer family for concealment in books and food packages destined for the two prisoners.
\nNevertheless, over the course of time Sack and Dohnanyi came to assess the situation differently. Dohnanyi, and Bonhoeffer too, were trying to obtain the earliest possible dates for their trials, both hoping to be acquitted. Sack, however, could see more clearly than Dohnanyi could in prison the danger to Admiral Canaris\u2019s Military Intelligence office. He was afraid that the entire case would be submitted to Hitler for his decision, if there were no success in depoliticizing the proceedings. He wanted to get Roeder removed from the case; moreover, he wanted to let the whole business \u2018run out of steam\u2019 until the coup, which was once again being feverishly prepared. A new centre for the conspiracy was taking shape in the office of General Olbricht, chief of the General Army office, with Count Claus von Stauffenberg as its driving force.
\nRoeder had thought at first that in the suspect \u2018Zettel\u2019 he had proof that Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer had committed high treason. But nothing he did\u2014not allowing Dohnanyi to read, write or smoke; threatening to \u2018finish him off\u2019 and that Hitler would make \u2018short work\u2019 of him if he didn\u2019t open up\u2014brought anything more than Dohnanyi\u2019s insistence that the note was normal Military Intelligence material. When Oster confirmed this on 17 June, and Canaris had repudiated every suspicion cast on his staff, not much was left of this first line of attack. So Roeder seized upon \u2018Operation 7\u2019. He succeeded in having a lawyer sent to Switzerland to interrogate the rescued Jews, but they were not deceived. And when the lawyer saw for what purpose his services had been used, he told Klaus Bonhoeffer, with whom he was acquainted, about his trip and its outcome. When Canaris found out that Toeppen had engineered the sending of this lawyer, he dismissed Toeppen from Military Intelligence.
\nIt would be characteristic of Roeder that he could not imagine why Dohnanyi had organized \u2018Operation 7\u2019, since there was no indication he had profited financially by it. It was Toeppen who had repeatedly insinuated that he had, though Toeppen had to be careful because he and some friends had themselves engaged in transfers of currency, which they did not want brought to light. As an official who was meticulous to a fault, Dohnanyi found these suspicions especially distasteful even though they did not lead anywhere. Meanwhile, investigation of exemptions of Confessing Church pastors from military service proved laborious, as we shall see in Bonhoeffer\u2019s case. Furthermore, in pursuing this line Roeder had moved rather far afield from charges like high treason. In the end he got tangled up in trying to prove irregularities in Dohnanyi\u2019s accounting for currency exchanges, taxes, travel expenses and interest charges.
\nAt this point Sack succeeded in convincing Keitel that Roeder and the SS Headquarters actually had Canaris in their sights instead of Dohnanyi, and that their aim was to weaken the military to the advantage of the SS. Keitel had Dr Lehmann examine the files and, on receiving his report, gave the order on 23 July 1943 that this case was not to be continued on charges of high treason. That did not leave anything very weighty to pursue.
\nDohnanyi\u2019s imprisonment was a period of unparalleled suffering. He had a much harder time of it than Bonhoeffer. It began with a bad case of phlebitis in both legs. His family wanted to bring in the leading Berlin physician Dr Ferdinand Sauerbruch, but Roeder prevented them. During an air raid in November 1943, in which Roeder\u2019s court files were destroyed by fire, a firebomb struck Dohnanyi\u2019s cell, and when the guards finally came to check on his welfare he had suffered an embolism in his brain. Sack and Lehmann could not reach Roeder by telephone and decided to have Dohnanyi taken to the Charit\u00e9 Hospital under Sauerbruch\u2019s care. Roeder turned up there two days later, raging to have his victim returned to him, but Sauerbruch would not release Dohnanyi, saying he was in danger of further embolisms.
\nRoeder ordered that no one but Dohnanyi\u2019s wife and children was to see or speak with him; but Sauerbruch and his assistant allowed all visitors who were important to the patient to visit him at night during blackouts. Roeder must have suspected this, for after a time he sent an ambulance with medical orderlies to move Dohnanyi to a prison hospital. Sauerbruch sent them away. But in January he had to go out of town, and Roeder immediately appeared at the Charit\u00e9 Hospital and took Dohnanyi to the prison hospital in Buch on the north side of Berlin.
\nThere, Roeder obtained Keitel\u2019s permission for Professor Max de Crinis to examine Dohnanyi, to certify whether he was fit for normal imprisonment and for interrogations. De Crinis was the successor to Karl Bonhoeffer, who had retired as head of the Charit\u00e9 Hospital\u2019s Psychiatric department in 1938, and his first act as the new chief had been to have a large bust of Hitler installed in the foyer. He was a civilian SS member and had friends among the SS leaders. He provided a report exactly to Roeder\u2019s liking, sent a notice to SS Headquarters that his recommendations had been carried out, and asked that Central Security chief Kaltenbrunner be informed.<\/p>\n
In the Tegel military prison<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer was brought to the Tegel prison in the early evening of 5 April 1943. As soon as he was allowed to write to his parents, he assured them that he was all right and didn\u2019t really need anything, but he later gave quite another description of his situation to his friend Eberhard Bethge. In December 1943 he wrote a letter imagining that the two of them were sitting together in the evening as they used to do.<\/p>\n
Then I would first have infinitely many questions for you \u2026 And finally I would begin to tell you, e.g., that, despite everything I have written it is horrible here, that the dreadful impressions often pursue me well into the night, and that I can cope with them only by reciting countless verses of hymns, and that then my awakening sometimes begins with a sigh instead of with the praise of God. (DBWE 8, II\/86)<\/p>\n
This was written after he had been in prison for eight months. Outwardly he was always composed, but he asked his friend, \u2018What does composure [Haltung] mean, actually?\u2026 one knows less about oneself than ever, and one no longer cares to know.\u2019
\nAround this time he wrote an official report in which he described the beginning of his imprisonment in such detail that we today can still feel how abominable it was.<\/p>\n
For the first night I was locked in a reception cell; the blankets on the cot stank so abominably that in spite of the cold, it was impossible to cover oneself with them. The next morning a piece of bread was thrown into my cell, so that I had to pick it up off the floor \u2026 For the first time my cell was invaded by the foul curses inflicted on persons detained for interrogation by the prison staff; since then I have heard the abuse daily from morning till night. (DBWE 8, II\/131)<\/p>\n
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Tegel Prison, Berlin, summer 1944<\/p>\n
There were 800 prisoners awaiting trial in Tegel. Week after week, some twenty of them were condemned to death, mostly on convictions of \u2018undermining Germany\u2019s defences\u2019 (i.e. talking against the regime).<\/p>\n
Then new prisoners would arrive. Those condemned to death were confined on the top floor, where Bonhoeffer also was assigned at first. In the daytime the prison was noisy, but at night he could hear the prisoners under death sentences, who occasionally wept. He learned how to communicate with his neighbours by knocking, and like all the inmates he could tell when the condemned ones were being taken away for execution. In his poem \u2018Night Voices in Tegel\u2019, written in prison, he described this:<\/p>\n
A low voice reads something, brusque and cold.
\nCompose yourself, Brother, soon it will be finished,
\nsoon! soon!
\nCourageous and proud are your steps I now hear.
\nNo longer mindful of the moment that\u2019s near,
\nyou see future times coming clear.
\n(DBWE 8, III\/175)<\/p>\n
It is not by chance that the word \u2018decision\u2019 was one of the most important words in Bonhoeffer\u2019s life and theology. That people he did not know, who were hostile to his way of thinking, now had the power to decide what happened to him was hard to bear. He had known handcuffs only from the cinema; now they were put on him whenever he was taken from his cell to Roeder\u2019s interrogations in the War Court. One of the guards called him a \u2018scoundrel\u2019, and it was all so unaccustomed and humiliating that during the first phase of the interrogations Bonhoeffer must have been going through \u2018prison shock\u2019. Roeder knew how to exploit this condition, which made the situation more dangerous.
\nBonhoeffer wrote notes on such slips of paper as he could find, often single words. On one, \u2018discontent\u2019, \u2018tension\u2019, \u2018impatience\u2019, are followed by \u2018suicide, not out of a sense of guilt, but because I am practically dead already, the closing of the book, sum total\u2019 (DBWE 8, I\/12). These must stand for a great deal more. No human being knows how he or she would react to being wounded and tortured. But Bonhoeffer knew how much depended on his not revealing the real context of his draft exemption as a secret agent. In case of doubt, taking his own life would be preferable to betraying his friends. Suicide would be the ultimate consequence of the decision he had made in 1940 to work for the conspiracy; it would be dictated by his ethical convictions. Moreover, the depression which followed his \u2018prison shock\u2019 would have played a role in the idea of \u2018ending it all\u2019. But Bonhoeffer soon put this thought aside and never mentioned it again.
\nDuring this early phase of his imprisonment, nothing helped Bonhoeffer more than his acquaintance with the monastic life and his own experiences of it in Finkenwalde and Ettal. A monk also lives in a \u2018cell\u2019, and knows life in two modes, the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, the active life and the life of contemplation and prayer. Bonhoeffer had been torn from his active life from one day to the next. He had not chosen to live in a cell as he now was obliged to do; but he succeeded in transforming the vita contemplativa that had been forced upon him into one that he could affirm with his inner being, and thus overcame the \u2018prison shock\u2019.
\nHis Bible had been returned to him on the third day. Now he could go back to reading regularly, as he had done in Finkenwalde, the daily texts indicated in his Moravian devotional book, meditate on them, commit Bible texts to memory and say aloud the hymns of the great German poet Paul Gerhardt that he already knew by heart. He began to observe carefully what went on around him and how this affected his thoughts and feelings; he devised a daily schedule, including physical exercises, and kept to it with an iron will. He knew he had to show himself to be equal to a formidable opponent, and had to prepare himself in body and spirit for the struggle. Bonhoeffer realized right away that Roeder \u2018would have liked to finish me off\u2019 (DBWE 8, II\/79), but he never gave any outward indication that he knew this. Since politeness was second nature to him, he was able to play the role of the guileless pastor who doesn\u2019t know how to defend himself in court. Roeder had a reputation for vanity, so he was probably flattered when Bonhoeffer wrote that he couldn\u2019t keep up with the tempo set by the \u2018honourable Senior Military Prosecutor\u2019 during the interrogations.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s cell in Tegel Prison, Berlin<\/p>\n
Since Roeder was treating Bonhoeffer like a convicted criminal, he could never have gained a true picture of the man in front of him during these interrogations. Though he did not treat Bonhoeffer quite as brutally as Dohnanyi, he used coarse language and tried in all sorts of ways to hoodwink his prisoner. Bonhoeffer had no experience in dealing with the justice system, and the interrogations must have made him somewhat apprehensive. Yet even so, he thwarted Roeder\u2019s attempts to lure him into serious contradictions, thanks initially to his strict observance of Dohnanyi\u2019s warning to plead ignorance and assign all responsibility to him, Dohnanyi. Later, when Bonhoeffer was allowed visits from his parents, the family network helped. Concealed messages let him in on Roeder\u2019s strategy, so that he could coordinate his statements with Dohnanyi\u2019s line of defence. No one played a greater role in this than Christine von Dohnanyi, who would find out from her husband how Bonhoeffer should conduct himself and then get the answer to him without ever making the slightest mistake.
\nBonhoeffer was soon allowed to have books of his own brought to him, with his name written on the flyleaf. If the family had underlined the name, the book contained a message. Beginning at the back, on every tenth page a single letter was marked lightly with a pencil. On noting these letters in order, Bonhoeffer would have a sentence before him, such as \u2018Oster now acknowledges Zettel.\u2019 Bonhoeffer could also return books in which he concealed replies or questions in the same way.
\nThe conditions of his imprisonment were greatly eased when his mother asked her cousin, General Paul von Hase, who happened to be the city commander of Berlin, to ring up the Tegel prison and ask how his nephew, imprisoned there, was getting along. Since the prison was under Hase\u2019s command, his telephone call caused great excitement. From one day to the next, Bonhoeffer became a sort of \u2018star prisoner\u2019. The prison commander stretched his visitation privileges as far as they would go, and all packages delivered by his family were received by the prisoner, which greatly improved his diet. Bonhoeffer was allowed to go to the infirmary, at first because he needed treatment himself, later in order to help out there. Guards who had treated him badly now tried to flatter him, to his boundless disgust. But there were at least three who were anti-Nazi and who, he soon found, were honest through and through. They were prepared to help him in any way. It was they who made possible his \u2018illegal correspondence\u2019 with Eberhard Bethge, containing his new theological reflections while in Tegel, and carried news back and forth between him and his family, although they were putting themselves in danger by doing so.
\nOf course the books brought to Bonhoeffer from home had another use as well. He had known and loved German literature since his schooldays, and now it helped him escape from Tegel into another and better world. At no other time of his life did he read so many novels, stories and plays as in the first months of his imprisonment. A few books he had been allowed, as early as April, to borrow from the prison library. Roeder, since he was in charge of investigating Bonhoeffer, read what he said about his reading in his letters, and prison officials listened to his conversations with his visitors. Here, exchanges of opinion on nineteenth-century literature became an elevated and non-incriminating topic, and also helped Bonhoeffer to shield his parents from the reality of Tegel Prison.<\/p>\n
The situation as such, that is the individual moment, is in fact often not so different from being someplace else. I read, reflect, work, write, pace the room\u2014and I really do so without rubbing myself sore on the wall like a polar bear \u2026 By the way, I have my Bible and reading material from the library here \u2026 I am treated well and read a lot, besides the newspaper and novels especially the Bible. (DBWE 8, I\/17, 2 and 6)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer must have read the Party newspapers in the way pastors read Neues Deutschland later in communist East Germany\u2014quickly and knowing exactly the real conditions they concealed\u2014but he mentioned reading the papers especially for Roeder\u2019s benefit. The novels he mentioned were also named for the benefit of the man who wanted to \u2018finish him off\u2019, since novels are so unthreatening. But even they quickly gained their own importance, as we can see from Bonhoeffer\u2019s comments. We learn that in the prison library he found works by the great Austrian poet Adalbert Stifter, and by Jeremias Gotthelf, K. L. Immermann, Theodor Fontane and Gottfried Keller, and that he read these authors \u2018with new admiration\u2019 because of their beautifully clear language. Unfortunately we are not always given the exact titles he read, but as soon as his family was allowed to bring books, he asked for Fontane\u2019s The Stechlin,Jenny Treibel and Entanglements. The period of Bonhoeffer\u2019s interrogations, during which he was also trying to write a play himself, seems to be the time when he did by far the most reading. From 23 May 1943 onwards, his parents were allowed to visit at regular intervals. The first book he asked them to bring was a volume from a set of Stifter. After that, they brought books by Gotthelf, a Swiss pastor and poet, about whom he remarked in the draft for a letter:<\/p>\n
I greatly enjoyed reading Jeremias Gotthelf again, whom, in his clear, healthy, quiet style, I consider to be one of our very great writers. Someone ought to publish a selection of his writings [Brevier] sometime \u2026 Adalbert Stifter\u2019s background is also primarily Christian\u2014his forest descriptions, by the way, often make me yearn for the quiet forest meadows near Friedrichsbrunn. Stifter is not as strong as Gotthelf, yet he has a wonderful simplicity and clarity that gives me great joy. (DBWE 8, I\/9, note 6 and I\/17)<\/p>\n
In time, Stifter was to become his favourite author:<\/p>\n
Actually I am reading some Stifter nearly every day. The sheltered and concealed life of his characters\u2014he is so pleasantly old fashioned in exclusively portraying sympathetic characters\u2014has something very soothing in this atmosphere, and focuses one\u2019s thoughts on the essential purposes in life. Here in the cell, one is both outwardly and inwardly led back to the most basic things in life; thus, for example, Rilke was no help at all. But maybe one\u2019s intellect also suffers somewhat from the constriction under which one lives? (DBWE 8, I\/25)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s comment about Rilke led to a lively exchange about literature in letters between him and his fianc\u00e9e, as we shall see.
\nThat he left us drafts of letters, in addition to the letters themselves, has to do with the fact that prisoners were only allowed to write one letter every ten days, of a length which could not exceed precise limits. Since Bonhoeffer had so much he wanted to say, he made drafts of almost all his letters before writing final versions. During the interrogations his letters landed first on Roeder\u2019s desk, and the latter could decide whether to keep them or send them on. Later they were read by another censor. Bonhoeffer kept his drafts and, along with his other writings, turned them over to his father for safekeeping.
\nAmong the most important of Bonhoeffer\u2019s writings are the drafts for his letters to Roeder, in which he corrected some of his statements and re-emphasized others. These make it possible, still today, to follow the lines along which Roeder proceeded and Bonhoeffer defended himself. The drafts are now preserved in the Federal Archives in Berlin. These pages, written in pencil which has now faded, show how a prisoner, decades ago, pursued a struggle in which a single word could make the difference between life and death.<\/p>\n
Further interrogations and the defeat of Roeder<\/p>\n
During the early weeks of the interrogations Roeder had given orders that Bonhoeffer could write his one letter to his parents every ten days, but otherwise could have no contact with the outside world. Since at this time the guards were still mistreating him, it was hard to bear. But Bonhoeffer did not give any hint of this in his letters home, not only to spare his parents, but because in his family one did not whine or complain over one\u2019s hard lot. Instead he wrote, \u2018I am now learning daily how good my life with you has always been, and besides, I now have to practise myself what I have told others in my sermons and books\u2019 (DBWE 8, I\/9). This sentence both conceals the disgust he felt at the conditions in Tegel during the phase of the interrogations, and says to his parents, but most of all to himself, that the time in prison was going to be a trial of his faith. Everything he had said previously about the Church, about life as a disciple of Jesus and the reality of God, was now being put to the test. He recognized this at the beginning of his imprisonment and it guided his life all the way until 9 April 1945. In this way he became the \u2018witness to Jesus Christ among his brothers\u2019, as the simple tablet says in the church at Flossenb\u00fcrg.
\nSince Bonhoeffer\u2019s case was closely connected to that of his brother-in-law Dohnanyi, his interrogations dealt with the same topics in the same order. The first, however, was Bonhoeffer\u2019s exemption from military service. Roeder claimed that he had really only been motivated by the desire to escape from his duty to report his movements as ordered by the Gestapo, and from his ban on public speaking. Bonhoeffer countered that the orders from the Gestapo had been a routine matter and also involved six other clergymen.<\/p>\n
\u2026 in order to avoid all further grounds for dispute, I had withdrawn to the Bavarian Alps to work on an extensive scholarly project and as required had reported this to the State Police \u2026 Despite considerable inner reservations, I seized the possibility, opened to me by my brother-in-law, of entering into Military Intelligence service and utilizing my church connections, because it promised me the engagement in the war effort I had sought since the beginning of the war and in fact in my role as a theologian. (DBWE 16, 417)<\/p>\n
He described the exemption obtained for him by Military Intelligence as a relief to him, coming as it did immediately after the orders received from the Gestapo, since he saw it as an opportunity to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the authorities. The knowledge that he was needed by a department of the military had, he emphasized, been very important to him, and he couldn\u2019t imagine that there could be any objection to a draft exemption to allow him to work for Military Intelligence, since he had been told that it was Admiral Canaris\u2019s wish and was done on his orders.<\/p>\n
To my occasional question whether difficulties might not arise for either Military Intelligence or for me because of my state police record, I was told that these things did not mean anything for military duty and, in addition, Military Intelligence works with all sorts of people who are useful to it. So I felt quite reassured. (DBWE 16, 419)<\/p>\n
His notes for the draft of this statement included what Oster had said: \u2018We work with enemies, Communists, Jews\u2014why not with the Confessing Church as well?\u2019 but this would have been an unnecessary provocation for Roeder.
\nRoeder now produced another suspicion: that Bonhoeffer had only made use of the draft exemption in order to continue working for the Church, and that this had been confirmed by General Superintendent Dibelius. This was a lie which Bonhoeffer could easily see through, since he had told Dibelius and Diestel that he was working for the Army High Command in Munich and abroad. Thus they could not have been counting on him for any ongoing employment in the Church. Roeder then told him that Consul Schmidhuber had testified in quite other terms than these, about his draft exemption, but Bonhoeffer replied that he had been told that the admiral did not want Schmidhuber to be informed about the assignments that he, Bonhoeffer, had personally undertaken. So such a statement could only represent very inexact knowledge, if not simply suppositions.
\nShortly before the charge of treason was dropped, Bonhoeffer summed up his defence in a letter to Roeder, beginning as always with the salutation \u2018Dear Senior Military Prosecutor Roeder\u2019:<\/p>\n
For you there can certainly be nothing conclusive (but perhaps you will believe it of me personally, and in this hope I will express it) about the fact that it is very painful for me to see how my early conflicts with the secret police which, I am deeply convinced, arose from conduct strictly confined to church affairs, have now led to my being considered capable of so serious a crime against the obvious duty of a German towards my people [Volk] and Reich. I also still cannot believe that this accusation has actually been made against me. If this were my attitude, would I then have found my fianc\u00e9e, who herself has lost father and brother at the front, from within a long-standing family of officers, all of whose fathers and sons have served in the field as officers since the beginning of the war, many serving with the highest decorations and making the ultimate blood sacrifice? Would I then, immediately before outbreak of war, severing all the commitments I had made in America, have returned to Germany, where of course I had to reckon with my immediate induction? Would I then, immediately following the outbreak of the war, have volunteered as a military chaplain? Anyone who wishes to become acquainted with my conception of the Christian obligation of duty towards the governing authorities should read my exegesis of Romans 13 in my book Discipleship. The appeal to submit oneself to the will and the demands of the governing authorities for the sake of Christian conscience has probably seldom been expressed more strongly than there. (DBWE 16, 422)<\/p>\n
If Roeder had bothered to obtain the book himself, he would not, of course, have found very much about being \u2018subject to the governing authorities\u2019 (Romans 13:1). Instead, Bonhoeffer had written: \u2018No authority can legitimately interpret Paul\u2019s words as a divine justification of its existence \u2026 Those in authority \u2026 could never interpret it as a divine authorization of their conduct in office\u2019 (DBWE 4, 241\u201342). When he wrote this, he had intended it not only to oppose a false understanding of Luther\u2019s \u2018doctrine of the two kingdoms\u2019, but also to oppose Hitler\u2019s acts of violence disguised in religious language.
\nIn June 1943 Roeder decided to look into \u2018Operation 7\u2019. Here Bonhoeffer had to be especially careful to avoid unintentionally contradicting testimony by Dohnanyi or Canaris. But his part in this matter only amounted to a side issue. He had arranged for Charlotte Friedenthal to be rescued, and also arranged the decisive conversation in Basel between Consul Schmidhuber and Alphons Koechlin, president of the Swiss Protestant Church Federation which was aiding these Jewish refugees. He did not deny that it had been personally very important to him to help Charlotte Friedenthal. He also recalled that she had asked him whether he thought she could responsibly accept the spying assignment that Military Intelligence was giving her, and he had said that she could. But he added that he had never learned specifically what her assignment was to be. This he could say truly, since it had never existed.
\nWhat Roeder was actually looking for was evidence that this was a rescue operation to get around the SS deportations of Jews. Therefore the accused had to show that Military Intelligence had actually begun working on it long before the beginning of the deportations, and here Bonhoeffer, who had not seen this at first, had to retract a statement he had made. He therefore wrote to Roeder correcting his testimony that he had asked Schmidhuber in the spring of 1942 to speak with Koechlin; he had now remembered that it must have been soon after August 1941. Canaris, however, was able to cover the entire operation in such a commanding way that Roeder had to let the matter drop.
\nIt is still amazing to consider that Roeder scarcely asked Bonhoeffer anything about his trips abroad. If he had \u2018put the screws on\u2019 his victim here, Bonhoeffer could possibly have encountered difficulties. As it turned out, the travel only played a role in Roeder\u2019s claim that Bonhoeffer had violated the Gestapo\u2019s ban on his visiting Berlin. But there Bonhoeffer knew easily which card to play: that he had to be available to the Berlin office before and after each journey, in particular when it was a special assignment directly from the admiral. He also pointed out that he had earlier been granted specific permission to visit his parents, and that when he had double pneumonia in the winter of 1941 they had insisted on having him cared for at home.
\nThat Roeder aimed his attacks only at Bonhoeffer\u2019s draft exemption and not at his travels shows how precisely the network of family and friends was functioning. Roeder\u2019s methods of investigation didn\u2019t take him anywhere near the real problem. He had two opponents of the regime in his hands, who knew about all the assassination attempts; Dohnanyi had even obtained the explosive for one attempt and brought it to Schlabrendorff, so had been actively involved. But Roeder never found the slightest hint that there was a conspiracy against Hitler.
\nOn 5 April 1943 in Dohnanyi\u2019s office, Roeder had also found a letter from Bonhoeffer asking his brother-in-law to prevent the call-up to military service \u2018threatening\u2019 Wilhelm Niesel, an important member of the Council of Brethren who had been Bonhoeffer\u2019s superior when he was director of the \u2018illegal\u2019 seminary at Finkenwalde. Such a request could possibly lead to a death sentence, since \u2018undermining Germany\u2019s defences\u2019, even by talking against the draft, was a capital crime. Death sentences were handed down for much less serious \u2018crimes\u2019. All Bonhoeffer could do was write another of his letters to Roeder, attempting at least to get out of this trap as well.<\/p>\n
Dear Senior Military Prosecutor Roeder:<\/p>\n
I am truly sorry to trouble you repeatedly in this way, but I dare not neglect to tell you something that seems important to me, and so I beg you sincerely to excuse this claim on your time as well. Yesterday when you read to me from my long-forgotten letter to my brother-in-law, I myself was initially profoundly shocked by the word \u2018threat\u2019 in connection with Niesel\u2019s being drafted, and did not understand how I could have arrived at this sort of expression; and I must confess that this language, in and of itself, does truly make a very unpleasant impression. (DBWE 16, 422)<\/p>\n
But he then went on to explain that Niesel, if he had been a staff member of a church authority recognized by the state, would certainly have been classified as worthy of an exemption. Only a church which stands firm in its faith can carry out the difficult task which it owes its homeland during a war; it is called to unwavering trust in God, strong inner resistance, steadfastness, firm confidence and offering person-to-person pastoral care to those fighting to defend the homeland. One might think whatever one likes of the Confessing Church, he continued, but certainly it could not be reproached with speaking of the call-up to military service as a threat. He said that the Confessing Church pastors he had met considered their call-up as a liberation from heavy inner pressure, because at last they could give proof that they too were ready to sacrifice themselves; thus even Martin Niem\u00f6ller had volunteered.<\/p>\n
I know that even religious persons can judge the church very differently, but especially in wartime no one dare desire to deny that the motive for another\u2019s conviction and action is love of the German people and the wish to serve them during the war as much as possible. (DBWE 16, 424)<\/p>\n
Then he spoke of his conversation with Justice Minister G\u00fcrtner in Ettal, when G\u00fcrtner had said he would do what he could to gain exemptions for Confessing Church pastors. Bonhoeffer therefore felt himself obliged to make every effort on Niesel\u2019s behalf, in order to enable the church\u2019s response to the war effort to be the strongest and most fluent within its power (DBWE 16, 422ff). Of course this letter would hardly have stopped Roeder from demanding that Bonhoeffer be put to death for \u2018undermining Germany\u2019s defences\u2019, but before he could do so the opposition succeeded in taking the trial out of his hands and having him promoted away from Berlin.
\nDuring the interrogations, Bonhoeffer wrote the short essay \u2018What does it mean to tell the truth?\u2019 of which we have already spoken. Only by his ensuring that he did not take a single step away from the path on which he and Dohnanyi had agreed could the conspirators keep working to end Hitler\u2019s system of injustice. To have told the \u2018truth\u2019 that Roeder was trying to get from him would have been utter betrayal. That Bonhoeffer withstood this period of interrogation, and the way in which he did it, were his last and most important contributions to the story of the German Resistance.
\nDespite the serious and very painful handicaps from which Dohnanyi suffered, he kept fighting against Roeder\u2019s accusations and trying to make his defence watertight. As soon as he was ready, he filed an official complaint against Roeder in the War Court. There were also complaints from others about Roeder and his conduct. This led to his being transferred as a \u2018judge with the rank of general\u2019, on 1 January 1944, to Air Fleet Four; in other words, he was \u2018kicked upstairs\u2019 to Lemberg in occupied Poland. He had actually already received his orders at the time when he had Dohnanyi moved from the Charit\u00e9 Hospital to the one at Buch and brought in de Crinis for an opinion. In this way he ensured that the investigation of Dohnanyi could be continued and that eventually the SS would get its hands on him.
\nBut Roeder\u2019s goal had been to have both Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer condemned to death, and in this he had not succeeded, so he must have regarded his being taken off their cases as a defeat. During the interrogations he had foolishly referred to the \u2018Brandenburg\u2019 division, which belonged to Military Intelligence, as a \u2018crowd of shirkers\u2019. The division commander, General Pfuhlstein, heard about this, had it confirmed by Dohnanyi, and flew out to Lemberg to box Roeder\u2019s ears. Keitel sentenced Pfuhlstein to a mere seven days\u2019 detention.
\nRoeder was succeeded by a prosecutor named Kutzner, who conducted Dohnanyi\u2019s case without ideological zeal, even when the SS tried to put him under pressure. As Sack advised him to do, he was working towards depoliticizing the trial. It was Christine von Dohnanyi\u2019s impression that Kutzner had an inkling of the real lie of the land. During this phase, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were both pushing for their actual day in court, because they were counting on being acquitted. But their friends outside wanted to prevent them at any cost from being turned over to the SS. It seemed much safer simply to let the case \u2018run out of steam\u2019, especially because there were now renewed hopes for a coup. Hitler was to be shown some new uniforms, and several young officers, including Axel von Bussche and Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, the eldest son of Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, had volunteered for a suicide attack on Hitler during this occasion. But shortly before they were due to be presented, the uniforms were burnt up during an air raid.<\/p>\n
\u2018Dreaming of heaven on earth\u2019\u2014the love letters<\/p>\n
It was depressing for Bonhoeffer that he could not personally present his fianc\u00e9e to his parents. All his brothers and sisters had married friends who had long been regular visitors in their parents\u2019 home. But Maria came from a conservative milieu, that of the landed nobility east of the Oder River, now part of Poland, where sons grew up to be military officers or to farm their inherited estates, while daughters married such estate-owners, officers or higher-ranking government officials. Bonhoeffer had come to know these families, and to appreciate them for their basic convictions and their piety, but for his family it was another world and he knew how critical his parents and especially his brothers and sisters could be. Maria was 15 years younger than Bonhoeffer\u2019s youngest sister, closer to the grandchildren\u2019s generation. How would she be received in Marienburger Allee?
\nAs it turned out, he could have spared himself these worries; the family was simply delighted with his choice. His eldest brother Karl Friedrich wrote him an especially warm letter of congratulations on 23 April:<\/p>\n
From your letters, I have now also learned that you are secretly engaged. You cannot imagine how happy this made me. I basically feel sorry for every unmarried man, even if this confession sounds ridiculous. But of course, in your case, as I see it, there were special circumstances. You do not belong to those who by disposition are destined to remain bachelors. Especially with the difficulties your profession entails nowadays, you need a good, astute and competent wife. (DBWE 8, I\/16)<\/p>\n
Karl Friedrich, who lived in Leipzig, happened to be in Berlin and met Maria on May 23 when she and her mother made their first visit to his parents. He was impressed that she talked very naturally and without a trace of embarrassment about her work in Hanover as a Red Cross nursing student.<\/p>\n
She is apparently one of those people who always pick the most difficult and exhausting tasks, and who pay no attention at all to themselves. The modest and matter-of-fact way she talked about it impressed me very much. I thoroughly scolded her for saving up her weekly ration of butter for you, and for not setting aside the few coffee beans she had been given by a patient for her own night shifts. I trust it was what you would have wanted me to do. (DBWE 8, I\/23)<\/p>\n
Maria and Bonhoeffer\u2019s mother got on well together from the first moment. Paula Bonhoeffer wrote to her son how quickly Maria had learned the names of the 18 Bonhoeffer grandchildren, and that she had asked to see his room.<\/p>\n
Of course I had tidied it up a little, although not too much, so that she will know what to expect later on. But she found it fabulously neat. Mothers are apparently more critical than fianc\u00e9es, and that\u2019s how it should be \u2026 Even though she is still very young, her entire attitude already speaks of being very dependable, hardworking and warmhearted. Her mother who during this year has experienced so much hardship is indeed to be admired in the way she attends to her responsibilities for the household and children, which she now faces alone, and how through this she is coping with the grief for her husband and son. (DBWE 8, I\/22)<\/p>\n
Both Paula Bonhoeffer and Maria von Wedemeyer were women of energetic character and were soon helping one another to mobilize friends, relatives and acquaintances for the benefit of the imprisoned family members. Not the least of these efforts was Maria\u2019s untiring provision of food so that both Hans and Dietrich could be better nourished in prison.
\nThat Bonhoeffer was only allowed to write to his fianc\u00e9e after the interrogations were over, and then only censored letters, must have been a torment for both. On 26 June Roeder decided to bring them face to face in his office at the War Court, and Bonhoeffer was only told immediately beforehand. This was undoubtedly intended to throw him off balance. He wrote to his parents:<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve just come back to my cell after seeing Maria\u2014an indescribable surprise and joy! I had been told just one minute beforehand. It is still like a dream\u2014really an almost incomprehensible situation\u2014how we shall remember this some day! Everything one is able to utter in such a moment is of course so trivial, but that\u2019s not the most important thing. It was so brave of her to come. I had not dared at all to suggest she should \u2026 (DBWE 8, I\/31)<\/p>\n
Throughout their engagement, the two of them never met or spoke except in the presence of supervisory personnel. Even before Bonhoeffer\u2019s arrest, they had hardly ever had a chance to be alone together. But as she was being shown the way out, Maria tore herself away from the men leading her and ran back to Bonhoeffer to give him a hug and a kiss for the very first time. From then on that was how they greeted each other whenever they met and when they had to say goodbye.
\nProbably literature had never been, even in passing, a subject of conversation for them, but\u2014given that the only letters they could write would first be read by Roeder\u2014it came quite naturally to write about books they were reading or that they loved. Since his schooldays Bonhoeffer had been very well read, but apart from a few propaganda-free books that people had managed to obtain and pass around at that time, his fianc\u00e9e knew only the books she had read at school. Bonhoeffer had already experienced what this was like with his students in Finkenwalde, but he must have been expecting something different from Maria von Wedemeyer; and so the two of them discovered that they were not of the same opinion about everything. Bonhoeffer seems to have been genuinely shocked, for on 28 November 1943, after they had exchanged quite a few letters, he wrote to Eberhard Bethge:<\/p>\n
Unfortunately I am not yet of one mind with Maria in the area of literature. She writes me such truly good, unselfconscious letters, but she reads and sends me and loves, of all people, Rilke, Bergengruen, Binding, Wiechert, of whom I consider the latter three beneath our level and the first outright unhealthy. Thus actually none of them suits her at all. Yet something draws her to them. One would need to be able to talk about such things to one another, and I am not convinced they\u2019re so unimportant. I would very much like for my wife to be in agreement with me as fully as possible in such matters \u2026 I don\u2019t like it at all when wives and husbands are of different opinions. They must stand together like an unassailable bulwark. Don\u2019t you agree? Or does this also belong in some way to my \u2018tyrannical\u2019 nature that you know so intimately? (DBWE 8, II\/79)<\/p>\n
His friend replied on 9 January 1944:<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m an example of how easily this can be corrected, the more so with such an intelligent person as Maria who, according to my observation, is very attentive to persuasions and nuances of taste \u2026 Even with us, you had to wait awhile until we realized that Frank Thie\u00df wasn\u2019t the ultimate and most exciting author! (DBWE 8, II\/96)<\/p>\n
Some passages in Bonhoeffer\u2019s letters to Maria seem more like suggestions for reading that a lecturer in German literature might make to his favourite student. We have to remember how terribly hard it was for him to write love letters when Roeder was the one who saw them first, before they reached Maria. She, however, was able to disregard Roeder and all other annoyances and be superbly herself, so that her letters are among the most unusual and beautiful love letters of the twentieth century. With regard to literature, but other matters as well, they show how Maria was able to stand up to her highly educated fianc\u00e9, 18 years older than she and with rather fixed opinions, because of her superior sense of humour. On 7 February 1944 she wrote:<\/p>\n
Just in case you read my letters standing up, you\u2019d better sit down\u2014with all due deference to your equilibrium, stone floors are no joking matter. The fact is, I\u2019m in the middle of a theological tome! What\u2019s more, I don\u2019t find it half as boring as I expected. You weren\u2019t supposed to know, really. I started it to be a little closer to you, not to become a \u2018Burckhardthaus type\u2019, but now I\u2019m reading it eagerly and greedily. It\u2019s Das Evangelium [The Gospel] by Paul Sch\u00fctz. (If you don\u2019t like the book, that\u2019ll be the last straw.)<\/p>\n
The reply came 11 days later:<\/p>\n
I\u2019m delighted that you\u2019re reading Sch\u00fctz! But forgive me for chuckling a little, because I\u2019ve seldom inveighed against any book as fiercely in recent times\u2014though solely and exclusively in the company of theologians! But I think it\u2019s only a danger to theologians\u2014why, it would take too long to explain\u2014and not to you. However, I\u2019d welcome it if you took a strong dose of Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling,Practice in Christianity,Sickness unto Death) as an antidote. Have you by any chance read Jeremias Gotthelf\u2019s Berner Geist? It\u2019s time you read that too. I wonder if you would care for Don Quixote, which I love so much. Or Wilhelm Meister? That would be far more important to me than Fontane, who can wait awhile. Do you know Stifter\u2019s Aus der Mappe m[eines] Urgro\u00dfvaters?<\/p>\n
Maria replied on 2 March 1944 from Bundorf Castle in Franconia in the south of Germany, where she was now staying with her cousin and helping to care for several children:<\/p>\n
I laughed so much at your aversion to Sch\u00fctz that Hesi came running upstairs and thought I\u2019d gone off my head. The first thing I did was stow the big book in my trunk with a sigh of relief, and there may it remain to all eternity! You\u2019re putting me through the mill where books are concerned. I\u2019ll soon be timidly consulting you first every time, and end by reading nothing but Kierkegaard with \u2018fear and trembling\u2019 and \u2018sickness unto death\u2019.<\/p>\n
Then she defended Werner Bergengruen, a romantic contemporary author, even more than Rilke, of whom she says in another letter \u2018\u2026 I can admire him perfectly well on my own.\u2019 In every case she humorously refused to be \u2018tyrannized\u2019 by Bonhoeffer\u2019s superiority; she just laughed it off. But she eagerly took his suggestions for her reading, read Goethe\u2019s Wilhelm Meister with enthusiasm, and of course also got hold of a copy of Bonhoeffer\u2019s favourite book, Adalbert Stifter\u2019s Witiko. After Bonhoeffer had read all of Stifter\u2019s books in the set his family owned, he asked them to look for Stifter\u2019s last book on which he had worked for almost twenty years, but they couldn\u2019t find it anywhere. On 9 November 1943 he wrote to his parents:<\/p>\n
The last ten days have unfolded for me entirely under the spell of Witiko which\u2014after I had pestered you so long to find it\u2014turned out to be right here in the prison library, where I had truly not expected to find it! With its thousand pages, which can\u2019t be skimmed through but must be read when one has leisure, it is presumably not accessible to more than a few people today and for this reason I don\u2019t know if I ought to recommend it to you. For me it belongs among the most beautiful books of all I know; by its purity of language and of the characters it transports one into a quite rare and curious feeling of happiness. Actually one should read it for the first time at age 14, instead of the Battle for Rome, and then grow up with it. Among all the novels I\u2019ve read to date, I have had an equally strong impression only of Don Quixote and Gotthelf\u2019s Berner Geist. (DBWE 8, II\/71)<\/p>\n
In his biography of Bonhoeffer, Eberhard Bethge cites words written by Hermann Bahr in 1922, which make it clear why Bonhoeffer was so moved by Stifter\u2019s major works:<\/p>\n
\u2026 then Witiko starts doing injustice for the sake of good and helps to bring out of this a new justice \u2026 Where there has been a [lasting] victory for revolution it has always been the victory of legitimacy, the victory of justice outside the law over a law that had become unjust \u2026 New justice must always first expiate its defects through profound suffering; it must first be purified by fire, with the wrongdoing burned away. Only then, through penance, will justice finally emerge from good injustice. (DB-ER 845\u201346)<\/p>\n
These are ideas which can be found in Bonhoeffer\u2019s Ethics, in passages where he is speaking of the conspiracy without saying so in so many words. Maria von Wedemeyer knew this instinctively when she responded to this long novel, which many young people even in those days found distasteful, as the loving young woman she was:<\/p>\n
[Witiko] gets more and more beautiful, right up to the end. I quite understand why you couldn\u2019t help liking the book; if I\u2019d read it first, I\u2019d have sent it to you. It reminds me of you, somehow. That\u2019s why I can\u2019t help liking it too, even though it\u2019s very different from anything I\u2019ve read in the past.<\/p>\n
\u2018She writes me such good, natural letters\u2019, Bonhoeffer had written to Bethge. And indeed his fianc\u00e9e was showing him her love, simply by letting him share in her life:<\/p>\n
P\u00e4tzig, 19 October 1943\u2014There\u2019s a shooting party here today\u2014a strange occasion in wartime, and without Father. Masses of guests have turned up. They think it\u2019s wonderful to be able to take their tails and evening gowns out of mothballs, have a good time and enjoy making small talk. I\u2019m the only one with a great big hole beside me all the time, and it\u2019s so hard to talk across a hole like that. It\u2019s better to write into it, even if one only imagines one can fill it a little.<\/p>\n
Altenburg, 13 January 1944\u2014I\u2019m so wistful, Dietrich, wistful as can be. I so love to sit curled up on the windowsill, gazing at the sky. Then I have a little piece of it all to myself. And I send my dreams up to heaven and dream heaven down to me, until I know exactly how various things stand, and how they\u2019ll be one day for us both: heaven on earth.<\/p>\n
Bundorf, 26 April 1944\u2014I\u2019ve chalked a line around my bed roughly the size of your cell. There are a table and a chair standing there, the way I picture it, and when I sit there I almost believe I\u2019m with you.<\/p>\n
But the letter from Bundorf also tells about a crisis that was very distressing for the engaged couple. Maria\u2019s cousin in Bundorf, Hedwig (Hesi) von Truchse\u00df, and her husband belonged, like the Wedemeyers, to the \u2018Berneuchen\u2019 movement. Its leader, Wilhelm St\u00e4hlin, came to their mansion with numerous invited guests to celebrate an elaborate monastic liturgy for Easter week, and told the lady of the house to \u2018just send Maria away\u2019 so that she would not have to take part in this Easter observance. He claimed that, as he knew her, she would not be able to endure making \u2018the choice between her father and her fianc\u00e9\u2019 that would be required of her afterwards. Maria\u2019s cousin did not tell her about this until after Easter. Maria wrote about it to Bonhoeffer and described the intensive worship services to him. He was beside himself about it: \u2018I\u2019m glad you told me everything, including St\u00e4hlin\u2019s unpleasant remark. He shouldn\u2019t have made it, and he can hardly hope to justify it. Where lies the fanaticism for which we\u2019re so fiercely vilified, on his side or on mine?\u2019 She would certainly not have to choose between her father and himself, he assured her: he and her father had regarded themselves as brothers in Christ. Even if they had had a disagreement, they would have been ready to learn from one another.<\/p>\n
Maria von Wedemeyer at home in P\u00e4tzig<\/p>\n
I\u2019m all in favour of unequivocal decisions where they are needed, certainly, but it\u2019s wrong\u2014for God\u2019s sake!\u2014in this age of necessary decisions, to bully people into making decisions that are neither genuine nor necessary! I\u2019m glad this Holy Week reinforced your belief in Christ, which would also imply that you don\u2019t allow yourself to be influenced, either by other people or by considerations of taste. However sure it is that one owes one\u2019s faith to certain people, every Christian should judge for him or herself and be obedient solely to God and his word, not to other people and their ideas.<\/p>\n
As pastor and author in cell 92<\/p>\n
Even during the interrogations, Bonhoeffer was already beginning to create a world of his own in his cell. He was trying to write a play. He wrote to his parents early on that, after hours of concentrated work on it, he had some difficulty in returning to the reality around him. He must have felt that drama was the appropriate form in which to express himself, since he was living under dramatic circumstances. But here he was already in difficulty, since he could not write about his own situation, much less about his hopes for an overthrow of the government. So he set his story in the immediate post-First World War period, and his characters were soldiers returning from the war.
\nThis material, however, was not nearly as exciting as the author\u2019s own situation, so after a time he put the manuscript aside and made an attempt instead at a novel showing the development of two families. This, too, he had given up by the time the guards who had become his friends made possible his secret correspondence with Eberhard Bethge. Some time later he mentioned his two literary experiments disparagingly to Bethge, calling them \u2018crazy mucked-up stuff\u2019, but in this he did himself some injustice. Both fragments contain less successful passages, but also some rather successful ones, and in both manuscripts these best parts occur, characteristically, in scenes of childhood. And in the midst of each text, sentences suddenly crop up which express directly Bonhoeffer\u2019s attitude toward the Resistance; for example: \u2018What well-meaning person today can still utter the besmirched words freedom, brotherhood, or even the word Germany?\u2026 Let us honour the highest values by silence for a while. Let us learn to do what is right without words for a while\u2019 (DBWE 7, 50).
\nIt is no surprise that the novel borrows very much from the world of the Bonhoeffer family, and understandable that the imprisoned author idealizes this world from which he is now separated. What has been irritating to Bonhoeffer researchers, however, is the author\u2019s conservative, some would even say reactionary, world view; he even gives his allegiance to elitist concepts in a way that no one today would do. So his fragmentary literary efforts in Tegel seem precisely opposed to the \u2018new theology\u2019 that Bonhoeffer began to develop soon afterwards in his letters to Eberhard Bethge. This has indeed been rather confusing.
\nBoth texts are, however, immediate reactions to the shock of imprisonment and to the world of Tegel. Bonhoeffer was writing under the sway of a regressive phase that he had to overcome. And his effort to set an entirely different elite in contrast to the Nazi elite represented by Roeder was legitimate. The most telling assessment of these texts comes from Ulrich Kabitz:<\/p>\n
As an archer has to pull back the string of his bow in order to send the arrow straight to its goal, so Bonhoeffer concentrated on his past, the world from which he came, in order to draw strength from it. This made it possible for him then to turn to his new theology for the future.<\/p>\n
When one considers how political prisoners were treated in Adolf Hitler\u2019s Germany from 1933 onward, and what Hans von Dohnanyi was made to suffer, it is clear that Bonhoeffer\u2019s lot in Tegel was unusual. He had been arrested and taken there under top-secret conditions, and until Roeder lost interest in him there was plenty of harassment. But a telephone call from General Hase had sufficed to make Bonhoeffer a privileged prisoner, with whom the prison commander, Captain Maetz, went for walks in the courtyard, and for whom visiting times with his parents and fianc\u00e9e were stretched as far as possible.
\nSome further easing of his situation was brought about by Bonhoeffer himself, through his manner towards others. When guards took the liberty of speaking disrespectfully to him, he corrected them sharply and had success in doing so. People felt that here was someone with whom they could talk. When the heavy air raids on Berlin began, the inmate from cell 92 proved to be a man who emanated calm and could help others. In the infirmary, where he had been treated occasionally for illness, Bonhoeffer became like one of the staff. His approach to a sick person was energetic; like his mother, he could always decide quickly what to do.
\nGuards soon began coming to him with their problems, and among them Bonhoeffer found the helpers to which modern theology owes so much, Sergeants Holzendorf (whom the Bonhoeffers called his \u2018angel\u2019), Knobloch and Linke. These were men who had seen through the systematic injustice being practised in their country and especially in Tegel. Without regard for their own safety, they smuggled out the letters to Bethge which, after the Second World War, made Bonhoeffer famous far beyond Germany. He enjoyed listening to concerts with these friends in the infirmary, where there was a radio, and with great caution they also listened to \u2018enemy\u2019 radio stations (a capital offence in wartime Nazi Germany). When Bethge, on leave from the front in June 1944, was allowed to visit Bonhoeffer, Sergeant Linke went so far as to lock the two of them in the visiting room alone for a whole hour so that they could talk undisturbed. It was the last time they saw each other. A year earlier, in May 1943, it was also Linke who brought Eberhard and Renate Bethge the homily that Bonhoeffer had prepared for their wedding and, in May 1944, the baptismal homily for their son Dietrich. All three of these helpful friends died in air raids or disappeared during the fall of Berlin.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer and some fellow Italian prisoners<\/p>\n
Fellow prisoners also tried to approach Bonhoeffer, as soon as he could move about a bit more freely in the prison, the word quickly passing among them that he was someone whom it was good to know. They could meet him in the infirmary or during air raids and immediately afterwards. He began playing chess again and had a book on chess theory sent to him. He also revived, after many years, his gift for handwriting analysis.
\nHe was often asked by prisoners to pray for them. Pious words he used most sparingly, yet he was ready to help immediately with practical matters. For example, when young soldiers had wandered away from their unit\u2014sometimes solely due to the shock of battle\u2014and now stood accused of desertion, Bonhoeffer would find a lawyer to defend them and more than once arranged for the lawyer\u2019s compensation. At the request of Captain Maetz, after a heavy attack in which not only the nearby Borsig locomotive factories were damaged, but also the military prison itself, Bonhoeffer wrote an expert opinion on possible measures of protection during air raids (DBWE 8, II\/80). He had heard prisoners kept locked in their cells screaming in fear of death, and those who were wounded had to wait much too long even for first aid. A second opinion, having to do with the reform of the penal system, was written for City Commander Hase (DBWE 8, II\/131).
\nA few of the prisoners, like the helpful guards, became good friends of his, and these friendships would certainly have continued after the war. The most interesting of these persons was probably Gaetano Latmiral, an Italian engineer who had been inspecting radar installations in Berlin at the point when Italy went over to the western Allies. He and several of his countrymen were arrested because they had security clearance for military secrets. Latmiral spent much time with Bonhoeffer, and right after the war he came to see the Bonhoeffer family, becoming the first to tell them about the role Dietrich had played among his fellow prisoners in Tegel.
\nThe most amazing moment in Bonhoeffer\u2019s unusual life as a prisoner was undoubtedly the visit of City Commander Paul von Hase, on 30 June 1944. Bonhoeffer told Bethge about it in a letter written the same day:<\/p>\n
U[ncle] Paul was here, had me brought downstairs immediately and stayed\u2014Maetz and Maa\u00df were there\u2014more than five hours! He had four bottles of sparkling wine served up, probably the only time in the annals of this place, and behaved in a way more generous and kind than I would ever have expected of him. He no doubt wanted to make it ostentatiously clear what his attitude is toward me and what he expects of that timid pedant M[aetz]. I was impressed with this independence, which would probably be unthinkable in civilian life. (DBWE 8, II\/170)<\/p>\n
Maa\u00df was the much more cooperative commander of the first prison in which Dohnanyi had been held. Like Bonhoeffer, and Paul von Hase, he was hoping for the success of the coup attempt which was expected very soon; no one could yet know how it would turn out. Less than six weeks after his visit to Tegel prison, Paul von Hase was hanged as a party to the conspiracy. His wife, after being turned away by her closest relatives, found refuge with R\u00fcdiger and Ursula Schleicher in Marienburger Allee.
\nRight to the end of the war, the regime failed in its efforts to do away completely with prison chaplaincies in Germany. So Tegel still had two Catholic and two Protestant chaplains serving the military and civilian departments of the prison. Hans Dannenbaum, the military chaplain, was director of the Berlin City Mission, knew who Bonhoeffer was and was grateful for his unexpected help. Harald Poelchau, who has already been mentioned, was not actually supposed to visit the military wing of the prison, but was so well regarded in Tegel that he had no trouble gaining access to Bonhoeffer in his cell. It was at his request that Bonhoeffer wrote his \u2018Prayers for Prisoners\u2019, which the pastors had duplicated and could distribute to people who asked for them. Here Bonhoeffer, usually so reserved about using religious language, speaks from an almost childlike piety (see pp. 412\u201314). Poelchau visited Bonhoeffer once a week and told him a great deal about how prisoners condemned to death and their executions were handled. Poelchau and the Italian Latmiral were the first persons with whom he talked about his new theological ideas.
\nAlthough there was a large church building in the middle of the prison grounds, it had been a long time since any worship services were held there; so from the spring of 1943 onwards, Bonhoeffer was never able to go to church again. He therefore kept that much more strictly to his times of prayer in his cell and even blessed himself with the sign of the cross, as Luther had done. At the time, Protestants regarded such things as \u2018falling back into Catholicism\u2019; for Bonhoeffer it expressed his inner attitude, in which his cell became a place apart from the power of the state and was instead placed under God\u2019s protection. In Thomas \u00e0 Kempis\u2019s Imitation of Christ, which he owned in the original Latin, he found good counsel: custodi diligenter cellam tuam, et custodiet te, as he wrote with delight to Bethge: \u2018Keep watch diligently over your cell, and it will keep watch over you.\u2019 A few times it even sounds as though he was getting used to living in a cell, but didn\u2019t really want to let that happen. No one in the prison noticed anything having to do with his \u2018spiritual life\u2019; he took care there to remain one inmate among others. This was also the reason he scarcely ever spoke of God or used religious language with people while in prison.
\nAs bearable as Bonhoeffer\u2019s prison situation was, compared with that endured by other opponents of the Hitler regime, he longed for freedom like every other prisoner. He wanted to get married and live together with his wife. He wanted a child. Often he had to force himself to stop thinking about these things, because otherwise his four walls would have become unendurable for him. But Bonhoeffer was accustomed to disciplining himself.<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t it an essential part of human maturity, as opposed to immaturity, that your centre of gravity is always wherever you happen to be at the moment, and that even longing for the fulfilment of your wishes can\u2019t pull you off balance, away from being your complete self wherever you are? (DBWE 8, II\/122)<\/p>\n
It was easy enough to say that, but hard to stay the course. He had to admit to himself that \u2018nothing is more tormenting than one\u2019s longings\u2019; and this torment was what lay behind his poem, \u2018The Past\u2019, written immediately after a visit from his fianc\u00e9e.<\/p>\n
You left, beloved bliss and pain so hard to love.
\nWhat shall I call you? Life, Anguish, Ecstasy,
\nmy Heart, of my own self a part\u2014the past?
\nThe door slammed shut and locked,
\nI hear your steps depart, resound, then slowly fade.
\nWhat remains for me? Joy, torment, longing?
\nI know just this: You left\u2014and all is past.<\/p>\n
This 110-line poem (DBWE 8, III\/158) is the first of the ten poems Bonhoeffer wrote in prison. It betrays his suffering so clearly that he did not dare at first to send it to Maria, to whom it is addressed. So it went first, questioningly, to Eberhard Bethge. But before his friend could reply that yes, it must be sent to the one for whom it was meant, Bonhoeffer himself had realized that he must take that risk. It was to Maria that he was revealing his innermost self here\u2014even though veiled, in the form of poetry.<\/p>\n
Do you feel how I reach for you now,
\nhow I clutch you as with claws,
\nso tightly that it must hurt?
\nHow I wound your flesh
\ntill your blood oozes out,
\njust to be assured you are near,
\nyou bodily, earthly fullness of life?
\nDo you sense my terrible longing for pain of my own?
\nthat I yearn to see my own blood
\njust so that all will not fade away
\ninto the past?<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer was quite shaken by his own burst of creativity. Writing a novel\u2014or any book\u2014is a long and wearisome task, which takes a lot of thinking and involves crossing out much of what one has already written. He in any case had found it so. But with this poem he had simply written, felt compelled to write down, what came welling up from within himself. The violence and passion of the language recalls his sermon on Jeremiah in January 1934 (DBWE 13, 349ff.). Only this time it is not about the Church to which his zeal is dedicated, but rather about his passionate love for a woman. \u2018When you are in love you want to live, above all things, and you hate everything that represents a threat to your life\u2019, he wrote in a letter to Bethge (DBWE 8, III\/147). The \u2018world\u2019 was not a new theme that Bonhoeffer had discovered for his theology; instead, he had himself arrived in the reality of the world.
\nHe tells Bethge in some embarrassment, \u2018I feel like a silly kid, keeping from you that I\u2019ve been trying my hand at poetry here from time to time.\u2019 Even this was a sort of justifcation, for as far as we know he had not previously tried to write any poetry. \u2018I\u2019ve kept it a secret from everyone until now\u2014even Maria, who would be the one it concerns most!\u2014simply because I was embarrassed somehow \u2026\u2019 (DBWE 8, III\/157). He asks his friend to tell him to forget it, to leave it alone, if necessary. But perhaps Bethge, who was then a soldier at the Italian front and thus also separated from his wife, had similar feelings and could therefore understand him. Bethge himself had once written to him, \u2018In saying goodbye, practice is pretty useless.\u2019<\/p>\n
For me, this confrontation with the past, this attempt to hold onto it and to get it back, and above all the fear of losing it, is almost the daily background music of my life here, which at times\u2014especially after brief visits, which are always followed by long partings\u2014becomes a theme with variations. (DBWE 8, III\/157)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer was not in the dark about the fact that his fianc\u00e9e was going through a crisis. How hard it was for her, she must have revealed to him in a letter which has not been preserved. She was much too intelligent not to have realized that their prospects for a life together were continually dwindling, and whenever she went to see him in Tegel she came back to Bundorf exhausted and in despair. She began to suffer from dizziness and fainting spells. Her visits to Berlin and her life in Bundorf did not really fit together, but she had been so happy there. All this and more she must have written to Bonhoeffer. She would not have told him outright that her cousin Hesi thought, and said, that it was fundamentally wrong for her to be engaged to a man twice her age who was in prison, but perhaps Bonhoeffer sensed it. He responded carefully and lovingly to her letter, and then said: \u2018On Whit Monday you felt you \u201ccouldn\u2019t go on\u201d. So tell me, can you go on without me? And, if you feel you can, can you still do so if you know that I can\u2019t go on without you?\u2019 Bonhoeffer had always believed that he must spare Maria whatever he could. Now he was asking for her help, and this call for help brought her to a decision. She left Bundorf and moved to his parents\u2019 home, and because she must of course have an occupation to justify her being in Berlin, she worked as receptionist for her future father-in-law, who still had a private medical practice at home.
\nEighteen times Maria von Wedemeyer was able to visit her fianc\u00e9 in Tegel Prison, from 24 June 1943 to 23 August 1944. Their engagement was made up of 18 tormenting farewells. These and their letters were all they had, fanning the flame, over and over again, of their longing for a life together. Maria received the poem \u2018The Past\u2019 in a letter smuggled out of the prison at the beginning of June 1944. On 27 June she was with him again in Tegel, and after the failed coup of 20 July 1944 they saw each other one last time, on 23 August.
\n\u2018Letters became Bonhoeffer\u2019s elixir of life in Tegel\u2019\u2014those he received and those he wrote himself (DB-ER 838). Through them, his imprisonment became a time of the liveliest exchanges with his parents, brothers and sisters, with his fianc\u00e9e, and above all with Eberhard Bethge, to whom he wrote jokingly on 1 February 1944:<\/p>\n
Carpe diem\u2014in this case that means I use every opportunity to write you a letter. First, I could go on writing for weeks without coming to the end of everything I have to tell you, and second, one never knows how long it will still be possible. And since you will some day be called upon to write my biography, I want to make sure the material you have is as complete as possible! (DBWE 8, II\/108)<\/p>\n
Bethge did become Bonhoeffer\u2019s biographer, and dedicated the rest of his life to the works of his friend; without him, only a few traces of Bonhoeffer\u2019s work would be left to us. But Eberhard Bethge was much more than a biographer. The Letters and Papers from Prison that he published in 1951 contained only Bonhoeffer\u2019s side of the correspondence. Only when an enlarged edition appeared many years later, containing Bethge\u2019s letters to Bonhoeffer as well, did we discover that Bonhoeffer developed his ideas in dialogue with Bethge. This was possible because they had been in ongoing conversation with one another since 1935. Thus, during the time Bonhoeffer was in Tegel, they could have said, like another, very different pair of friends, \u2018I do my thinking in you, and you do yours in me.\u2019 And the praise Bethge accorded Bonhoeffer\u2019s letters, he also deserves himself, although he stayed so modestly hidden behind his friend for many years:<\/p>\n
Letters and essays are the literary form, apart from his theological style, in which Bonhoeffer speaks directly and convinces. Summer evenings over the prison walls, Karl Barth\u2019s cigar, memories of Berlin concert halls, the rhythm of the church year or the surprise at holding a knife and fork in his hands again, the privileges of mothers-in-law, Berlin beer, the anger at shabby cowardice\u2014all this, unintentionally, makes fascinating reading. It is serious, has touches of humour, and conveys the joy in earthly things that surprised the friends of the earlier Bonhoeffer, the theologian; they wrongly imagined him to be a fierce and radical teacher of eschatology. Instead, his praise was for \u2018a beauty that is neither classical nor demonic, but simply earthly, though it has its own proper place. For myself, I must say that this is the only kind of beauty that really appeals to me.\u2019 (DB-ER 842)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer\u2019s arrest did not cause Eberhard Bethge\u2019s ties to the Resistance to be discovered. So, on 8\u201310 July 1943, Bethge was still an agent for Military Intelligence and in that capacity was sent to Switzerland\u2014as an \u2018expert on India\u2019 due to his work for the Go\u00dfner Mission\u2014where he was able to see Visser \u2018t Hooft and to pay a visit to Karl Barth. The latter sent his regards to Bonhoeffer and gave Bethge a cigar to take back to him.<\/p>\n
Theology for a \u2018religionless\u2019 time<\/p>\n
The contact that Bonhoeffer was able to regain with Bethge after being imprisoned, beginning on 18 November 1943, brought a change of direction both theological and political. As he had been doing before he was arrested, Bonhoeffer was again increasingly looking ahead. He no longer needed to seek security by looking back to German literature, because he was now well in command of his situation in Tegel. In April 1944 he came to a watershed; the style and content of his letters changed so fundamentally that not even the 20th of July, with the news that once again the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat had failed, could alter them any longer.
\nThere was another reason for this new focus. Sack had sent word to Bonhoeffer that he should no longer count on a court trial, but should rather adjust to the idea of staying in Tegel for some time to come. This was the news that released in him a new phase in his theological work. He wrote to Bethge, \u2018It is just as you say, that \u201crecognition\u201d (Erkenntnis) is the most exciting thing in the world and this is why I am quite riveted by my work now\u2019 (DBWE 8, IV\/188).
