Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

The infamous events of that week began November 7, when a seventeen-year-old German Jew shot and killed an official in the German Embassy in Paris. The young man’s father had recently been put in a crowded boxcar and deported to Poland. For that and for the Nazis’ other abuses against the Jews he had his revenge. But the man he killed was not the German ambassador, Count Johannes von Welczeck, as he had intended. It was the third secretary of the embassy, Ernst vom Rath, who happened to cross the angry young man’s path at the wrong time. Ironically, vom Rath was opposed to the Nazis, in part because of their vicious anti-Semitism. As with the burning of the Reichstag, the shooting was just the pretext that Hitler and the Nazi leaders needed. In a “spontaneous” series of demonstrations, evils would be unleashed against the Jews of Germany on a terrible scale. Hitler gave the command to take action against the Jews, but to execute this action, he looked to the services of Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command at the SS. One of the most sinister figures in the evil pantheon of the Third Reich, Heydrich had an icy mien that suggested something one might encounter in the lightless world of the Marianas Trench. At 1:20 a.m., following the vom Rath assassination, he sent an urgent Teletype message to every Gestapo station across Germany. The orders gave explicit directions on how to perpetrate the events of what has come to be known as the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken ...