Dietrich Bonhoeffer (partial bio) (German: [ˈdiːtʁɪç ˈboːnhœfɐ]; 4 February 1906 – 9 April 1945) was a German pastor, theologian, spy, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity's role in the secular world have become widely influential, and his book The Cost of Discipleship has become a modern classic.[1]
Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Hitler's euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews.[2] He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel prison for one and a half years. Later he was transferred to a Nazi concentration camp. After being associated with the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, he was quickly tried, along with other accused plotters, including former members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office), and then executed by hanging on 9 April 1945 as the Nazi regime was collapsing.
Still too young to be ordained, at the age of 24 Bonhoeffer
went to the United States in
1930 for postgraduate study and a teaching fellowship
at New York City's
Union Theological
Seminary. Although Bonhoeffer found the American seminary not up to his
exacting German standards ("There is no theology here."),[3]
he had life-changing experiences and friendships. He studied under Reinhold
Niebuhr and met Frank Fisher, a black fellow-seminarian who introduced him
to Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where
Bonhoeffer taught Sunday school and formed a lifelong love for African-American
spirituals, a collection of which he took back to
Germany. He heard Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., preach the
Gospel of Social Justice, and became sensitive not only to social injustices
experienced by minorities, but also the ineptitude of the church to bring about
integration.[4]
Bonhoeffer began to see things "from below"—from the perspective of
those who suffer oppression. He observed, "Here one can truly speak and
hear about sin and grace and the love of God...the Black Christ is preached
with rapturous passion and vision." Later Bonhoeffer referred to his
impressions abroad as the point at which he "turned from phraseology to
reality."[3]
He also learned to drive an automobile, although he failed the driving test
three times.[5]
He traveled by car through the United States
to Mexico,
where he had been invited to speak on the subject of peace. His early visits to
Italy, Libya, Spain,
the United States, Mexico, and Cuba opened Bonhoeffer to ecumenism.[6]
After returning to Germany
in 1931, Bonhoeffer became a lecturer in systematic theology at the University of Berlin.
Deeply interested in ecumenism, he was appointed by the World Alliance for
Promoting International Friendship through the Churches (a forerunner of the World Council of Churches) as one of its
three European youth secretaries. At this time he seems to have undergone
something of a personal conversion from being a theologian primarily attracted
to the intellectual side of Christianity to being a dedicated man of faith,
resolved to carry out the teaching of Christ as he found it revealed in the
Gospels.[8]
On 15 November 1931—at the age of 25—he was ordained at the Old-Prussian United
St. Matthew's Church (German: St. Matthäuskirche)
in Berlin.
Under cover of the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer served as a courier for the German resistance movement to reveal its existence and intentions to the Western Allies in hope of garnering their support, and, through his ecumenical contacts abroad, to secure possible peace terms with the Allies for a post-Hitler government. His visits to Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland were camouflaged as legitimate intelligence activities for the Abwehr. In May 1942, he met Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, a member of the House of Lords and an ally of the Confessing Church, contacted by Bonhoeffer's exiled brother-in-law Leibholz; through him feelers were sent to British foreign minister Anthony Eden. However, the British government ignored these, as it had all other approaches from the German resistance.[33] Dohnányi and Bonhoeffer were also involved in Abwehr operations to help German Jews escape to Switzerland. During this time Bonhoeffer worked on Ethics and wrote letters to keep up the spirits of his former students. He intended Ethics as his magnum opus, but it remained unfinished when he was arrested. On 5 April 1943, Bonhoeffer and Dohnányi were arrested and imprisoned.