\nFrom Stifter, he turned to reading philosophers and scientists like Carl Friedrich von Weizs\u00e4cker, Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset and Wilhelm Dilthey, and instead of theological books he read The Homeric Gods by W. F. Otto and Die Geschichte der preu\u00dfischen Akademie (History of the Prussian Academy) by his teacher, Adolf von Harnack. It is striking that the results of his research into the nineteenth century consciously entered into his attempts to express what Christian faith is today. But he also made use of his observations of himself and others there in Tegel:<\/p>\n
Last night was pretty lively again. The view of the city from the roof was appalling \u2026 To me it\u2019s crazy when they announce the arrival of bombers and we are immediately tempted \u2026 instinctively to wish the horror on other cities, anyone\u2019s neck but our own \u2026 At such moments one is very aware of our natura corrupta and peccatum orginale; to that extent it is perhaps a healthy development. (DBWE 8, II\/124)<\/p>\n
Both inmates and guards would say, \u2018Keep your fingers crossed for me.\u2019 Do we mean by this that thinking of someone else actually has power? Bonhoeffer wondered whether this and other superstitious sayings like \u2018touch wood\u2019 or \u2018you can\u2019t escape your fate\u2019 are leftover memories of intercessions and church community, of God\u2019s anger and mercy, of divine guidance. \u2018What I don\u2019t see at all is any relic of an eschatological sort. Or have you noticed any?\u2019 (DBWE 8, II\/121). He asked his father for a book on superstition, and wrote to Bethge: \u2018Here I\u2019m surrounded almost entirely by people clinging to their desires, so that they\u2019re not there for anyone else; they don\u2019t listen any more and aren\u2019t able to love their neighbour\u2019 (DBWE 8, II\/122). He observed how few persons are able to keep several things in mind at the same time. If aeroplanes were heard, people were overcome by fear; on seeing something good to eat, they were given over to greed; if something they wished for didn\u2019t happen, they fell into complete despair. Thus, he concluded, instead of living fully, they had only pieces of their potential existence (DBWE 8, III\/152). So, he asked, how can one speak the word of God to human beings who can no longer hear? Religious declarations wouldn\u2019t do any good here.
\nMany commentators after the Second World War, including even Karl Barth, wanted to ascribe Bonhoeffer\u2019s new theological ideas to the shock of his arrest and imprisonment; but he had already left that far behind when he began expressing his new insights. One of the earliest essays in response to Letters and Papers from Prison, the book in which Bonhoeffer\u2019s letters from Tegel were first published, says:<\/p>\n
Anyone who knew Bonhoeffer\u2019s earlier work most likely knew him as the author of The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together. In his letters from prison, the emotional tone of those two books seems to have given way to a very different one. There he had sought to define Christianity with a sharpness reminiscent of Kierkegaard, in contrast to the deadly reservations, half-measures and self-deceptions which he saw infecting the churches of the Reformation \u2026 When one is placed by God in a Christian community, one is placed in a spiritual, divine reality which lives by its own laws and could not be more sharply distinct from every merely psychological human reality. That Christians belong nonetheless in the world means they belong \u2018in the midst of their enemies\u2019 \u2026 To the last, Bonhoeffer never gave up this attitude of a fighter at the front. But the letters from his time in prison, and the fragments of the Ethics he left us, show that he saw himself surrounded more and more, with the passage of time, by a great danger, to which even the reawakening Church was blind \u2026 To his deep unease, he was finding that the Confessing Church, in defending itself against violation by a regime of terror and lies, was leaving others threatened by that regime to their fate \u2026 In this situation, it was a great discovery for Bonhoeffer to find that the only Gospel in the Bible is a Gospel turned toward the whole world. This world is, even though at enmity with God or far away from God, still the world that God loves. So there can only be a church which turns toward the world.<\/p>\n
This early review defines exactly the change in Bonhoeffer\u2019s thinking. He had not given up his stance at the front on behalf of the Church; but he no longer saw the church itself in the foreground, but rather the world that God loves. \u2018Christianity entails a decision\u2019, he had said in his first sermon. But, impressive as Bonhoeffer\u2019s focus had always been, and remained, on the obedience implied in faith and on following Christ, all his statements from this time show a trace of calling himself to order: this is the way it must be, and this way only! The man in prison still spoke of the obedience of faith; but even in his Ethics, and that much more so in the letters from prison, the language had clearly changed. His vision had broadened, because in the Resistance he had come to know people who did \u2018the right thing\u2019 without being consciously Christians, and because he was now seeing the world that he was learning to know in Tegel through the eyes of Jesus, whose cross and resurrection are the fundamental facts for every human life. He wrote to Eberhard and Renate Bethge in June 1944, in an interpretation of 1 Peter 3:9:<\/p>\n
God does not repay evil for evil, and thus the righteous should not do so either. No judgement, no abuse, but blessing. The world would have no hope if this were not the case. The world lives by the blessing of God and of the righteous and thus has a future. Blessing means laying one\u2019s hand on something and saying, Despite everything, you belong to God. This is what we do with the world that inflicts such suffering on us. We do not abandon it; we do not repudiate, despise or condemn it. Instead we call it back to God, we give it hope, we lay our hand on it and say: may God\u2019s blessing come upon you, may God renew you; be blessed, world created by God, you who belong to your Creator and Redeemer. We have received God\u2019s blessing in happiness and in suffering. Yet those who have been blessed can do nothing but pass on this blessing; indeed, they must be a blessing wherever they are. (DBWE 16, p. 632)<\/p>\n
We can see that the \u2018new theology\u2019, as we now have it before us, could only have emerged in the \u2018world of Tegel\u2019, in which Bonhoeffer not only developed but also experienced it. It revolves especially around one theme:<\/p>\n
What keeps gnawing at me is the question, what is Christianity, or who is Christ actually for us today? The age when we could tell people that with words\u2014whether with theological or pious words\u2014is past, as is the age of inwardness and of conscience, and that means the age of religion altogether. (DBWE 8, III\/137)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer found it salutary that, in the religionless world of Tegel, he was getting to know the world \u2018from below\u2019, \u2018from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering\u2019 (DBWE 8, Prologue), but he did not want to get pulled into the undertow of this world. He remained who he was; yet neither did he want, when people turned to him, to exploit their situations for religious purposes. His distrust of \u2018religious words\u2019 kept growing as long as he was in Tegel. \u2018That the Israelites never pronounce the name of God is something I think about over and over again, and I understand it better and better\u2019 (DBWE 8, II\/73).
\nHe came to prefer the Old Testament for his reading. By the time he could begin writing to Bethge, he reported that he had already read it two and a half times since he had been in Tegel (DBWE 8, II\/73). And what impressed him in the Old Testament, much more than in previous years, was the profound \u2018this-worldliness\u2019 of the Jews\u2019 Bible. Now he no longer clung to Kierkegaard\u2019s epitaph [see page 229], but rather wrote, as early as January 1944: \u2018I\u2019m still doing fine, working and waiting. By the way, I\u2019m still optimistic in every regard \u2026\u2019 (DBWE 8, II\/102).
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s concept of \u2018religionlessness\u2019 is regarded by many theologians today as a prophecy that has not come true. But he did not at all mean to say that the world religions were going to come to an end, nor that there could no longer be any new styles of religion. Instead, this concept contains first of all a two-pronged criticism of his own church. Not only had the church recognized by the state, against which Bonhoeffer had struggled so passionately, approved of Hitler\u2019s war\u2014in this regard there were pulpit proclamations from bishops, even after 20 July 1944, which can only make our hair stand on end\u2014but even the Confessing Church had far too seldom issued clear statements. For Bonhoeffer, religious language in Germany had been discredited, in political and human terms, by the conduct of the Church between 1933 and 1945.
\nBesides this, there was a much older problem. The Church had dug in its heels against the Enlightenment and entered into a defensive war against the triumphant progress of the modern natural sciences, which were explaining how the world worked \u2018without God as a working hypothesis\u2019. Theologians had thus been fighting a \u2018rearguard action\u2019 against the secularization of the world and society, trying to keep at least marginal areas of human life open for God. In this way, God was turned into a sort of \u2018stopgap\u2019. Against this strategy, Bonhoeffer says: \u2018God wants to be grasped by us not in unsolved questions, but in those that have been solved\u2019 (DBWE 8, III\/152). In any case, there should be no attempt to keep God within bounds as a \u2018private\u2019 or \u2018personal\u2019 God.<\/p>\n
What used to be the servants\u2019 secrets\u2014to put it crudely\u2014i.e. the intimate areas of life (from prayer to sexuality)\u2014became the hunting ground of modern pastors. The intention \u2026 is religious blackmail \u2026 It is not the sins of weakness, but rather the sins of strength that matter. There is no need to go spying around. Nowhere does the Bible do this \u2026 What I am driving at is that God should not be smuggled in somewhere, in the very last secret place that is left. Instead, one must simply recognize that the world and humankind have come of age. One must not find fault with people in their worldliness, but rather confront them with God where they are strongest. (DBWE 8, III\/172)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer determinedly drops the word \u2018secularization\u2019 and instead speaks of the modern world\u2019s \u2018coming of age\u2019 and the \u2018coming of age\u2019 of humankind.<\/p>\n
And we cannot be honest, unless we recognize that we have to live in the world\u2014etsi deus non daretur. And this is precisely what we do recognize\u2014before God! God himself compels us to recognize it. Thus our coming of age leads us to a truer recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage their lives without God. The same God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34!).The same God who makes us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God, is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God, and with God, we live without God. God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross, God is weak and powerless in the world, and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us. (DBWE 8, III\/177)<\/p>\n
This development toward thinking of the world\u2019s coming of age lets us see clearly the God of the Bible, whose powerlessness in the world becomes paradoxically the source of power and space there for God. However, in solidarity with the godless world, Christians must confront the question \u2018What do we really believe?\u2019 Here no one can take refuge any longer behind the faith of the Church. Even in the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer was convinced there was more \u2018standing up for the \u201ccause\u201d of the Church, etc., but little personal faith in Christ. \u201cJesus\u201d disappears from view.\u2019 Yet everything depended on the encounter with him, on the experience that there is here a \u2018turning around of all human existence\u2019 (DBWE 8, IV\/187).<\/p>\n
Jesus\u2019 \u2018being-for-others\u2019 is the experience of transcendence! Only through this liberation from self, through this \u2018being-for-others\u2019 unto death, does omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence come into being. Faith is participating in this being of Jesus \u2026 Our relationship to God is \u2026 a new life in being there-for-others\u2019, through participation in the being of Jesus. Transcendence is not the infinite, unattainable tasks, but the neighbour within reach in any given situation. God in human form! (DBWE 8, IV\/187)<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer is not speaking \u2018out of the human condition\u2019 about faith here. (This is why, after the publication of the Letters and Papers from Prison [the original German title is Widerstand und Ergebung, Resistance and Submission], there were those who wanted to make use of him against Karl Barth.) Instead, he can speak only \u2018out of\u2019 the nature of the Son of God who became a human being, who was closest to those farthest away and still is so, again and again, today. Of Rudolf Bultmann, to whose thinking there are several positive references by Bonhoeffer in Tegel, but from whom he also distances himself, he says that one cannot \u2018demythologize\u2019 anything here. \u2018This mythology (resurrection and so forth) is the thing itself!\u2019 (DBWE 8, III\/161). The review we have already quoted above says further:<\/p>\n
It is the image of Jesus himself which disturbs Bonhoeffer, encourages him and shows him the way forward \u2026
\nThe Son of God reveals his divinity in his lowliness, and this is the way, thought by the religious master teachers to be impossible, by which we come to faith. It is a faith incredibly lacking in prerequisites. Jesus Christ himself is its only prerequisite.<\/p>\n
It cannot be the task of the Church to overwhelm persons who have come of age with a language that they can neither understand nor speak. As \u2018church which is there for others\u2019, the Church must go back to having an arcane discipline. That means that in every case where the revelations of the Bible cherished by the Church could be discouraging for people outside the Church, it may, and should, treat these matters as secret. In so doing it is betraying neither its task nor its Lord himself, but instead is inviting others to know him in the self-abnegation which he practised himself.
\nEver since the publication of the Letters and Papers from Prison, the baptismal homily written in May 1944 for Eberhard and Renate Bethge\u2019s son Dietrich has rightly been considered an outstanding part of Bonhoeffer\u2019s legacy. In it he summarizes his new theological ideas:<\/p>\n
You are being baptized today as a Christian. All those great and ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be pronounced over you, and the command of Jesus Christ to baptize will be carried out, without your understanding any of it. But we too are being thrown back all the way to the beginnings of our understanding. What reconciliation and redemption mean, rebirth and Holy Spirit, love for one\u2019s enemies, cross and resurrection, what it means to live in Christ and follow Christ, all that is so difficult and remote that we hardly dare speak of it anymore. In these words and actions handed down to us we sense something totally new and revolutionary, but we cannot yet grasp it and express it. This is our own fault. Our church has been fighting, during these years, only for its self-preservation, as if that were an end in itself. It has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption to humankind and to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action. By the time you grow up, the form of the Church will have changed considerably. It is still being melted and remolded, and every attempt to help it develop prematurely into a powerful organization again will only delay its conversion [Umkehr] and purification. It is not for us to predict the day\u2014but the day will come\u2014when people will once more be called to speak the word of God in such a way that the world is changed and renewed. It will be in a new language, perhaps quite nonreligious language, but liberating and redeeming like Jesus\u2019 language, so that people will be alarmed, but overcome by its power\u2014the language of a new righteousness and truth, a language proclaiming that God makes peace with humankind and that God\u2019s kingdom is drawing near \u2026 Until then, the Christian cause will be a quiet and hidden one; but there will be people who pray and do justice and wait for God\u2019s own time. (DBWE 8, III\/145)<\/p>\n
Ernst Lange says that the greatness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is that he reflected upon the way in which he himself was a homo religiosus, expounded the problems he discovered, and overcame them; in doing so he did not in fact create a religionless Christianity, but rather became the originator of a new way of being religious. His image of the Church to come is a prophetic image, particularly because it has so little in common with the Church that was actually restored after the Second World War. A great deal of what Bonhoeffer foretold still lies ahead of us.
\nA person who draws such a picture must have experienced the presence of God; as Bonhoeffer puts it in his Ethics, such a person must have experienced, in the \u2018penultimate\u2019, moments of the \u2018ultimate\u2019. The mystics knew that the certainty of God\u2019s presence comes in a moment, in its own time. It cannot be compelled, and it is never something that lasts. Bonhoeffer knew this as well. He wrote early on, \u2018One has only the decisive moment\u2019 (DBWE 10, 365). His baptismal homily was written out of such an experience of the \u2018ultimate\u2019. He was talking here of the faith which can never become a community experience, but only that of an individual person. In times of loneliness, and during his imprisonment in Tegel, this faith took on a new form for him. Bonhoeffer was speaking with the calm of the mystic, out of the experience of the \u2018ultimate\u2019, when he wrote to Eberhard Bethge on 21 July 1944, the day after the failure of the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat:<\/p>\n
Later on I discovered, and am still discovering to this day, that one only learns to have faith by living in the full this-worldliness of life. If one has completely renounced making something of oneself \u2026 then one throws oneself completely into the arms of God \u2026 then one no longer takes one\u2019s own sufferings seriously, but rather the suffering of God in the world. Then one stays awake with Christ in Gethsemane. And I think this is faith, this is metanoia [conversion]; and this is how one becomes a human being, a Christian.
\nHow should one become arrogant over successes or shaken by one\u2019s failures when one shares in God\u2019s suffering in the life of this world? You understand what I mean even when I put it so briefly. I am grateful that I have been allowed this insight, and I know that it is only on the path that I have finally taken that I was able to learn this. So I am thinking gratefully and with peace of mind about past as well as present things. (DBWE 8, IV\/178)<\/p>\n
The last sentence of this quotation is the first, and by far the shortest, reaction we know of to the 20th of July 1944.<\/p>\n
The 20th of July 1944<\/p>\n
On 20 July Count Claus von Stauffenberg left a bomb in a briefcase in a conference room at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf\u2019s Lair) field headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia, where Hitler was meeting with top military aides. Stauffenberg slipped from the room, witnessed the explosion at 12:42 p.m. and, convinced that Hitler had been killed, flew to Berlin to join the other plotters, who were to have seized the Supreme Command Headquarters there \u2026 A stenographer and three officers died, but Hitler escaped with only minor injury \u2026 Rumours of Hitler\u2019s survival melted the resolve of many of the key officers. In a countercoup at the Berlin headquarters, General Friedrich Fromm, who had known about and condoned the plot, sought to prove his allegiance by arresting a few of the chief conspirators, who were promptly shot (Stauffenberg, Olbricht and two aides) or forced to commit suicide (Beck). In subsequent days, Hitler\u2019s police rounded up the remaining conspirators, many of whom were tortured by the Gestapo to reveal their confederates and hauled before the Volksgericht (People\u2019s Court) to be excoriated by the dreaded Nazi judge Roland Freisler. About 180 to 200 plotters were shot or hanged, or viciously strangled with piano wire.<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer was among those who knew when this last assassination attempt was about to take place. He had great hopes for it, so his quiet reaction to its failure was remarkable. He scarcely allowed it to interrupt his ongoing theological work. He did know that from then on his life was in even greater danger than it had already been.<\/p>\n
Come now, highest of feasts on the way to freedom eternal,
\nDeath, lay down your ponderous chains and earthen enclosures
\nwalls that deceive our souls and fetter our mortal bodies,
\nthat we might at last behold what here we are hindered from seeing.
\nFreedom, long have we sought you through discipline, action and suffering.
\nDying, now we discern in the countenance of God your own face.
\n(DBWE 8, IV\/191)<\/p>\n
These are the words of one who is determined to fight for his life up to the last moment, who has already done so, yet who looks with complete calm into the face of his approaching death. \u2018Come now, highest of feasts \u2026\u2019
\nNothing shows how calm Bonhoeffer remained, despite the failure of the coup, so clearly as the continuation of his theological efforts. He wanted to put his new insights into a book. It would take him no more than a hundred pages to put down his new ideas, since they were not a new doctrine but rather theses for a discussion on fundamentals. He wrote to Bethge:<\/p>\n
The church must get out of its stagnation. We must also get back out into the fresh air of intellectual discourse with the world. We also have to risk saying controversial things, if that will stir up discussion of the important issues in life. As a \u2018modern\u2019 theologian who has nevertheless inherited the legacy of liberal theology, I feel responsible to address these questions. (DBWE 8, IV\/186)<\/p>\n
In his small book, the first chapter was to be \u2018Taking Stock of Christianity\u2019. Here he would speak of the coming of age of humankind and of its religionlessness, in which it no longer needs God as a \u2018stopgap for when we come up short\u2019, but also about the human illusion that we can \u2018organize\u2019 our lives so as to make ourselves safe from all strokes of fate. In the second chapter he meant to pursue the question, \u2018What is Christian faith really, and who is God?\u2019 This was to be about the insight that Jesus\u2019 \u2018being-there-for-others\u2019 is the quintessential experience of transcendence. Here he was also to ask the question of what we really believe, and of the contradictions among the confessions, which Bonhoeffer no longer believed were really genuine. And in the third chapter he intended to draw the conclusions from the above. \u2018Church is church only when it is there for others.\u2019<\/p>\n
It will have to speak of moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment. It will have to see that it does not underestimate the significance of the human \u2018example\u2019 (which has its origin in the humanity of Jesus and is so important in Paul\u2019s writings!); the church\u2019s word gains weight and power not through concepts but by example. (DBWE 8, IV\/187)<\/p>\n
This he intended to develop more fully, since he felt that in his time people had almost lost the concept of following the New Testament example. Undoubtedly this book would not have fitted people\u2019s expectations amid the \u2018economic miracle\u2019 of postwar Germany. We today would have liked it better. Bonhoeffer was working on it right up to April 1945, but with his death it was lost forever.
\nAfter surviving the assassination attempt of 20 July, Hitler seems to have thought it was \u2018a tiny clique of treasonous officers\u2019 who had tried to murder him. He had his mistress, Eva von Braun, present his bloodstained uniform tunic as proof that the \u2018Providence\u2019 which he was so fond of invoking had declared once again that he was its instrument. His attackers were to be \u2018liquidated\u2019 as rapidly as possible.
\nThe SS headquarters, however, suspected right away following the attack that the number of Hitler\u2019s opponents who had taken part in it was much larger. SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner appointed a staff of 400 officials to an investigating committee, which resulted in a wave of arrests. The proof that a conspiracy had existed for some time was discovered by officials of this special 20 July Commission, on 22 September 1944 at a branch office of the Armed Forces High Command, in Zossen near Berlin. There they found parts of a secret archive belonging to Hans von Dohnanyi, which he had originally kept in a bank but had later moved to the bunker at Zossen for safety.
\nSeveral times since his imprisonment Dohnanyi had enquired about these files and begged to have them destroyed, because their discovery would be a catastrophe for the conspirators. But General Beck had ordered that they be preserved; he wanted to use them to prove to the German public that Hitler\u2019s regime had been committing crimes from the beginning. Christine von Dohnanyi had passed on the warnings from her husband and had been assured that everything necessary had been taken into consideration.
\nAfter the files had been discovered there was no longer any question of \u2018making short shrift of the traitors\u2019. The trials already taking place in the People\u2019s Court were suspended, and the executions already ordered were postponed, so that the conspirators under arrest could be tortured and the names of further participants and accessories unearthed. For the next three months Kaltenbrunner\u2019s Commission carried on working in 11 groups. He sifted through their findings and passed them on to Freisler. Summaries were sent to Hitler through the Party general secretary, Martin Bormann.<\/p>\n
A rescue plan<\/p>\n
Since Bonhoeffer in Tegel was not immediately in the Gestapo\u2019s sights, a plan was devised to save his life. One of the friendly guards, Sergeant Knobloch, a factory worker from north Berlin, offered to smuggle Bonhoeffer out of Tegel Prison disguised as a mechanic, and to hide with him in a colony of garden allotments on the edge of the city until the end of the war. Bonhoeffer and his family accepted this offer immediately. The mechanic\u2019s uniform was obtained, and\u2014together with money and food ration coupons\u2014brought by R\u00fcdiger and Ursula Schleicher, with their daughter Renate Bethge, on 24 September to Knobloch at his home in Berlin\u2019s Niedersch\u00f6nhausen district. He concealed everything in the garden colony and planned to escape with Bonhoeffer during the first days of October. But things turned out otherwise.
\nOn 30 September Klaus Bonhoeffer came home from work to see a suspicious-looking black car parked in front of his house. He turned round and went to his sister Ursula\u2019s house in Marienburger Allee, where the widow of City Commander Hase had found refuge that very day. When he got there, Knobloch had just arrived also, to make the final arrangements. All the family could do was to ask him to inform Dietrich of this latest development.
\nAll that night in the Schleicher home, they struggled to decide what Klaus Bonhoeffer should do: flee, commit suicide, or allow himself to be arrested. He and R\u00fcdiger Schleicher had been actively involved only in later stages of the conspiracy, when it was reorganized after the arrests of Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer. His wife happened just then to be away visiting their children, who had been evacuated to Schleswig-Holstein, Germany\u2019s northernmost province. He himself was inclined to take his own life, but the family held him back. Ursula Schleicher later reproached herself bitterly on this account, since this brother of hers was cruelly tortured in prison. On 1 October the Gestapo came to the house on Marienburger Allee to arrest him. The next day, Sergeant Knobloch returned with the news that Dietrich had decided to give up the escape plan, in order not to put his family and fianc\u00e9e in even greater danger. Two days later, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher was arrested at his office, and the day afterwards, Friedrich Justus Perels. Their arrests were followed by those of the university professors who had written the Freiburg Memorandum, and by those of the \u2018Kreisau Circle\u2019 members.<\/p>\n
In the power of the Gestapo<\/p>\n
On Sunday, 8 October 1944, Bonhoeffer was removed from Tegel Prison to the cellar prison of the Reich SS Headquarters in Prince Albrecht Street. During the two and a half months since 20 July, he had been concentrating on the draft of his new book. Before leaving Tegel he had been able to turn over to his father all his important papers except this last book manuscript, which he took with him. According to fellow prisoners who survived, he kept working on it until shortly before his death.
\nIn the infamous Gestapo cellar he was reunited with his friend and comrade-in-arms Josef M\u00fcller, who had been held there since 27 September, and later also with other conspirators; in February he even saw Hans von Dohnanyi. But this was far from being the only Gestapo prison. The SS leadership had taken over a wing of the officers\u2019 prison on Lehrter Street, to which Canaris, Oster, Sack and many others were taken\u2014even, some time later, Eberhard Bethge.
\nBethge was clerk for his army unit on the Italian front, where his normal duties included sorting the mail and opening the letters for the major, his superior. Suddenly he had before him a telegram which said that Corporal Bethge was to be sent back to Berlin under guard. Before bringing the major his mail, Bethge burned all of Bonhoeffer\u2019s letters that he still had, not yet having sent them as usual to his wife for safekeeping.
\nHe got along so well with the two soldiers guarding him on the way to Berlin that they were willing to take him first to the Schleichers\u2019 in Marienburger Allee, where his mother-in-law Ursula gave them all a good dinner. There it was agreed that the two guards would deliver Bethge to the prison the next day at the exact moment when Ursula Schleicher came there to enquire about her husband. In this way Bethge would have time to get all the information he needed to be prepared for his interrogations. During the reunion scenes at the prison, his wife Renate, his mother-in-law and he himself all pretended to be surprised at meeting each other there, and the prison personnel could see that they would not gain anything by unexpectedly confronting him with his loved ones.
\nMuch more is known about the interrogations undergone by Klaus Bonhoeffer and R\u00fcdiger Schleicher than about those which Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer now had to face under changed conditions. This may seem surprising at first, but the reason for it makes sense. Kaltenbrunner\u2019s reports to Hitler and Himmler have been preserved. Their content must have passed through many hands before it came to Kaltenbrunner in the form of transcripts of interrogations. However, this had to be avoided in the investigations of Canaris\u2019s office because, in the interrogations of Military Intelligence people, highly secret reports could surface that needed to be seen by as few people as possible. The interrogations of the Oster-Dohnanyi Resistance group are therefore only marginally referred to in the Kaltenbrunner reports.
\nWhen Oster had been placed under house arrest, followed by Canaris on 26 February 1944, Canaris\u2019s office was incorporated into the Reich SS Headquarters with all its staff, except for a small unit which remained with the Armed Forces High Command. Of course its secret service work was not to be broken up, but rather to be continued by the same experienced professionals under the supervision of the SS. Not least, the SS was interested in probing the conspirators\u2019 enemy contacts to see if it could make use of them itself. This is why none of the conspirators in Military Intelligence were brought before Freisler in the People\u2019s Court.
\nThe Foreign News Service, which the SS Headquarters had maintained in parallel to that of Admiral Canaris, was directed by SS Brigadier General Walter Schellenberg. He had working under him SS Colonel Walter Huppenkothen, who since 1935 had made his career with the Gestapo and was now the new chief of the Military Intelligence police. It was to Huppenkothen that the former Military Intelligence staff members who were now under suspicion of being involved in the coup attempt were assigned for investigation. Because the results of these investigations were kept strictly secret, he was allowed to work independently of the other investigating groups. The member of his staff with whom he worked most closely was Criminal Commissioner Franz-Xaver Sonderegger.
\nAfter the Second World War the two of them were put on trial, and their testimony showed that Kaltenbrunner treated their reports differently from those of the other 10 investigating groups. Huppenkothen stated during a later trial that, from the archives discovered in Zossen, he and Sonderegger put together a special 160-page \u2018report to the F\u00fchrer\u2019, along with two volumes of documentation, of which only three copies are said to have existed: one each for Hitler and Himmler, and a joint one for Kaltenbrunner and Gestapo Chief M\u00fcller. These three copies are said to have been destroyed before the end of the war. It is presumed that, at his hearings, Huppenkothen did not reveal anywhere near everything he knew, and certainly not anything self-incriminating. This is why there are no official documents, with one exception as we shall soon see, about what was done with Bonhoeffer during the time from 8 October 1944 to 9 April 1945.
\nOn instructions from Schellenberg, who at that time was supposed to be making contacts in Sweden for Himmler, Huppenkothen focused for a time, while interrogating Bonhoeffer in the prison in Prince Albrecht Street, on his contacts abroad. This is known through a letter from Kaltenbrunner to the Reich Foreign Ministry, in which he reported in detail on Bonhoeffer\u2019s conversations with Bishop Bell in Sweden. The letter shows that Bonhoeffer succeeded in having his trip to Sweden accepted as an assignment in the national interest. The letter does not say that it was General Beck who had actually given him his orders, but it does describe in detail Bishop Bell\u2019s role in Britain and portrays him as a friend of Germany. It says that Bell had been \u2018on familiar terms\u2019 with Rudolf He\u00df, and had first sought an understanding with the \u2018Reich Church\u2019 before turning to the Confessing Church. The purpose of his trip to Sweden, it continues, had been to find out about Sweden\u2019s relationship with the Soviet Union and about what was going on in the Scandinavian churches. According to Bonhoeffer, Kaltenbrunner wrote further, Bell<\/p>\n
explained that he had spoken at length with Eden before leaving England, and had asked what he should do if peace feelers were extended from any particular direction in Sweden. Eden had told him quite bluntly that there was no question of England discussing peace terms before it had won the war. In this matter Eden was totally in agreement with Churchill. The attitude of Sir Stafford Cripps to these problems was quite different from that of Eden, according to Bell. It was quite wrong to say that Sir Stafford was a Bolshevik; he was more of a Christian socialist. Sir Stafford evidently spoke with great concern about the power of Russia, which almost everyone in England underestimated \u2026 During the course of the interview Bell had commented on the visit which evidently Lord Beaverbrook had recently made to Switzerland. Beaverbrook had held meetings with German industrialists and had discussed with them the possibilities of negotiating peace terms, with a view to forming a common front between the Western powers and Germany against Russia. (DB-ER 903\u20134)<\/p>\n
Sonderegger testified at his trial that Bonhoeffer had dictated this information into his machine. According to him, Bonhoeffer had admitted that, on orders from Canaris, he had violated Heydrich\u2019s \u2018Ten Commandments\u2019; nevertheless he had been able to avoid speaking of his role in the conspiracy, and by referring to Lord Beaverbrook\u2019s visit to Switzerland had shown Huppenkothen that it might be useful to keep the Military Intelligence members alive for awhile longer.
\nThe work of Huppenkothen\u2019s investigating group was made considerably more difficult by air raids. The Americans and British were advancing from the west, and on 12 January 1945 the Red Army launched its major offensive on the eastern front. Bonhoeffer believed that there was no important evidence being held against him, and that he would still be able to drag out his case long enough.<\/p>\n
Walter Huppenkothen, Bonhoeffer\u2019s interrogator in the Gestapo prison<\/p>\n
The prison in Prince Albert Street was a different world from that of Tegel. No visitors were allowed, and contact by mail was forbidden; however, three letters exist that Bonhoeffer wrote during this time, as we shall see. Not a single word was supposed to reach the outside world from this dreaded cellar, and no one was allowed to find out what the prisoners looked like. According to all information we have, Bonhoeffer himself would have been presentable. He had been threatened with torture by the SS, but was never actually tortured. Denying outsiders any contact with prisoners, however, added to the terror associated with this centre of power. The inmates were each entitled to receive one package every Wednesday. This was the only possibility of making their lot any easier.
\nWhile we know little from official sources about this final phase of Bonhoeffer\u2019s life, there are quite a few witnesses whose testimony is more valuable to us than any SS documents could be. Fellow prisoners who managed to escape Freisler\u2019s death sentences reported after the war about their encounters with Bonhoeffer. After a few days he was moved from cell 19 to cell 25, next door to Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was a cousin of Maria von Wedemeyer\u2019s. It was Schlabrendorff who, together with Tresckow, had carried out the assassination attempt in Smolensk, and had removed the evidence after it failed. Bonhoeffer and he had seen each other even before the war at one time or another.
\nNow, since there was only a single toilet for all the prisoners, and one bathroom at the end of the corridor where several had to wash at once, there were opportunities to communicate. Talking was of course strictly forbidden, but they could whisper to each other while the cold shower was running. There were even guards who no longer believed in Germany\u2019s \u2018final victory\u2019 and may have looked the other way now and then. Schlabrendorff reported that under the shower Bonhoeffer had tersely described his interrogations as \u2018repulsive\u2019; but it was astonishing how, even in the Gestapo\u2019s cellar, he was able to win over some of the guards. Huppenkothen\u2019s interrogations were repulsive because, although he did not torture anyone himself, he ordered it done by others. When he appeared again afterwards he would offer his victim a cigarette and act the perfect gentleman.
\nThe best opportunities for sustained conversations among the inmates came during air raids, which now occurred ever more frequently. Not to protect their lives but in the hope that there were still confessions to be extracted from them, the prisoners were driven like cattle into the so-called Himmler Bunker, where they had to stand closely packed until the all-clear was given. Schlabrendorff wrote that this was actually helpful for men who had been brought there after long periods of solitary confinement. Here, for example, Bonhoeffer met Goerdeler and was able to speak with him; and when Hans von Dohnanyi was brought to the prison on 1 February, paralysed by diphtheria, Bonhoeffer managed in the jostling during the next air raid warning to dive into his brother-in-law\u2019s cell unnoticed for a few moments, and then still to get in line with the group coming out of the bunker. This, on 3 February 1945, was the heaviest bombing Berlin had yet seen, and also turned the SS Headquarters buildings into a burnt-out shell. Schlabrendorff wrote about it:<\/p>\n
We were standing tightly squeezed together \u2026 when a bomb hit [the bunker] with an enormous explosion. For a second it seemed as if the bunker were bursting and the ceiling crashing down on top of us. It rocked like a ship tossing in the storm, but it held. At that moment Dietrich Bonhoeffer showed his mettle. He remained quite calm, he did not move a muscle \u2026 as if nothing had happened.<\/p>\n
Schlabrendorff noted that in their conversations it was often he who was depressed, while Bonhoeffer was always hopeful. Unlike his fellow inmates, Bonhoeffer had recovered long ago from the shock of his imprisonment. Because his courage and will to live could no longer be broken, it could influence others around him. When he received a food package, he would look for opportunities to pass bread, apples or cigars to other prisoners, happy that even in prison there were still opportunities to share with others and help one\u2019s neighbour. Dohnanyi soon had to be moved to a military hospital because of his illness. On 25 February 1945 he said in a secret message to his wife: \u2018I have seen Dietrich; he looks cheerful \u2026 Runge [an SS lawyer] has a soft spot for Maria \u2026 he thought Dietrich was a decent fellow\u2019 (DB-ER 908).
\nMaria von Wedemeyer had come to Berlin to stay with Bonhoeffer\u2019s parents and help them, and to take part in efforts to ease the situation of the family members in prison; in one attempt to be allowed to see Bonhoeffer, she got as far as an audience with Huppenkothen. This had been made possible by Countess Maria Bredow, who had a certain influence on higher-ranking SS leaders. But Huppenkothen kept his iron mien and did not allow her to see her fianc\u00e9.
\nHowever, Runge was not the only one in Central Security on whom Maria von Wedemeyer had made an impression. It was Sonderegger especially who also had a \u2018soft spot\u2019 for her, and allowed her to bring, to him personally, packages for Bonhoeffer whenever she wanted. Thus the third and last letter which Bonhoeffer was allowed to write from Prince Albrecht Street says, \u2018Unfortunately no books were handed in for me today. Commissar Sonderegger would accept them on another day if Maria brings them\u2019 (DBWE 8, IV\/202). A secret message from Dohnanyi to his wife also says, \u2018Sonderegger loves people to play to the gentleman in him, and is not wholly heartless, but he\u2019s shifty.\u2019 Against regulations, Sonderegger handed over to Maria von Wedemeyer each of the last three letters Bonhoeffer\u2019s loved ones received from him. The first was for Maria herself, a Christmas letter written on 19 December 1944. Bonhoeffer wrote to her that the days of Christmas would be very quiet for him, but it had always been his experience that the deeper the stillness around him, the more clearly he felt the bond to those he loved. \u2018It\u2019s as if, in solitude, the soul develops organs of which we\u2019re hardly aware in everyday life.\u2019 With this letter he enclosed the poem \u2018By Powers of Good\u2019, and asked her to copy it out for his parents, brothers and sisters. Today German Protestants have it in their hymnals as Bonhoeffer\u2019s legacy (see pp. 415\u201316). What he meant by \u2018powers of good\u2019, he wrote in the letter to his fianc\u00e9e:<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t for an instant felt lonely and forlorn. You yourself, my parents\u2014all of you, including my friends and students on active service\u2014are my constant companions. Your prayers and kind thoughts, passages from the Bible, long-forgotten conversations, pieces of music, books\u2014all are invested with life and reality as never before. I live in a great, unseen realm of whose real existence I\u2019m in no doubt. The old children\u2019s song about the angels says \u2018two to cover me, two to wake me\u2019, and today we grown-ups are no less in need than children are of preservation, night and morning, by kindly unseen powers.<\/p>\n
The second letter of Bonhoeffer\u2019s that Sonderegger handed to Maria was for his mother, for her 68th birthday. It says in part:<\/p>\n
I know that you have always lived only for us, and that there has never been a life you could call your own. This is why everything that I experience, I can only experience as if together with you. It is a very great comfort to me that Maria is with you. I thank you, Mama, for all the love that has come from you to me in my cell in the past year and made every day easier for me. I believe that these difficult years have forged an even closer bond between us than ever before. (DBWE 8, IV\/201)<\/p>\n
The third letter mentioned, among other requests, some books he hoped Maria could bring to Sonderegger. This letter Bonhoeffer intended not least as a sign to reassure his family that he was still alive and still in Berlin.
\nFrom December 1944 onwards, the Bonhoeffers experienced a time of suffering that had become almost unbearable by the time it was over. Klaus Bonhoeffer and brother-in-law R\u00fcdiger Schleicher had had contacts with the Resistance even before Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi were arrested, but had not participated actively until afterwards. Both had said they were ready to work with a new regime after the coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, and important meetings of the conspirators had been held in their homes. Formal charges were brought against them on 20 December 1944. During this time Dohnanyi lay seriously ill in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but he was brought to Prince Albrecht Street on 1 February 1945 because Huppenkothen was not getting anywhere in his interrogations of the Military Intelligence people. Dohnanyi was turned over to a Commissioner Stawitzky, who tried to wear him down through neglect; the guards were forbidden to take him to the washroom or even the toilet. In his helplessness he was soon in a bad state.
\nOn 2 February Freisler brought his verdict in the People\u2019s Court against Klaus Bonhoeffer, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, Friedrich Justus Perels, and Schleicher\u2019s colleague Hans John who had facilitated many of the contacts among the conspirators. All were sentenced to death. The following day Ursula Schleicher had arranged to speak with Reich Attorney General Ernst Lautz about an appeal for clemency.
\nWith the same purpose in mind, R\u00fcdiger\u2019s brother Rolf Schleicher, a military doctor, who had come from Stuttgart for the conclusion of the trial, also set out the next morning. He was caught in that same air raid, the most severe the Allies had yet inflicted on Berlin by daylight, and had to wait until the all-clear in the Potsdamer Platz Underground station. When he arrived on foot at the People\u2019s Court, the building was on fire. Someone saw by his uniform that he was a doctor and took him to a man who was severely injured. But all he could do was assure them that the man was dead; it was Roland Freisler. Rolf Schleicher said he would not issue the death certificate, however, until he had first spoken with Justice Minister Thierack. Shaken by this odd coincidence, the Minister said he would have the executions delayed and would entertain an appeal for clemency.
\nThat same morning, Bonhoeffer\u2019s parents, together with Klaus Bonhoeffer\u2019s wife Emmi, had set out for the prison to bring their son Dietrich a birthday package. They had to wait out the air raid in the Underground under the Anhalter railway station. After that they were not allowed to approach the heavily damaged SS Headquarters building in Prince Albrecht Street; they were desperate with anxiety, but there was nothing to do but go home again. However, they were able to deliver the parcel the following Wednesday, with at least one of the requested books, having learned that nothing had happened to the prisoners in the bunker. The letter accompanying the package, however, was refused. Karl Bonhoeffer had written, hiding his fears behind his usual laconic style: \u2018\u2026 it wasn\u2019t a very pretty sight. Apart from the fact that we looked like chimney sweeps afterward, we came away unscathed\u2019 (DBWE 8, IV\/204).
\nThis air raid also severely diminished Huppenkothen\u2019s resources for carrying on his investigation. The SS Headquarters and the cellar prison in Prince Albrecht Street had been largely destroyed. Only the prisoners who were expected to appear in court in the next few days were left in the bunker; the others were forced to \u2018decamp\u2019 along with the various branches of SS Headquarters operations.<\/p>\n
12. The End<\/p>\n
Buchenwald<\/p>\n
While a group including Canaris and Oster was being taken to Flossenb\u00fcrg concentration camp, Bonhoeffer found himself in an eight-seat prison van with eleven other prisoners, on the way to Buchenwald. When he protested against being handcuffed again, his friend Josef M\u00fcller, who had plenty of experience with torture, consoled him, \u2018Dietrich, don\u2019t take it so hard. We\u2019re doing this for our Christian convictions.\u2019 But the interrogations of the Canaris group were definitively over. Even Huppenkothen seemed to have run out of possibilities to continue them.
\nAt Buchenwald the group from Berlin was not put into the concentration camp itself, but rather in the cellar of an SS barracks in front of it; this cellar had been used as a jail for guards who were being punished. Because this area outside the actual camp had already been bombed several times by the Allies, the inmates were locked in during air raids, while those guarding them fled into the woods nearby where trenches had been dug. The rooms in the cellar were damp and the food meagre. At midday, normal dinner-time in Germany, there was soup, and for supper, bread with a little pork fat and jam. Anyone who wanted breakfast had to save some of this for the next morning.
\nThe Americans were advancing from the west, making the guards visibly nervous. They refused ever to let the prisoners outdoors for some fresh air, but after some humming and hawing allowed them out of their cells once a day to walk in the cellar corridor, which was divided lengthwise into three narrow passages. There were a few gaps in the walls between these, so that the inmates were able to meet and talk with one another. And since the guards found it too much effort to supervise them while the cell doors were open, these were really sociable times. One or another of the guards would be selling black market tobacco, which made the atmosphere a bit more relaxed. The prisoners could get to know one another and share any books they still had with them. Bonhoeffer\u2019s neighbour in the next cell was Hermann P\u00fcnder from the Rhineland, a Catholic who as a young man had been Chancellor Br\u00fcning\u2019s chief of staff before 1933. Bonhoeffer enjoyed political and cultural discussions with P\u00fcnder, especially about the future relations they both hoped for between Catholics and Protestants in Germany.
\nAfter a time further prisoners arrived in Buchenwald, including two English officers, Hugh Falconer and Sigismund Payne Best. Best had been lured by an SS commando into an ambush in the Dutch border town of Venlo in 1939 and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His book The Venlo Incident, written soon after the war, is the only reliable source we have for the last weeks of Dietrich Bonhoeffer\u2019s life. All other testimonies were written a long time after the war. The new group also included a Russian, Vassily Kokorin, a nephew of Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, Generals Falkenhausen and Rabenau, and a few more.
\nFriedrich von Rabenau was put into Bonhoeffer\u2019s cell, and Payne Best had the impression that they were the only two cell-mates who got along together without any problems. General Rabenau was a friend of Goerdeler\u2019s. He had been director of the Army archives, and since his retirement had studied theology in Berlin and earned his doctorate in it. He had been arrested when it became known that he had enabled contacts between Goerdeler and several generals. He and Bonhoeffer were worlds apart in their theological thinking, but that did not prevent them from having lively theological conversations, to which their neighbour P\u00fcnder listened with great interest.
\nRabenau introduced Payne Best to Bonhoeffer in the washroom, and Bonhoeffer enjoyed the opportunity to speak English again. Best had ample luggage with him, and when he discovered that Bonhoeffer lacked warm clothes and was wearing wooden prison clogs instead of shoes, he gave him his golf shoes and a warm sweater. Best also had two chess sets, one of which he offered to the two theologians, to their delight. Thus life in the cell next to the stairs was far from monotonous, especially since Bonhoeffer and Rabenau also had pencils and paper and each could continue working on a manuscript which he had brought with him. Best later described his fellow prisoners half-humorously, half-caustically. About Bonhoeffer he wrote:<\/p>\n
Bonhoeffer was all humility and sweetness; he always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. There was something doglike in the look of fidelity in his eyes and his gladness if you showed that you liked him. He was one of the very few men I have ever met to whom his God was real and ever close to him.<\/p>\n
In a letter to Sabine and Gerhard Leibholz he later expressed himself more fully, and no doubt found that his animal comparison was no longer appropriate. \u2018In fact my feeling was far stronger than these words imply. He was, without exception, the finest and most lovable man I have ever met.\u2019
\nThe original letter seemed to have been lost, but in 2008 Stephanie Schlingensiepen (the author\u2019s daughter) discovered a copy in the Imperial War Museum in London. It contains such a lively description of the conditions in Buchenwald that it is included in the Appendix of this book (see pp. 417\u201321).
\nBest reported that most inmates complained a lot, but that Falkenhausen and Bonhoeffer never did. Bonhoeffer was always composed and master of his situation. \u2018His soul really shone in the dark desperation of our prison \u2026 [we were] in complete agreement that our warders and guards needed pity far more than we and that it was absurd to blame them for their actions.\u2019 Payne Best had spent five years in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and had developed there a similar sort of expertise, in dealing with the guards, to that of Bonhoeffer in Tegel. This short statement shows that they had talked about it. When, in the Buchenwald cellar, the inmates began hearing the artillery of the advancing Americans from the Werra River area, Best had the feeling that he could persuade the wardens to escape with the prisoners; but the German prisoners would all have had to take part in this, and before they could reach agreement the opportunity had been missed.<\/p>\n
The destruction of P\u00e4tzig<\/p>\n
During Bonhoeffer\u2019s imprisonment in Prince Albrecht Street, the Red Army had conquered large stretches of eastern Germany and had almost reached the Oder River. On 30 January 1945, Ruth von Wedemeyer wrote to Bonhoeffer\u2019s mother that she had had to be very hard on her, asking her daughter Maria to come back to P\u00e4tzig immediately.<\/p>\n
Despite twelve degrees of frost and an icy east wind, I\u2019ve sent Maria in a covered wagon with my three other children, Mrs D\u00f6pke and her own two children, Miss Rath, who has a high temperature, and Mrs Dimel who\u2019s very delicate, their destination being a village in the west, in the neighbourhood of Celle \u2026 I need her help very badly now. It\u2019s really far too much for her. She has a Polish driver and the three best plough horses. Join me in praying that she proves equal to her difficult task. They should be there in two weeks, if all goes well, but the snow and wind have been very severe since then.<\/p>\n
Maria had set out on this journey on 29 January. Her mother later reported that when they said goodbye, she had a feeling of great strength flowing to her from her daughter. Shortly after the wagon had departed, the state authorities, just before taking their own departure, had announced a strict ban on trekking, although the Russians were now very nearby. Ruth von Wedemeyer had actually been determined to stay at P\u00e4tzig, but at the last moment was persuaded to flee on foot. From the edge of the village, she saw her manor house enveloped in flames.
\nAlmost as soon as she had arrived safely at the home of relatives in the west, Maria set off once again to find out where her fianc\u00e9 had been taken. Suspecting that he might have been transferred to the concentration camp at Dachau or at Flossenb\u00fcrg, she travelled to both places, and on 19 February wrote to her mother from the Upper Palatinate (near Flossenb\u00fcrg) that she had not been able to find Dietrich at either place. \u2018I\u2019m feeling utterly miserable, but that\u2019s only because I\u2019ve been on the train for two days now, had to walk seven kilometers to get there, and then, without any prospect of hearing anything, had to trudge the same seven kilometres back again\u2019 (DBWE 8, IV\/205). She did not mention that she had done all this while carrying a suitcase full of warm clothing and food for Dietrich. Since P\u00e4tzig was no more, and she didn\u2019t want to return to Berlin because the Russians were expected there, she ended up, exhausted and miserable, in Bundorf.<\/p>\n
The last seven days<\/p>\n
On the first of April, which in 1945 was Easter Sunday, the American artillery was thunderous as they advanced beyond the Werra River. In the cellar at Buchenwald, one of the guards arrived with orders for the prisoners to get ready to march. Another guard confirmed that they would be leaving on foot, which made them afraid that they would be taken into the woods and shot. In this uncertainty, on 3 April the last week of Dietrich Bonhoeffer\u2019s life began.
\nBut in the evening of that day, the Tuesday after Easter, an enormous closed van appeared, with a motor that used wood for fuel. The prisoners had to squeeze past a great stack of wood and huddle together inside. The van departed that night, headed southward. Everyone now travelled at night if at all possible, since the Allies had long dominated Germany\u2019s air space and military transports were a prized target for bombers. This lorry could only manage twenty miles an hour at most, and had to keep stopping to be serviced. While the air filters were being cleaned, the boiler refilled with chopped wood and the whole engine reheated, the air inside the van became almost unbreathable, yet the prisoners were not allowed to get out, and they had no water and nothing to eat during these stops. Payne Best, a heavy smoker, remembers that in this situation Bonhoeffer found the last of his tobacco in his pocket and insisted on sharing it with everyone. \u2018He was a good and saintly man.\u2019
\nAs the woodpile grew smaller, two prisoners at a time could climb past it to breathe some fresh air through the crack at the edge of the tailgate. In this way those who knew the area saw that they had arrived in northeastern Bavaria. At noon on 4 April they were supposed to stop at the town of Weiden, but there were already so many refugees there that the transport was turned away. Now they would find out where they were going; if they turned left, it would be Flossenb\u00fcrg and almost certain death, but if they continued southward, were they possibly headed for freedom? The journey continued toward the south.
\nA few miles further on they were stopped by two military policemen on motorcycles; Josef M\u00fcller and Franz Liedig were ordered to get out. Bonhoeffer leaned back so as not to be noticed. But Ludwig Gehre, who had been M\u00fcller\u2019s cell-mate at Buchenwald, jumped out after M\u00fcller. He was jumping to his death, since he thence became one of those who were hanged a few days later with Canaris and his group.
\nIt took a while until the wood-burning lorry started up again. Were there no further orders for its guards? In any case it was striking how much friendlier they became from this moment on. They made a stop at a farmhouse and let the prisoners get out. There was a pump in working order, and they could all drink water and freshen up. The farmer\u2019s wife brought out a loaf of rye bread and a pitcher of milk. Then they continued onwards, arriving in Regensburg that evening. The transporter drove into the yard of the courthouse there.
\n\u2018Aristocrats again,\u2019 grumbled a jailer when the new group objected to being rudely ordered about. The Regensburg city jail was full of Sippenh\u00e4ftlinge, family members of accused prisoners, who were being kept in the corridors. Bonhoeffer and his companions in suffering met people of all ages bearing the names Stauffenberg, Goerdeler, Hammerstein, Hassell and so forth. The new group was locked up for the night, five to a cell, but they were hungry and protested noisily until a kind-hearted warden managed to get them some soup.
\nThe scene on the morning of 5 April, according to Payne Best, must have been more like a festive reception than the beginning of a day in prison. It was very lively, and the guards had quite a struggle to herd the group from Buchenwald back into their cells. Bonhoeffer remained standing at the little window in the cell door, telling the inmates in the corridor about people he had seen in the Prince Albrecht Street prison under the SS Headquarters. In this way Mrs Goerdeler found out what he knew about the last weeks of her husband\u2019s life, and that he had been executed on 2 February.
\nSuddenly this joyful reunion of people who had almost reached safety was interrupted by an air raid siren. All the inmates were herded into the courthouse cellar, where they survived an attack on the nearby railroad marshalling yard. Payne Best got a look at it through a window, and remembered: \u2018Engines and coaches lying on their backs with their legs in the air, burnt-out coaches in long rows, and railway lines sticking up in great loops like pieces of wire \u2026\u2019 Hearing this destruction from inside the cellar must have been frightful. But when the prisoners came back upstairs it was the same scene as in the morning, all over again. When finally everyone was ready to settle down for the night, one of the Buchenwald guards appeared and called for his group; they were going further.
\nThis was the day, 5 April, the Thursday after Easter, on which Bonhoeffer\u2019s fate was decided. By chance, the SS General Walter Buhle had discovered in Zossen some further material from Dohnanyi\u2019s secret archive, including diaries belonging to Admiral Canaris. Kaltenbrunner immediately passed on their fully revealing content to Hitler, who worked himself up into a frenzied rage. At a noon meeting in his headquarters, he ordered the \u2018liquidation\u2019 of Canaris and the other conspirators from Military Intelligence.
\nBy this time it was no longer possible for anyone to believe that Germany would be victorious. The watchword everywhere had already been for some time, \u2018every man for himself\u2019\u2014save yourself if you can. Nevertheless, it took only a single command from Hitler to start up the official machinery of judicial murder in a far corner of the Reich. He still had henchmen who shared his fury and blindly carried out their orders to the very last. Thus, on the evening of this same day, the SS judge Otto Thorbeck in Nuremberg was summoned to preside over a court-martial at Flossenb\u00fcrg. On the Sunday he found an open coal train that took him as far as Weiden. From there no further transport was available, so he got hold a bicycle for the last twelve miles or so, intent on carrying out Hitler\u2019s judicial murders as if they had been lawful acts.*
\nIn Berlin, Dr Tietze in the State Hospital received orders to prepare Dohnanyi for transport to Sachsenhausen the next morning. He immediately sent for Christine von Dohnanyi, and at Hans\u2019s bedside they discussed escape plans with him, but were forced to accept that it was too late. The next morning Sonderegger came to collect the prisoner, and left no doubt in anyone\u2019s mind that Dohnanyi\u2019s fate was sealed. Huppenkothen, together with an unknown SS judge and the camp commander at Sachsenhausen, proclaimed the death sentence for Hans von Dohnanyi, who was already lying only half-conscious on a stretcher before them. The sentence was carried out on 9 April.
\nKlaus Bonhoeffer, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, Hans John, Friedrich Justus Perels, Albrecht Haushofer and 11 other prisoners were told on 22 April that they were to be moved from the prison in Lehrter Street to another building, where they were to be released. Instead, they were taken out that night behind Lehrter Railway Station and murdered by machine pistol shots in the back. One prisoner escaped and was able to bring the news of their death to their families on 31 May. At a bomb crater in the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery, which had been used as a shallow grave for these victims and many others, Eberhard Bethge, who had been freed in the meantime by Soviet troops, held a funeral service with the families of the dead on 11 June. The Bonhoeffer family was then still waiting for Dietrich to come home.
\nBonhoeffer and his group had arrived in Sch\u00f6nberg, 25 miles north of Passau, in the afternoon of 6 April. The journey there from Regensburg had been an adventure. In heavy rain and mud it had not been long until the steering of the old wood-burning van broke down and could not be repaired. The guards asked passers-by to report this to Regensburg Jail and request that another vehicle be sent. Despite being armed with machine pistols they were extremely tense and nervous. The rain was drumming on the roof of the van, in which the prisoners still huddled. Towards morning they were allowed out to stretch their legs. It was nearly noon before a new team of 10 SS guards showed up with a bus. The guards from Buchenwald, who had become friendlier as time passed, had to stay with their van, while the group of prisoners was treated to a pleasant trip, by daylight, in the much more comfortable bus. They passed by Metten Monastery and continued up into the hills of northeastern Bavaria.
\nIn the meantime the family members of those who had planned the coup had also been sent to Sch\u00f6nberg from Regensburg. They had moved into the ground floor of the school there, while Bonhoeffer\u2019s group was placed in the large classroom upstairs. On three sides they could see from the windows the beautiful landscape of the Ilz River valley. They had freshly made beds, but nothing to eat. But what the guards could not do, the prisoners\u2019 families downstairs could. They made contact with sympathetic people in the village, who brought a huge pot of steaming unpeeled potatoes and even made potato salad the next day.
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s bed was next to that of the Russian, Kokorin. Hugh Falconer later wrote to Sabine Leibholz:<\/p>\n
He did a great deal to keep some of the weaker brethren from depression and anxiety. He spent a good deal of time with Wasily Wasiliev Kokorin, Molotov\u2019s nephew, who was a delightful young man although an atheist. I think your brother divided his time with him between instilling the foundations of Christianity and learning Russian. (DB-ER 924)<\/p>\n
Saturday, 7 April 1945, was the most pleasant day the prisoners had had since they were taken to Buchenwald. They found an electric outlet in the classroom, and Payne Best got out his electric razor and passed it around. Bonhoeffer still had his books with him, and probably also his manuscript, which had grown considerably since he left Tegel. The search for it has continued to this day. But it must have been lost on the way to Flossenb\u00fcrg or destroyed at the camp there: an irreparable loss in the true sense of the word.
\nBonhoeffer is said to have spent much of this day sitting in conversation with others at one of the open windows. The rain had stopped, and the valley was green and springlike. In the bright sunshine the prisoners\u2019 spirits rose as they looked forward to freedom and new life.
\nThe night before, Walter Huppenkothen and his wife had packed several large suitcases with things that they hoped to save until after the war. He was to be the prosecutor at Flossenb\u00fcrg, making sure that the Military Intelligence group of Resistance members was liquidated before the Americans got there. When the couple joined the convoy led by an SS leader named Gogalla next morning, Huppenkothen had two purposes in mind: carrying out the F\u00fchrer\u2019s orders, and preparing to flee the capital before it was taken by the Russians. He was to return only once, briefly, to Berlin, where he was entrusted with some more files, and then he escaped to Austria. By bringing death to a final group of Hitler\u2019s opponents he was given the chance to survive himself.
\nGogalla and Huppenkothen were both carrying \u2018Reich Secret Business\u2019 files with them, which were to guarantee them the support of the military police in case their journey to the south should be interrupted by accidents or delays. The documents specified exactly what they were to do in Flossenb\u00fcrg, Dachau and Sch\u00f6nberg. Himmler seems to have hoped to the last that if he had internationally respected prisoners well treated and handed them over to the Allies, he could save his own life. It was, oddly enough, Payne Best who got hold one of these \u2018Reich Secret Business\u2019 documents. Somebody gave it to him when they had arrived in the Tyrolean Mountains. It said that Georg Elser, who had tried in 1939 to assassinate Hitler in the B\u00fcrgerbr\u00e4u Cellar in Munich, was to be \u2018liquidated\u2019, but others such as Schacht, Halder, former Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg and his wife, and Martin Niem\u00f6ller were to be treated politely and transported on towards the Alps. Gogalla, who was responsible for carrying out these orders, picked up General Falkenhausen, Payne Best and Vassily Kokorin at Sch\u00f6nberg.
\nHuppenkothen arrived in Flossenb\u00fcrg on Saturday evening, and together with the camp commander, Max K\u00f6gl, prepared the summary court-martial that was to pass the death sentences on Military Intelligence\u2019s Resistance group and Army Judge Karl Sack as their protector. As they were doing so, someone realized that prisoner Bonhoeffer was missing. A feverish search for him began. Other prisoners, including Schlabrendorff and Josef M\u00fcller, were shouted at in their cells during the night, \u2018Surely you are Bonhoeffer!\u2019 Finally the conclusion was reached that, by mistake, Bonhoeffer must have been transported onwards to Sch\u00f6nberg. While Germany\u2019s fighting forces were abandoning their vehicles on both the eastern and western fronts for lack of petrol, Concentration Camp Commander K\u00f6gl was able to send a car on the 100-mile journey, by way of Weiden, Cham and Regen, to Sch\u00f6nberg.
\nIt arrived there on White Sunday, where the prisoners were in high spirits. After breakfast, P\u00fcnder suggested that Bonhoeffer lead them in Morning Prayer. Bonhoeffer objected at first, saying that most of the group were Catholics and Kokorin did not belong to any church. But then Kokorin himself joined the others in requesting a worship service. So Bonhoeffer read the Bible texts for that Sunday, led the group in prayer, and spoke on the texts for that day, \u2018With his stripes we are healed\u2019 (Isaiah 53:5) and \u2018Blessed 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\u2019 (1 Peter 1:3).
\nThe prisoners\u2019 families on the ground floor could hear that a service was being held upstairs, and were considering how to smuggle Bonhoeffer downstairs to lead one for them as well, when two men dressed as civilians appeared and called him: \u2018Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready and come with us!\u2019 They also called for Rabenau. Both men quickly packed their things. The Plutarch book that his brother Karl Friedrich had sent to Bonhoeffer in the prison in Prince Albrecht Street was later found on a table in the middle of the classroom. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written his name in it in three places, to leave a trace of where he had been.<\/p>\n
The execution grounds at Flossenb\u00fcrg. Here, on the morning of 9 April 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Canaris, Ludwig Gehre, Hans Oster, Karl Sack, Theodor Str\u00fcnck and Friedrich von Rabenau were put to death<\/p>\n
Payne Best described their farewell: \u2018We bade him goodbye. He drew me aside. \u201cThis is the end,\u201d he said, \u201cfor me, the beginning of life,\u201d and then he gave me a message to give, if I could, to the Bishop of Chichester, a friend to all evangelical pastors in Germany.\u2019 As Bonhoeffer ran hurriedly down the stairs, Mrs Goerdeler called out a final goodbye. It was her son who later brought the Plutarch book to Bonhoeffer\u2019s family.
\nIn the meantime, SS Judge Thorbeck had arrived in Flossenb\u00fcrg by bicycle. Though he later insisted that he, Huppenkothen and K\u00f6gl had held a proper trial, at which the prisoners were thoroughly questioned and were allowed to respond, it only had the appearance of a trial. The verdict had already been given before this court was called to order.9
\nDuring the morning hours of 9 April, Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Oster, his colleagues Theodor Str\u00fcnck and Ludwig Gehre, Karl Sack and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were hanged and cremated. Friedrich von Rabenau was to follow them a few days later. Their ashes, together with those of many thousands of other victims of Hitler\u2019s regime, form the now grass-grown pyramid in the middle of the former concentration camp at Flossenb\u00fcrg.<\/p>\n
Epilogue<\/p>\n
Above the west portal of Westminster Abbey, the national shrine of the English people, 10 new statues carved in stone were installed some years ago, portraying martyrs of the twentieth century. In the middle stands Dietrich Bonhoeffer, holding an open Bible. For many people, far beyond the borders of Germany, he has become a model of the Christian life.
\nHow this came about is a story in itself, for when Josef M\u00fcller and Fabian von Schlabrendorff brought the news of Bonhoeffer\u2019s death from Flossenb\u00fcrg, he was hardly a publicly known figure. The two conspirators had been taken, with a larger group of prominent prisoners of the SS, including Martin Niem\u00f6ller, former Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg and his wife, Halder, Falkenhausen, Payne Best, Falconer and Kokorin, as far as the Puster Valley in the Tyrolean Alps of northern Italy, where a German army unit released them and US troops brought them to Venice and Capri. From there they were able to send a message to Visser \u2018t Hooft and his staff in Geneva. Visser \u2018t Hooft himself, however, had flown to the USA together with Bishop Bell, to help prepare for a meeting of ecumenical leaders. They were especially hoping to have Bonhoeffer participate on behalf of Germany. It was only on returning to Europe that they learned he had been hanged at Flossenb\u00fcrg.<\/p>\n
Statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (far right) among other martyrs of the twentieth century at Westminster Abbey in London<\/p>\n
Julius Rieger, who received a telegram from Freudenberg, Visser \u2018t Hooft\u2019s collegue in Geneva, had to bring Sabine Leibholz the news that her brothers Klaus and Dietrich had been murdered during the last days of the war. Maria von Wedemeyer heard it in June, at her cousin\u2019s in Bundorf; but there was still no communication from the outside with Berlin.
\nIn July, all British newspapers carried the shocking photos of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the mounds of corpses that had been found there. These images went beyond what anyone had ever imagined of the atrocities in Germany, and after that hardly anyone in Britain could or would envision receiving Germany back into the community of nations. Even Payne Best waited more than a year before writing to Bishop Bell that he had a message for him from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
\nIt was on 27 July, during this time of shock when Germany and Germans were regarded with abhorrence, that Bishop Bell, Franz Hildebrandt and Julius Rieger held a public memorial service for Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Holy Trinity Church in Kingsway in London\u2014a service that was broadcast by the BBC. Bonhoeffer\u2019s parents, who had finally learned only a few days earlier that their son Dietrich had also perished, listened on the radio in Berlin. Sabine Leibholz came to the service with her family, as did members of Bonhoeffer\u2019s former parishes and friends from his time in London, German \u00e9migr\u00e9s and British Christians, filling every pew in the church. In his sermon, the bishop spoke of his friend as hardly anyone else would have dared to do at that time:<\/p>\n
His death is a death for Germany\u2014indeed for Europe too \u2026 his death, like his life, marks a fact of the deepest value in the witness of the Confessing Church. As one of a noble company of martyrs of differing traditions, he represents both the resistance of the believing soul, in the name of God, to the assault of evil, and also the moral and political revolt of the human conscience against injustice and cruelty. He and his fellows are indeed built upon the foundation of the Apostles and the Prophets. And it was this passion for justice that brought him, and so many others \u2026 into close partnership with other resisters, who, though outside the Church, shared the same humanitarian and liberal ideals \u2026
\nFor him and Klaus \u2026 there is the resurrection from the dead; for Germany redemption and resurrection, if God pleases to lead the nation through men animated by his spirit, holy and humble and brave like him; for the Church, not only in that Germany which he loved, but the Church Universal which was greater to him than nations, the hope of a new life. (DB-ER 931)<\/p>\n
Long before the Marshall Plan or even the currency reform, before the economy rose again under the Federal Republic of Germany, Christians in the Scandinavian countries, Britain and the United States began rescuing those who were starving and aiding the hosts of German refugees. The Scandinavians, who were nearest, also worked fervently within East Germany, the Russian-occupied zone. Bonhoeffer had known since his meeting with Bell in Sweden that the bishop and his fellow campaigners would bring the \u2018war behind the war\u2019 to a peaceful conclusion and urge that Germany not remain an outcast from the community of nations. He had foreseen this in his poem \u2018The Death of Moses\u2019 (DBWE 8, IV\/197).
\nThe Old Testament (Deuteronomy 34:1\u20134) relates that Moses, who had led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt, was not allowed to enter the Promised Land with them. But before his death, God showed him that land from the summit of Mount Nebo. Bonhoeffer tells this story in simple verse, without any overt reference to the present. Yet we can hear that he was thinking of himself and the others who were prepared to pay with their lives for their patriotism.<\/p>\n
Faithful Lord, your faithless servant\u2019s sure
\nthat your righteousness shall e\u2019er endure \u2026
\nWondrous deeds with me you have arranged,
\nbitterness to sweetness you have changed.<\/p>\n
Through death\u2019s veil you let me see at least
\nthis, my people, go to highest feast.
\nThey stride into freedom, God, I see,
\nas I sink to your eternity.
\nTo punish sin, to forgive you are moved;
\nO God, this people have I truly loved.<\/p>\n
Appendix 1: Theological Declaration of Barmen<\/p>\n
Written by Karl Barth and the confessing church in Nazi Germany in response to Hitler\u2019s national church. Its central doctrines concern the sin of idolatry and the lordship of Christ.<\/p>\n
I. An Appeal to the Evangelical Congregations and Christians in Germany<\/p>\n
8.01 The Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church met in Barmen, May 29\u201331, 1934. Here representatives from all the German Confessional Churches met with one accord in a confession of the one Lord of the one, holy, apostolic Church. In fidelity to their Confession of Faith, members of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches sought a common message for the need and temptation of the Church in our day. With gratitude to God they are convinced that they have been given a common word to utter. It was not their intention to found a new Church or to form a union. For nothing was farther from their minds than the abolition of the confessional status of our Churches. Their intention was, rather, to withstand in faith and unanimity the destruction of the Confession of Faith, and thus of the Evangelical Church in Germany. In opposition to attempts to establish the unity of the German Evangelical Church by means of false doctrine, by the use of force and insincere practices, the Confessional Synod insists that the unity of the Evangelical Churches in Germany can come only from the Word of God in faith through the Holy Spirit. Thus alone is the Church renewed.<\/p>\n
8.02 Therefore the Confessional Synod calls upon the congregations to range themselves behind it in prayer, and steadfastly to gather around those pastors and teachers who are loyal to the Confessions.<\/p>\n
8.03 Be not deceived by loose talk, as if we meant to oppose the unity of the German nation! Do not listen to the seducers who pervert our intentions, as if we wanted to break up the unity of the German Evangelical Church or to forsake the Confessions of the Fathers!<\/p>\n
8.04 Try the spirits whether they are of God! Prove also the words of the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church to see whether they agree with Holy Scripture and with the Confessions of the Fathers. If you find that we are speaking contrary to Scripture, then do not listen to us! But if you find that we are taking our stand upon Scripture, then let no fear or temptation keep you from treading with us the path of faith and obedience to the Word of God, in order that God\u2019s people be of one mind upon earth and that we in faith experience what he himself has said: \u2018I will never leave you, nor forsake you.\u2019 Therefore, \u2018Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father\u2019s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.\u2019<\/p>\n
II. Theological Declaration Concerning the Present Situation of the German Evangelical Church<\/p>\n
8.05 According to the opening words of its constitution of July 11, 1933, the German Evangelical Church is a federation of Confessional Churches that grew out of the Reformation and that enjoy equal rights. The theological basis for the unification of these Churches is laid down in Article 1 and Article 2(1) of the constitution of the German Evangelical Church that was recognized by the Reich Government on July 14, 1933: * Article 1. The inviolable foundation of the German Evangelical Church is the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is attested for us in Holy Scripture and brought to light again in the Confessions of the Reformation. The full powers that the Church needs for its mission are hereby determined and limited.
\n* Article 2 (1). The German Evangelical Church is divided into member Churches Landeskirchen).<\/p>\n
8.06 We, the representatives of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches, of free synods, Church assemblies, and parish organizations united in the Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church, declare that we stand together on the ground of the German Evangelical Church as a federation of German Confessional Churches. We are bound together by the confession of the one Lord of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.<\/p>\n
8.07 We publicly declare before all evangelical Churches in Germany that what they hold in common in this Confession is grievously imperiled, and with it the unity of the German Evangelical Church. It is threatened by the teaching methods and actions of the ruling Church party of the \u2018German Christians\u2019 and of the Church administration carried on by them. These have become more and more apparent during the first year of the existence of the German Evangelical Church. This threat consists in the fact that the theological basis, in which the German Evangelical Church is united, has been continually and systematically thwarted and rendered ineffective by alien principles, on the part of the leaders and spokesmen of the \u2018German Christians\u2019 as well as on the part of the Church administration. When these principles are held to be valid, then, according to all the Confessions in force among us, the Church ceases to be the Church and th German Evangelical Church, as a federation of Confessional Churches, becomes intrinsically impossible.<\/p>\n
8.08 As members of Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches we may and must speak with one voice in this matter today. Precisely because we want to be and to remain faithful to our various Confessions, we may not keep silent, since we believe that we have been given a common message to utter in a time of common need and temptation. We commend to God what this may mean for the interelations of the Confessional Churches.<\/p>\n
8.09 In view of the errors of the \u2018German Christians\u2019 of the present Reich Church government which are devastating the Church and also therefore breaking up the unity of the German Evangelical Church, we confess the following evangelical truths:<\/p>\n
8.10\u20141. \u2018I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.\u2019 (John 14:6). \u2018Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.\u2026 I am the door; if anyone enters by me, he will be saved.\u2019 (John 10:1, 9.)<\/p>\n
8.11 Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.<\/p>\n
8.12 We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God\u2019s revelation.<\/p>\n
8.13\u20142. \u2018Christ Jesus, whom God has made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption.\u2019 (1 Cor. 1:30.)<\/p>\n
8.14 As Jesus Christ is God\u2019s assurance of the forgiveness of all our sins, so, in the same way and with the same seriousness he is also God\u2019s mighty claim upon our whole life. Through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures.<\/p>\n
8.15 We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other lords\u2014areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him.<\/p>\n
8.16\u20143. \u2018Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body [is] joined and knit together.\u2019 (Eph. 4:15,16.)<\/p>\n
8.17 The Christian Church is the congregation of the brethren in which Jesus Christ acts presently as the Lord in Word and sacrament through the Holy Spirit. As the Church of pardoned sinners, it has to testify in the midst of a sinful world, with its faith as with its obedience, with its message as with its order, that it is solely his property, and that it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance.<\/p>\n
8.18 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church were permitted to abandon the form of its message and order to its own pleasure or to changes in prevailing ideological and political convictions.<\/p>\n
8.19\u20144. \u2018You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant.\u2019 (Matt. 20:25,26.)<\/p>\n
8.20 The various offices in the Church do not establish a dominion of some over the others; on the contrary, they are for the excercise of the ministry entrusted to and enjoined upon the whole congregation.<\/p>\n
8.21 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, apart from this ministry, could and were permitted to give itself, or allow to be given to it, special leaders vested with ruling powers.<\/p>\n
8.22\u20145. \u2018Fear God. Honor the emperor.\u2019 (1 Peter 2:17.)
\nScripture tells us that, in the as yet unredeemed world in which the Church also exists, the State has by divine appointment the task of providing for justice and peace. [It fulfills this task] by means of the threat and exercise of force, according to the measure of human judgment and human ability. The Church acknowledges the benefit of this divine appointment in gratitude and reverence before him. It calls to mind the Kingdom of God, God\u2019s commandment and righteousness, and thereby the responsibility both of rulers and of the ruled. It trusts and obeys the power of the Word by which God upholds all things.<\/p>\n
8.23 We reject the false doctrine, as though the State, over and beyond its special commission, should and could become the single and totalitarian order of human life, thus fulfilling the Church\u2019s vocation as well.<\/p>\n
8.24 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church, over and beyond its special commission, should and could appropriate the characteristics, the tasks, and the dignity of the State, thus itself becoming an organ of the State.<\/p>\n
8.25\u20146. \u2018Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.\u2019 (Matt. 28:20.) \u2018The word of God is not fettered.\u2019 (2 Tim. 2:9.)<\/p>\n
8.26 The Church\u2019s commission, upon which its freedom is founded, consists in delivering the message of the free grace of God to all people in Christ\u2019s stead, and therefore in the ministry of his own Word and work through sermon and sacrament.<\/p>\n
8.27 We reject the false doctrine, as though the Church in human arrogance could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of any arbitrarily chosen desires, purposes, and plans.<\/p>\n
8.28 The Confessional Synod of the German Evangelical Church declares that it sees in the acknowledgment of these truths and in the rejection of these errors the indispensable theological basis of the German Evangelical Church as a federation of Confessional Churches. It invites all who are able to accept its declaration to be mindful of these theological principles in their decisions in Church politics. It entreats all whom it concerns to return to the unity of faith, love, and hope.<\/p>\n
From: The Church\u2019s Confession Under Hitler by Arthur C. Cochrane. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962, pp. 237\u2013242.<\/p>\n
Appendix 2: Prayers for Prisoners<\/p>\n
Dietrich Bonhoeffer<\/p>\n
The following translation of Bonhoeffer\u2019s \u2018Gebete f\u00fcr Gefangene\u2019 will be published in the forthcoming Volume 8 (Letters and Papers from Prison) of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Translation is by Lisa E. Dahill.<\/p>\n
1. Morning Prayer<\/p>\n
God, I call to you early in the morning
\nhelp me pray and collect my thoughts;
\nI cannot do so alone<\/p>\n
In me it is dark, but with you there is light.
\nI am lonely, but you do not abandon me.
\nI am faint-hearted, but from You comes my help.
\nI am restless, but with you is peace.
\nIn me is bitterness, but with you is patience.
\nI do not understand Your ways, but you know [the] right way for me.<\/p>\n
Father in heaven,
\nPraise and thanks be to you for the quiet of the night
\nPraise and thanks be to you for the new day
\nPraise and thanks be to you for all your goodness and faithfulness
\nin my life thus far.<\/p>\n
You have granted me much good,
\nnow let me also accept hardship from your hand.
\nYou will not lay on me more than I can bear.
\nYou make all things serve your children for the best.<\/p>\n
Lord Jesus Christ,
\nyou were poor and miserable, imprisoned and abandoned as I am.
\nYou know all human need,
\nyou remain with me when no human being stands by me
\nyou do not forget me and you seek me,
\nyou want me to recognize you and turn back to you
\nLord, I hear your call and follow.
\nHelp me!<\/p>\n
Holy Spirit,
\nGrant me the faith
\nthat saves me from despair and vice
\nGrant me the love for God and others
\nthat purges all hate and bitterness,
\ngrant me the hope
\nthat frees me from fear and despondency.<\/p>\n
Teach me to discern Jesus Christ and to do his will.
\nTriune God,
\nmy creator and my savior,
\nthis day belongs to you. My time is in your hands.<\/p>\n
Holy, merciful God
\nmy creator and my savior
\nmy judge and my redeemer
\nyou know me and all my ways and actions.<\/p>\n
You hate and punish evil in this and every world
\nwithout regard for person,
\nyou forgive sins
\nfor anyone who asks you sincerely
\nand you love the good and reward it
\non this earth with a clear conscience
\nand in the world to come with the crown of righteousness.<\/p>\n
Before you I remember all those I love,
\nmy fellow prisoners, and all
\nwho in this house perform their difficult duty.
\nLord, have mercy
\nGrant me freedom again
\nand in the meantime let me live in such a way
\nthat I can give account before [you] and others.<\/p>\n
Lord, whatever this day may bring\u2014your name be praised.<\/p>\n
2. Evening Prayer<\/p>\n
Lord my God,
\nI thank you that you have brought this day to an end.
\nI thank you that you allow body and soul to come to rest
\nYour hand was over me and has protected and preserved me.<\/p>\n
Forgive all weakness of faith and wrong of this day
\nand help me gladly to forgive those
\nwho have done wrong to me.<\/p>\n
Let me sleep in peace beneath your protection
\nAnd preserve me from the assaults of darkness.<\/p>\n
I commend to you those dear to me,
\nI commend to you this house,
\nI commend to you my body and my soul
\nGod, your holy name be praised.<\/p>\n
Amen.<\/p>\n
3. Prayer in Particular Need<\/p>\n
Lord God,
\nmisery has come over me.
\nMy afflictions are about to crush me;
\nI don\u2019t know which way to turn.<\/p>\n
God, be gracious and help me.
\nGive me strength to bear what you send.
\ndo not let fear rule over me.
\ngive fatherly care to those I love,
\nespecially my wife and children,
\nprotect them with your strong hand
\nfrom all evil and all danger.<\/p>\n
Merciful God,
\nforgive me everything in which I have sinned
\nagainst you and others.
\nI trust in your grace
\nand commit my life entirely into your hand<\/p>\n
Do with me
\nas pleases you and as is good for me.
\nWhether I live or die,
\nI am with you and you are with me, my God
\nLord I await your salvation and your kingdom.<\/p>\n
Amen<\/p>\n
Appendix 3: By Powers of Good<\/p>\n
Dietrich Bonhoeffer<\/p>\n
The following translation will be published in the forthcoming Volume 8 (Letters and Papers from Prison) of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, English Edition. Translation is by Nancy Lukens.<\/p>\n
1. By faithful, quiet powers of good surrounded
\nso wondrously consoled and sheltered here,
\nI wish to live these days with you in spirit
\nand with you enter into a new year.<\/p>\n
2. The old year still would try our hearts to torment,
\nof evil times we still do bear the weight;
\no Lord, do grant our souls, now terror-stricken,
\nsalvation for which you did us create.<\/p>\n
3. And should you offer us the cup of suffering,
\nthough heavy, brimming full and bitter brand,
\nwe\u2019ll thankfully accept it, never flinching,
\nfrom your good heart and your beloved hand.<\/p>\n
4. But should you wish now once again to give us
\nthe joys of this world and its glorious sun,
\nthen we\u2019ll recall anew what past times brought us
\nand then our life belongs to you alone.<\/p>\n
5. The candles you have brought into our darkness,
\nlet them today be burning warm and bright,
\nand if it\u2019s possible, do reunite us!
\nWe know your light is shining through the night.<\/p>\n
6. When now the quiet deepens all around us,
\no, let our ears that fullest sound amaze
\nof this, your world, invisibly expanding
\nas all your children sing high hymns of praise.<\/p>\n
7. By powers of good so wondrously protected,
\nwe wait with confidence, befall what may.
\nGod is with us at night and in the morning
\nand oh, most certainly on each new day.<\/p>\n
Appendix 4: Letter from S. Payne Best to Professor Leibholz<\/p>\n
2nd March 1951<\/p>\n
My dear Professor Leibholz,<\/p>\n
I was extremely happy to receive your letter this morning (hutchinson\u2019s [sic] are always dilatory about forwarding letters) not only because of your very kind remarks about my book, but mainly, because I am delighted to have this contact with a close relative of Dietrich Bonnh\u00f6fer [sic, throughout]. You are quite right in saying that I liked him though in fact my feeling was far stronger than these words imply. He was, without exception, the finest and most lovable man I have ever met. I fear though, that there is very little that I can add by way of information which might be useful to you beyond what is contained in my book.
\nYou must understand that our meetings in the passage of our prison at Buchenwald were always surreptitious and liable to interruption. As General von Rabenau had been a passenger in the prison van which brought me from Berlin to Buchenwald I was no stranger to him. I think that is was a day after my arrival when I met him in the lavatory and he introduced me to Bonnhofer [sic] saying, \u2018I am sure that you will like my friend, he is the son of the famous neurologist Professor Bonnh\u00f6fer\u2019. He then whispered to me \u2018Er ist durch den Volksgericht zum Tode verurteilt aber er hat die Hoffnung nicht aufgegeben\u2019. He then went on to tell me about himself; that he had written a life of General von Seeckt, that he had retired from the army as a full general and had since taken two degrees in philology and divinity. Then he went on to tell me how much weight he had lost and of his fear that one day he might lose his trousers. Bonnh\u00f6fer did not say much on this occasion but I had quite a long talk with him when we met a day or two later. I noticed that he was wearing a pair of prison wooden clogs and when he told me that he had no other foot-gear I gave him a pair of black-and-white golf shoes which fitted him perfectly and with which he was highly delighted. Von Rabenau mentioned chess and said how he wishes they could play this or some other game to while away the tedium of the hours in their cell. As I had a small travelling chess set I lent this to them and also various books.
\nAs you will understand, it was not etiquette amongst prisoners to ask questions as to the reasons of their imprisonment, nor even to seek information of this nature. The Gestapo frequently had spies disguised as prisoners and in any case, no one was safe from being called up for interrogation and therefore, the less one knew and could give away, the better. Old Werner von Alvensleben was, however, very talkative and it was from him that most of my information about my companions was derived. He told me on one of our first meetings \u2018Wir haben viele Todeskandidaten hier\u2019 and went on to say that M\u00fcller, Liedig, Bonnh\u00f6fer, Gehre, and von Rabenau had all been sentenced to death by the Volksgericht. Later, von Rabenau told me that he had never been tried and interrogated only once, but that his young friend (Bonnh\u00f6fer) had been before the Volksgericht and sentenced to death. He did not, however, think that the sentence would be carried out as, if there had been this intention, he would have never been sent to Buchenwald. On another occasion, Josef M\u00fcller, warning me against his room mate Gehre whom he said was a Gestapo spy, told me about how he had shot his wife and attempted to commit suicide. He said that Gehre had given all his comrades away and, having been sentenced to death by the Volksgericht had been given a chance of life if he could obtain evidence which would lead to his (M\u00fcller\u2019s) conviction. Please don\u2019t take this seriously\u2014I didn\u2019t at the time. All these people had been held in prison for a long time without news of any kind from the outside world and were in a pretty bad state of nerves. You see, I had been a prisoner for so many years that I had quite got used to the life and so rather tended to father all the rest of the flock even to the extent of seeing that they were properly dressed. Bonnh\u00f6fer went to execution in my shoes and sweater, Gehre, in my overcoat, and von Rabenau in my trousers. Curiously enough, I had a letter yesterday from the Dr. Sch\u00e4fer who was my interrogator at the Gestapo H. A. in 1939. He wrote:\u2014\u2018Nach Kriegsende erz\u00e4hlte mir ein deutscher Oberstleutnant, der in einen amerikanischen Lager das Bett \u00fcber mir bewohnte, dass er als Gestapo-H\u00e4lfling mit Ihnen zusammen die letzten Kriegswochen, das Kriegs-Ende und auch den Aufenthalt in Italien geteilt habe. Er zeigte mir seine Pantoffel, die angeblich Ihnen geh\u00f6rten. Den Namen des Mannes habe ich vergessen; er war ein Adeliger mit einen l\u00e4hmen Arm.\u2014So wusste ich, dass Sie den Krieg \u00fcberlebt hatten\u2019. This was Horst von Petersdorff.
