Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

by Eric Metaxas

That October, to the delight of most Germans, Hitler declared that Germany was pulling out of the League of Nations. The announcement came just two days before Bonhoeffer was to leave for his London pastorate.

I feel that, in some way I don’t understand, I find myself in radical opposition to all my friends; I became increasingly isolated with my views of things, even though I was and remain personally close to these people. All this has frightened me and shaken my confidence so that I began to fear that dogmatism might be leading me astray—since there seemed no particular reason why my own view in these matters should be any better, any more right, than the views of many really capable pastors whom I sincerely respect.

Because of Bonhoeffer, the German churches in England even joined the Pastors’ Emergency League and, later, the Confessing Church. Of all the countries with German congregations, only one country—England—would take such a stand, all because of Bonhoeffer.

In any case2, he had long felt that Gandhi could provide some clues for him. Gandhi was not a Christian, but he lived in a community that endeavored to live by the teachings set forth in the Sermon on the Mount. Bonhoeffer wanted Christians to live that way. So he would travel to India to see it practiced by non-Christians.

One such Saturday before this service, Bonhoeffer broached the subject of personal confession between them. It had been Luther’s idea that Christians should confess to one another instead of to a priest. Most Lutherans had thrown that baby out with the bathwater and didn’t confess to anyone. Confession of any kind was considered overly Catholic, just as extemporaneous prayer was criticized as too pietistic. But Bonhoeffer successfully instituted the practice of confessing one to another. Perhaps not surprisingly, Bonhoeffer chose Eberhard Bethge as his confessor.

But the Confessing Church was again slow to act. It was guilty of the typically Lutheran error of confining itself to the narrow sphere of how church and state were related. When the state is trying to encroach upon the church, this is a proper sphere of concern. But for Bonhoeffer, the idea of limiting the church’s actions to this sphere alone was absurd. The church had been instituted by God to exist for the whole world. It was to speak into the world and to be a voice in the world, so it had an obligation to speak out against things that did not affect it directly.

On April 2213, Bonhoeffer delivered a lecture titled “The Question of the Boundaries of the Church and Church Union.” It was typically measured, thorough, and definitive, to the point of being elegant and beautiful, like a winning equation. In it, he explained how the Confessing Church was not solely concerned with dogma, but neither was it unconcerned with dogma. In a memorable and hideous turn of phrase, he said that the Confessing Church “takes its confident way between the Scylla of orthodoxy and the Charybdis of confessionlessness.” He talked about the boundaries of engagement, explaining the vital difference between engaging “another church”—such as the Greek Orthodox Church or the Roman Catholic Church—and an institution that was “anti-church,” such as the German Christians. One could have differences with another church, but engage in a dialogue to further mutual understanding. One could not have a dialogue with an institution that was “anti-church.” This lecture on the eternal question, What is the church? helped his students make clear, biblical sense of a confusing issue at a confusing time in German church history.

But someplace in this beautiful landscape, planted like a time bomb, was a single sentence. It would soon explode and effectively obliterate every sentence around it and cause a firestorm of controversy. Bonhoeffer did not think of it that way when he wrote it, and he had never imagined that it would become a focal point of the lecture. The controversial sentence was this: “Whoever knowingly separates himself from the Confessing Church in Germany separates himself from salvation.”

The memo was written in such a way as to invite its maniacal reader into a conversation. It was neither demanding nor accusatory, but asked questions, and as such was calling Hitler’s bluff, asking him to clarify things, giving him the benefit of the doubt. Was the “de-Christianization” of the German people official government policy? What did the Nazi Party mean by the term positive Christianity? It also noted that party ideology was forcing German citizens to hate Jews, and as a result, Christian parents faced difficulties with their children since Christians were not supposed to hate anyone. Hildebrandt was involved in drafting it, and Niemöller was among the signers.

The document was hand delivered to the Reich chancellery on June 4. Besides the copy for Hitler, only two other copies existed, both closely guarded. It was all a calculated gamble, since Hitler could respond negatively. As it turned out, Hitler did not respond at all. Days passed, then weeks. Had he ever received it?

After six weeks, disastrous news: they heard news of the memo from a London newspaper. On July 17, the Morning Post published an article about it. How could the British press have known about it since it had not been made public? Now Hitler would look bad in the eyes of the world at the very moment the Confessing Church had hoped to give him an opportunity to react privately, to save face. And it got worse: a week later a Swiss newspaper published the memo in its entirety. It app...

So what happened? It turned out that two of Bonhoeffer’s former students, Werner Koch and Ernst Tillich, and Dr. Friedrich Weissler, a lawyer for the Confessing Church, were behind the leak. They had been frustrated with Hitler’s lack of response, and they thought they could force his hand. All three were arrested and sent to Gestapo headquarters and interrogated. In the fall they were sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. Weissler, for the crime of being Jewish, was separated from his brethren and died within the week. The Olympics were to begin in two weeks, so Hitler delayed taking immediate action against the trio. After all, international visitors and media were on hand, and more than four million tickets were sold. For now, he wished to appear magnanimous and tolerant. The Confessing Church now made a bold move. Since the horse was out of the barn, the memo would be read from pulpits across Germany “to provide unmistakable evidence that the church had not completely lost its voice about the flagrant injustice.” Furthermore, the text of the memo would be printed onto a million pamphlets and distributed. By criticizing Hitler publicly, the Confessing Church was swimming against a surging tide of popular opinion for Hitler. He was in high regard among even those who had been his detractors a year or two earlier, and the Olympics would be a crowning achievement. Anyone criticizing the buoyant Hitler at that high-water mark in Germany’s resurrection from the Ve...

Niemöller was in jail for eight months, but on the day of his release the Gestapo promptly rearrested him. They were known for this unpleasant tactic. Hitler could not abide the freedom of someone so outspokenly against him, so he honored Pastor Niemöller with the distinction of being a “personal prisoner” of the Führer for the next seven years, which Niemöller spent in Dachau. He was freed by the Allies in 1945.

Meanwhile, Hildebrandt would preach at Dahlem, his sermons no less fiery than Niemöller’s. Still, he began to see that, as a Jew, it might be time for him to make an exit. Passports were being revoked, and he might not be able to leave when it was more convenient. His last sermon was July 18. There were always Gestapo30 officers in the congregation. They meant to intimidate the parishioners and pastors, but at Dahlem they failed consistently.

This Sunday, in direct contravention of the new laws, Hildebrandt read aloud the list of those for whom intercessory prayers were being asked. He then took up an extra collection explicitly for the work of the Confessing Church. He instructed that the money be placed on the Lord’s Table at the altar, where it was dedicated to God and God’s work with a prayer. The Gestapo usually turned a blind eye to such breaches of the laws, but that day the officer did not. At the end of the service he brazenly went forward and took the money.

One of these dignified men was at the center of the crisis that threatened to topple Hitler, and that had Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer wide-eyed with interest. That man was the commander in chief of the army, General Wilhelm von Fritsch. The troubles began when Fritsch made the mistake of trying to talk Hitler out of his war plans. Hitler had no patience for these upper-class cowards. For him the question was not whether Fritsch might have a point, but how to silence such troublemakers. The puffy and pomaded Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring had an idea. Göring had been ogling the top spot in the German military for some time, and he had recently been successful in getting rid of the previous head of the army in an underhanded fashion. That man, Field Marshal Blomberg, was drummed out in a scandal involving his new wife, whom Göring accused of having been a prostitute, which she had been.

While Bonhoeffer wrote, the Czechoslovakian crisis was front and center. Hitler publicly maintained that the German-speaking populations of Europe belonged to Germany. The Austrian Anschluss had been portrayed not as an act of aggression, but as a benevolent father welcoming his children home.

Simiar messaging coming from Putin and Ukraine's Donetsk and luhansk region

The army generals were aching for Hitler to march on Czechoslovakia, not because they thought it wise, but because they thought it so patently foolish that it would give them the opportunity they had been waiting for. They would seize Hitler and take over the government. A number of possibilities were open to them. One was to declare him insane and unfit for leadership, and the first piece of evidence would be his insistence on invading Czechoslovakia when it would bring certain disaster and ruin to Germany.