Imprisonment
On 13 January 1943, Bonhoeffer became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, the granddaughter of his close friend and Finkenwalde seminary supporter, Ruth von Kleist Retzow. Ruth had campaigned for this marriage for several years, although up until late October 1942, Bonhoeffer remained a reluctant suitor despite Ruth being part of his innermost circle.[34] A large age gap loomed between Bonhoeffer and Maria: he was 36 to her 18. The two also spent almost no time alone together prior to the engagement and did not see each other between becoming engaged and Bonhoeffer's 5 April arrest. Once he was in prison, however, Maria's status as fiancee became invaluable, as it meant she could visit Bonhoeffer and correspond with him. While their relationship was troubled,[35] she was a source of food and smuggled messages.[36] Bonhoeffer made Eberhard Bethge his heir, but Maria, in allowing her correspondence with Bonhoeffer to be published after her death, provided an invaluable addition to the scholarship.For a year and a half, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned at Tegel military prison awaiting trial. There he continued his work in religious outreach among his fellow prisoners and guards. Sympathetic guards helped smuggle his letters out of prison to Eberhard Bethge and others, and these uncensored letters were posthumously published in Letters and Papers from Prison. One of those guards, a Corporal named Knobloch, even offered to help him escape from the prison and "disappear" with him, and plans were made for that end. But Bonhoeffer declined it fearing Nazi retribution on his family, especially his brother Klaus and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi who were also imprisoned.[37]
After the failure of the 20 July Plot on Hitler's life in 1944 and the discovery in September 1944 of secret Abwehr documents relating to the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer's connection with the conspirators was discovered. He was transferred from the military prison Tegel in Berlin, where he had been held for 18 months, to the detention cellar of the house prison of the Reich Security Head Office, the Gestapo's high-security prison. In February 1945, he was secretly moved to Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Flossenbürg concentration camp.
On 4 April 1945, the diaries of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, were discovered, and in a rage upon reading them, Hitler ordered that the Abwehr conspirators be destroyed.[38] Bonhoeffer was led away just as he concluded his final Sunday service and asked an English prisoner Payne Best to remember him to Bishop George Bell of Chichester if he should ever reach his home: "This is the end—for me the beginning of life."[39]
Execution
Bonhoeffer was condemned to death on 8 April 1945 by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a drumhead court-martial without witnesses, records of proceedings or a defense in Flossenbürg concentration camp.[40] He was executed there by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, just two weeks before soldiers from the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the camp,[41][42] three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the capitulation of Nazi Germany.Bonhoeffer was stripped of his clothing and led naked into the execution yard, where he was hanged, along with fellow conspirators Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Canaris's deputy General Hans Oster, military jurist General Karl Sack, General Friedrich von Rabenau,[43] businessman Theodor Strünck, and German resistance fighter Ludwig Gehre. Bonhoeffer's brother, Klaus Bonhoeffer, and his brother-in-law, Rüdiger Schleicher, were executed in Berlin on the night of 22–23 April as Soviet troops were already fighting in the capital. His brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi had been executed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 8 or 9 April.
Eberhard Bethge, a student and friend of Bonhoeffer's, writes of a man who saw the execution: "I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God."[39]
This is the traditional account of Bonhoeffer's death, which over the decades went unchallenged.[44] But many recent biographers see problems with the story, not due to Bethge but his source. The purported witness was a doctor at Flossenbürg concentration camp, Hermann Fischer-Hüllstrung,[45] who may have wished to minimize the suffering of the condemned men to reduce his own culpability in their executions. J. L. F. Mogensen, a former prisoner at Flossenbürg, cited the length of time it took for the execution to be completed (almost six hours), plus departures from camp procedure that would probably not have been allowed to prisoners so late in the war, as jarring inconsistencies. Considering that the sentences had been confirmed at the highest levels of Nazi government, by individuals with a pattern of torturing prisoners who dared to challenge the regime, it is more likely that "the physical details of Bonhoeffer's death may have been much more difficult than we earlier had imagined."[46]
Other recent critics of the traditional account are more caustic. One terms the Fischer-Hüllstrung story as "unfortunately a lie," citing additional factual inconsistencies (the doctor described Bonhoeffer climbing the steps to the noose, but at Flossenbürg the gallows had none), and observing that "Fischer-Hüllstrung had the job of reviving political prisoners after they had been hanged until they were almost dead, in order to prolong the agony of their dying."[47] Another charges that Fischer-Hüllstrung's "subsequent statement about Bonhoeffer as kneeling in wordy prayer . . . belongs to the realm of legend."[48]
Legacy
Bonhoeffer's life as a pastor and theologian of great intellect and spirituality who lived as he preached—and his killing in opposition to Nazism—exerted great influence and inspiration for Christians across broad denominations and ideologies, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, in the United States, the anti-communist democratic movement in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa.Bonhoeffer is commemorated as a theologian and martyr by the United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and several church members of the Anglican Communion including the Episcopal Church (USA) on the anniversary of his death, 9 April.
The Deutsche Evangelische Kirche in Sydenham, London, at which he preached between 1933 and 1935, was destroyed by bombing in 1944. A replacement church was built in 1958 and named Dietrich-Bonhoeffer-Kirche in his honor.[49
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer
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