\nBut, I am getting far from the subject about which I intended to write. Arrest II at Buchenwald was a most miserable place and personally I never expected to get away from there alive. I had, however, lived so long under such conditions that I had reached the point where I did not much care one way or another; my comrades were though, with the exception of von Falkenhausen and Bonnh\u00f6fer; oh yes, I forget to include Margot Heberlein who was always unafraid, in an extremely jumpy condition and very much inclined to look upon the dark side of things. Falkenhausen was the Chinese philosopher and Margot Heberlein a very brave woman but Bonnh\u00f6fer was different. Just quite calm and normal; seemingly perfectly at his ease. It is a funny thing, but when I think of him I always seem to see him with a halo of light round his head\u2014his soul really shone in the dark desperation of our prison. I don\u2019t suppose I spoke to him more than three times whilst we were at Buchenwald but when we left he sat for a time next to me in the prison van. He told me then how happy prison had made him. He had always been afraid that he would not be strong enough to stand such a test but now he knew that there was nothing in life of which one need ever be afraid. He also expressed complete agreement with my view that our warders and guards needed pity far more than we and that it was absurd to blame them for their actions. The journey in the prison van, first to Regensburg and then on to Sch\u00f6neberg was a nightmare of which little remains in my memory except the few details given in my book. I can\u2019t remember whether I had any more connected conversation with Bonnh\u00f6fer, nor indeed any further close association with him except for his most moving sermon on Easter Sunday shortly after which he was taken from us to Flossenberg.
\nHis sister will probably wish to know how he looked. He always looked extremely well with a good colour and with plenty of flesh on his bones. He did not look in the least like a man who had spent months in prison and who went in fear of his life\u2014on the contrary, he was cheerful. [sic] ready to respond to a joke, and apparently completely care-free. I am sure that he went to his death in just such a spirit. In a sense, he was materially disembodied. His little poem \u2018Wer bin ich\u2019 expresses, I think, not only his own feelings but also those of many others of us.
\nAt Buchenwald, Bonnh\u00f6fer was a cell-mate of von Rabenau and I do not know whether he had much contact with any of the other prisoners besides myself. You might, however, like to make enquiries of some of them as possible they may be able to tell you more than I can. Here are some names and addresses:\u2014<\/p>\n
Donna Margot Heberlein, \u2018El Rincon\u2019, Cristo de la Parra, 8. Toledo
\nDr. H. P\u00fcnder, Altenburgerstrasse, 404. Cologne
\nFranz Liedig, Planegg bei M\u00fcnchen, Heimst\u00e4tterallee, 13
\nDr. Josef M\u00fcller, Gedonstrasse, 4. M\u00fcnchen
\nGeneral von Falkenhausen, Prison de St. Gilles, Brussels<\/p>\n
As regards the execution of your brother-in-law and of so many others at Flossenburg on 8th and 9th April 1945 I do not believe that there can ever have been any trial there and I think that it is safe to say that the orders for their liquidation were brought from Berlin by Gogalla just as he brought the order for the liquidation of Georg Elser to Dachau. What part was played by Huppenkothen I do not know but I am inclined to think that he really only had quite a minor role and that the executions are carried out either on the direct orders of Hitler or Himmler, or by instructions from them transmitted by either Obergruppenf\u00fchrers M\u00fcller or Pohle. Sepp M\u00fcller was in London last July and I talked over the whole matter with him and with Staatsanwalt Ferid. I also gave him the original of the letter reproduced between pages 208\/209 of my book. M\u00fcller wanted revenge for the death of Canaris and Oster and as Huppenkothen was the only man in his power he wished at all costs to have him punished. I did not, however, consider the case against him verystrong [sic].
\nDuring these last weeks of the war there seemed to be a large number of death sentences floating round, some issued as much as three months earlier. From what I could learn, of the two men who were with us when we reached Niederdorf, Stiller and Bader, the former had a specified list of those to be liquidated whilst Bader relied upon a general routine order given many months earlier according to which no prisoners were to be allowed to fall alive into the hands of the enemy. Leutnant [sic] von Alvensleen, the officer commanding the first Wehrmacht troops sent to our rescue says in his report: \u2018Ich befragte dort den F\u00fchrer des S.D. ohne mich zun\u00e4chst zu erkennen zu geben, seinem nach Auftr\u00e4ge [sic], die H\u00e4ftlinge irgenwo in die Berge zu leiten. Auf weiteres Befragen gab er zu, dass sein Auftrag erledigt sei, \u2018Wenn die Gefangenen gertorben seien\u2019. [\u2019]
\nI am sorry to have bothered you with so long a letter which contains so little information of the nature which you require. Please take it as a sign of my deep interest. Perhaps some day, when I am on my way to or from London you will permit me to call on you, for I should so much like to meet Dietrich\u2019s sister to whom I hope you will convey my deep respects. I heard a lot about Dietrich and Klaus from Otto John whom I occasionally met in London before his return to Germany.
\nAgain thanking you for your letter and with my very kind regards<\/p>\n
Yours sincerely
\nS. Payne Best<\/p>\n
Appendix 5: Chronology<\/p>\n
4 February 1906
\nDietrich Bonhoeffer born in Breslau
\n1912
\nFather becomes head of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Berlin; the family moves to Berlin.
\n1918
\nBrother Walter Bonhoeffer killed at the front in World War 1
\n1923
\nBegins theology studies at the University of T\u00fcbingen
\n1924
\nTrip to Italy, Holy Week in Rome an especially formative experience; continues undergraduate studies in Berlin, takes examinations
\n1925
\nDiscovers the writings of Karl Barth
\n17 December 1927
\nCompletes doctorate in theology under Reinhold Seeberg, with thesis Sanctorum Communio
\n1928
\nFirst qualifying examination for the ministry under the church consistory in Berlin
\nFeb. 1928\u2013Feb. 1929
\nPastoral assistant in Barcelona
\nJuly 1929\u2013July 1930
\nAcademic assistant to Prof. Wilhelm L\u00fctgert in Berlin
\n8 July 1930
\nSecond qualifying examination under the consistory
\n18 July 1930
\nCompletes postdoctoral degree with thesis Act and Being
\nSept.1930\u2013June 1931
\nYear of study at Union Theological Seminary, New York; youth work at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem
\nDecember 1930
\nTrip to Cuba with Erwin Sutz
\nMay\u2013June 1931
\nTrip to Mexico with Jean Lasserre
\nJuly 1931
\nTwo weeks in Bonn to meet Karl Barth
\n1 August 1931
\nBegins work as adjunct lecturer in systematic theology in Berlin: lectures on \u2018History of 20th-Century Systematic Theology\u2019, seminar on \u2018The Concept of Philosophy and Protestant Theology\u2019
\n13 November 1931
\nOrdained as Lutheran pastor; chaplain to students at the Technical University; takes over confirmation class of 42 boys
\n1\u20135 September 1931
\nWorld Alliance Conference in Cambridge; elected an international youth secretary
\nJanuary 1932
\nMoves to Oderberger Street in east Berlin to be closer to his confirmands
\n19\u201329 March 1932
\nConfirmation class retreat in Friedrichsbrunn
\nSummer 1932
\nLectures on \u2018The Nature of the Church\u2019; seminar \u2018Is There a Christian Ethic?\u2019
\nSpring 1932
\nBonhoeffer acquires a hut in Biesenthal, north of Berlin, for retreats with his students and confirmands
\nJuly\u2013August 1932
\nTakes part in ecumenical conferences at Westerburg, Germany, (July 12\u201314), Ciernohorsk\u00e9 K\u00fapele, Czechoslovakia (July 20\u201330) and Gland, Switzerland (August 25\u201331)
\nWinter 1932\u201333
\nLectures on \u2018Creation and Sin\u2019 (published as Creation and Fall) and \u2018Recent Theology\u2019; seminar \u2018Problems of a Theological Anthropology\u2019
\n1 February 1933
\nRadio lecture \u2018The Younger Generation\u2019s Altered View of the Concept of F\u00fchrer\u2019
\nApril 1933
\nEssay \u2018The Church and the Jewish Question\u2019
\n6\u201310 March 1933
\nEcumenical meeting in Dassel
\nMay 1933
\nBeginning of summer semester: lectures on \u2018Christology\u2019; seminar \u2018Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Religion\u2019; works with the \u2018Young Reformation\u2019 movement; preparations for the church elections ordered by Hitler
\n22 June 1933
\nStudent assembly on \u2018The Struggle for the Church\u2019 with 2000 participants, organized by Bonhoeffer and a colleague
\n14 July 1933
\nTheodor Heckel (Church Foreign Office) offers Bonhoeffer a pastorate in London.
\n28 July 1933
\nInterviews at Sydenham Church and St. George Church in London
\n15\u201325 August 1933
\nWorks with others on the \u2018Bethel Confession\u2019 opposing the false doctrines of the \u2018German Christians\u2019
\nLate August 1933
\nPublishes theses on \u2018The Aryan Paragraph in the Churches\u2019, leading to a dispute with Heckel
\n12 September 1933
\nBonhoeffer, Martin Niem\u00f6ller and others found the \u2018Pastors\u2019 Emergency League\u2019
\n15\u201320 September 1933
\nAt the World Alliance conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, Bonhoeffer confidentially informs prominent participants about what is taking place in Germany
\n27 September 1933
\nBonhoeffer and others protest against the \u2018National Synod\u2019 of the church, dominated by \u2018German Christians\u2019, in Wittenberg
\n4 October 1933
\nInforms Heckel that he will not represent the position of the \u2018Reich\u2019 church while in London
\n17 October 1933
\nBegins his ministry to the two parishes in London
\n21 November 1933
\nFirst meeting with George Bell, Bishop of Chichester
\n27\u201330 November 1933
\nConference of pastors of expatriate German congregations at Bradford, England. Bonhoeffer tells his colleagues about the situation in Germany
\n1934
\nEfforts by Bonhoeffer and his colleages to intervene in the church struggle in Germany and to have Ludwig M\u00fcller removed from his position as \u2018Reich Bishop\u2019.
\n21 January 1934
\nSermon on Jeremiah 20:7
\n8\u20139 February 1934
\nHeckel in London with two colleagues, fails to persuade the German pastors in England and Bishop Bell to keep out of the church struggle
\n13 February 1934
\nBonhoeffer in Hanover for a meeting of the Pastors\u2019 Emergency League Council of Brethren
\n6\u20137 March 1934
\nHeckel, having been named \u2018Bishop abroad\u2019, summons Bonhoeffer to Berlin and demands that he give up his ecumenical contacts; Bonhoeffer refuses; attends first Berlin-Brandenburg Confessing Church synod as a guest
\n10 May 1934
\nBishop Bell, after detailed consultation with Bonhoeffer, sends his \u2018Ascensiontide Pastoral Letter\u2019 on the situation in the German church to the member churches of the Universal Council for Life and Work
\n18\u201330 August 1934
\nEcumenical conference on the island of Fan\u00f8, Denmark, at which Bonhoeffer gives a speech on peace (28 August)
\n4\u20138 September 1934
\nFrench-German-British youth conference in Bruay-en-Artois, France, hosted by Jean Lasserre
\nOctober 1934
\nAt Bonhoeffer\u2019s urging, Bishop Bell and Archbishop Lang protest against aggravation of the German church struggle by church \u2018legal administrator\u2019 August J\u00e4ger. J\u00e4ger dismissed on orders from Hitler
\n1 November 1934
\nBonhoeffer invited to India by Mahatma Gandhi, but unable to accept due to lack of time
\n5 November 1934
\nUnder Bonhoeffer\u2019s leadership, the German congregations in England resolve to secede from the Reich Church government
\nJanuary 1935
\nBegins refugee work in London, aided by Bishop Bell; final sermon in London; accepts call as director of a pastoral training seminary of the Confessing Church
\n26 March 1935
\nBegins visits, with Julius Rieger, to three Anglican monasteries
\n15 April 1935
\nFarewell visit to Bishop Bell
\n26 April 1935
\nBegins work with Confessing Church seminary, temporarily at Zingsthof (first course 26 April\u201316 October)
\n24 June 1935
\nSeminary moves to Finkenwalde estate near Stettin
\n3\u201312 August 1935
\nBonhoeffer officially takes leave of the congregations in London
\n23 August 1935
\nLectures on \u2018Recalling New Testament Texts\u2019; essay on \u2018The Confessing Church and the Ecumenical Movement\u2019
\n4 November 1935\u201315 March 1936
\nSecond seminary course at Finkenwalde
\nFebruary 1936
\nLast lecture at the University of Berlin
\n29 Feb.\u201310 March 1936
\nSeminary study trip to Denmark and Sweden
\nApril 1936
\nEssay on \u2018The Church Community\u2019
\n20 August\u2013early September 1936
\nTravels with Eberhard Bethge to the Chamby ecumenical conference in Switzerland, then to Rome
\nFebruary 1937
\nBonhoeffer resigns as ecumenical youth secretary; attends his last ecumenical conference, in London
\nAugust 1937
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s right to teach at the university revoked
\nlate September 1937
\nSeminary at Finkenwalde closed and sealed by the police
\nNovember 1937
\nTwenty-seven of Bonhoeffer\u2019s former seminary students in prison. Bonhoeffer\u2019s fourth book, Discipleship, published by Kaiser Verlag
\n5 December 1937
\nThe first of five half-year \u2018collective pastorates\u2019 in K\u00f6slin and Schlawe (Gro\u00df Schl\u00f6nwitz), East Pomerania, begins
\n11 January 1938
\nBonhoeffer and other Confessing Church educators banned from Berlin. His father obtains exceptional permission for him to visit his parents.
\nFebruary 1938
\nHans von Dohnanyi arranges Bonhoeffer\u2019s first contacts with Resistance members (Dr. Karl Sack and Col. Hans Oster)
\n20 June 1938
\nReunion of former Finkenwaldians at Zingst
\n9 September 1938
\nTwin sister Sabine Leibholz emigrates with her family. In her house in G\u00f6ttingen, Bonhoeffer writes his book Life Together
\nMarch 1939
\nTrip to see his sister in London, also conversations with Bishop Bell, Visser \u2018t Hooft, Canon Hodgson, Reinhold Niebuhr and Gerhard Leibholz
\n2 June 1939
\nLeaves for the USA, originally planning to stay a year, but returns on 27 July
\nAugust 1939
\nBeginning of the war. Applies without success for a military chaplaincy
\n25 August 1939
\nHans von Dohnanyi appointed \u2018Sonderf\u00fchrer\u2019 in the Military Intelligence department of the Army High Command, under Admiral Canaris
\nLate October 1939
\nLast collective pastorate begins at Sigurdshof near Schlawe
\n15 March 1940
\nLast collective pastorate course ends
\n18 March 1940
\nThe Gestapo closes and seals Sigurdshof
\n24 March 1940
\nBonhoeffer meets with Hans Oster
\n6 June 1940
\nFirst of three visitation journeys to East Prussia begins
\n17 June 1940
\nFrance capitulates\u2014Bonhoeffer and Bethge in Memel
\nSeptember 1940
\nA decree by the SS bans Bonhoeffer from public speaking anywhere in the Reich, and obliges him to report his movements in Schlawe. Meanwhile Canaris\u2019 Military Intelligence office discusses employing him as an agent. Begins work on his Ethics.
\n30 October 1940
\nBonhoeffer becomes a Military Intelligence secret agent attached to the Munich office
\nNov. 1940\u2013Feb. 1941
\nGuest at the Benedictine Abbey in Ettal
\n24 Feb.\u201324 March 1941
\nFirst journey to Switzerland for Military Intelligence
\n19 March 1941
\nBonhoeffer banned from publishing and printing throughout the Reich by the Reich Writers\u2019 Guild
\n29 Aug.\u201326 Sept. 1941
\nSecond journey to Switzerland; takes part in \u2018Operation 7\u2019, rescue of 14 Jews through Military Intelligence
\nNovember 1941
\nSuffers severe pneumonia; cared for in his parents\u2019 home
\n10\u201318 April 1942
\nTrip to Norway with Helmuth James von Moltke
\n11\u201326 May 1942
\nThird trip to Switzerland
\n30 May\u20132 June 1942
\nTravels to Sweden; meets with Bishop Bell in Sigtuna and Stockholm
\nJune 1942
\nJourney to Italy with Dohnanyi; Bonhoeffer has conversations with Vatican contacts
\n17 January 1943
\nBecomes engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer
\n13 and 21 March 1943
\nFailed attempts by the Resistance to assassinate Hitler
\n5 April 1943
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s room searched; Bonhoeffer arrested and imprisoned in Tegel military prison. Josef M\u00fcller, Hans von Dohnanyi and their wives arrested the same day.
\nJune 1943\u2013Aug. 1944
\nMaria von Wedemeyer allowed 18 visits to Bonhoeffer at Tegel, on 21 June, 30 July, 26 Aug., 7 Oct., 10 Nov., 26 Nov., 10 Dec., 21 Dec. 1943, and 5 Jan., 24 Jan., 4 Feb., 20 Feb., 30 March, 18 April, 25 April, 22 May, 27 June and 23 Aug. 1944
\n18 November 1943
\nBeginning of \u2018illegal\u2019 correspondence with Eberhard Bethge, through letters smuggled by friendly prison wardens
\nJanuary 1944
\nInvestigating judge Manfred Roeder taken off Bonhoeffer\u2019s case
\n6 March 1944
\nFirst major air raid on Tegel
\n30 April 1944
\nBonhoeffer\u2019s first letter to Bethge about his new theological ideas
\nMay 1944
\nCase against Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer postponed indefinitely
\n20 July 1944
\nFinal, unsuccessful attempt by Stauffenberg to assassinate Hitler
\n23 August 1944
\nLast prison visit to Bonhoeffer by Maria von Wedemeyer
\n22 September 1944
\nZossen files discovered; Bonhoeffer\u2019s and Dohnanyi\u2019s lives in immediate danger
\n5 October 1944
\nFollowing the arrests of his brother Klaus and brother-in-law R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, Bonhoeffer gives up the escape plan proposed by one of the guards
\n8 October 1944
\nTransferred to the Gestapo prison on Prince Albrecht Street
\n7 February 1945
\nMoved to Buchenwald concentration camp following heavy air raids on Berlin
\n4 April 1945
\nTransported to Regensburg
\n5 April 1945
\nHitler orders liquidation of the Resistance group in Military Intelligence
\n6 April 1945
\nThe prisoners travel on to Sch\u00f6nberg in the Bavarian mountains
\n8\u20139 April 1945
\nBonhoeffer brought to Flossenb\u00fcrg and, following a sham trial during the night, put to death together with the other members of the Canaris group. Brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi at Sachsenhausen meets the same fate.
\n23 April 1945
\nKlaus Bonhoeffer, R\u00fcdiger Schleicher, Friedrich Justus Perels and others shot in the back by firing squad in Berlin<\/p>\n
Volumes 9\u201316 of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English (DBWE) contain much more detailed chronologies, in some cases updating the information that was available for publication in the German original Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (DBW).<\/p>\n
Appendix 6: Bonhoeffer Family Tree<\/p>\n
Karl Bonhoeffer 1868\u20131948
\nPaula von Hase 1876\u20131951
\nKarl-Friedrich 1899\u20131957
\nWalter*1899
\nKlaus*1901
\nUrsula 1902\u20131983
\nChristine 1903\u20131965
\nDietrich*1906
\nSabine 1906\u20131999
\nSusanne 1909\u20131991
\nfallen in war 1918
\nexecuted 1945
\nexecuted 1945
\nengaged to Maria von Wedemeyer
\nGrete von Dohnanyi
\nEmmi Delbr\u00fcck
\nR\u00fcdiger Schleicher
\nHans von Dohnanyi
\nGerhard Leibholz
\nWalter Bre\u00df
\nexecuted 1945
\nexecuted 1945<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
10. In the Resistance (1939\u20131943) The journey towards reality In 1914 the German people had welcomed the First World War enthusiastically, because they saw it as a \u2018just war\u2019. This time there was no such talk, and even the propaganda efforts of a Joseph Goebbels did not make much difference. Bonhoeffer\u2019s father wrote in his … <\/p>\n