But they also had connections to a highly esteemed German psychiatrist who shared their diagnosis of the nation’s leader, and their political views. Karl Bonhoeffer was waiting in the wings. His expert testimony would come in handy, and he was indeed convinced from a clinical perspective that Hitler was a pathological madman. They had thought that going about everything through legal means would expose Hitler’s crimes, would avoid the grim possibility of sparking a civil war, and would avoid turning him into a martyr, since his popularity was soaring. But Hitler must make the first move. When he did, the army would stage its coup, and everything would be different.

The breathtaking climax of this magnificent drama was destroyed by Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who suddenly appeared in the unprecedented role of appeaser ex machina. It was as though he had commandeered a hot air balloon, floated by, and offered Herr Hitler a nice, civilized ride to the ground. Hitler accepted, although he was thunderstruck by Chamberlain’s unsolicited and unnecessary offer. He was not one-tenth as thunderstruck as the generals, who had been a hair’s breadth from action and couldn’t fathom why Chamberlain would have done such a thing! And Chamberlain was willing to meet with Hitler personally, wherever Hitler wished, with no concern for protocol. The sixty-nine-year-old prime minister had never been in an airplane before, but he would now fly seven hours from London to Berchtesgaden on the far side of Germany to meet with the ill-mannered tyrant. His badly timed efforts would serve for generations as the textbook example of cheap grace in geopolitical terms: it was “peace” on the house, with a side order of Czechoslovakia.

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 ...

It’s impossible to say when Bonhoeffer joined the conspiracy, mainly because he was always in the midst of it, even before it could have been called a conspiracy. The Bonhoeffer family had relationships with many powerful people in the government, most of whom shared their anti-Hitler views. Karl Bonhoeffer was close to Ferdinand Sauerbruch, a famous Berlin surgeon who was anti-Nazi and who influenced Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat, to join the Resistance. Kolbe became America’s most important spy against Hitler.

The head of the Abwehr was Wilhelm Canaris. Knowing Dohnanyi’s position on Hitler, Canaris appointed Dohnanyi to his staff and asked him to compile a file of the Nazis’ atrocities. A year later, when the war against Poland was launched, Dohnanyi documented the barbarity of the SS Einsatzgruppen, even though many of the top generals themselves knew nothing about it.

Canaris knew that the evidence of these atrocities would be crucial in convincing those generals and others to join the coup when the time came. That information would also help to convince the German people of the criminality of Hitler and thereby destroy his sway over them. And it would give the new government the necessary authority.

The next day3, the Reichskirche published the Godesberg Declaration, signed by Dr. Werner. It declared that National Socialism was a natural continuation of “the work of Martin Luther” and stated that the “Christian faith is the unbridgeable religious opposite to Judaism.” It also said: “Supra-national and international church structure of a Roman Catholic or world-Protestant character is a political degeneration of Christianity.”

The situation in the Confessing Church seemed increasingly hopeless too. Its revulsion toward Karl Barth over his letter calling every Czech soldier who died fighting Hitler a martyr disturbed Bonhoeffer. That the Confessing Church could distance itself from the author of the Barmen Confession grieved him. This and many other things made him feel that there was little left for him to do in Germany. America seemed to be the direction that God had for him. Still, he wasn’t sure.

He repented of the anti-Americanism stirring in him over the last days and boldly equated the fundamentalists with the Confessing Church. Here they were fighting the corrupting influences of the theologians at Union and Riverside, and at home the fight was against the Reichskirche. It was a staggering equation. Here is the church, he seemed to say, marginalized here as we are marginalized there.

It is remarkable35 how I am never quite clear about the motives for any of my decisions. Is that a sign of confusion, of inner dishonesty, or is it a sign that we are guided without our knowing, or is it both? . . . Today the reading speaks dreadfully harshly of God’s incorruptible judgement. He certainly sees how much personal feeling, how much anxiety there is in today’s decision, however brave it may seem. The reasons one gives for an action to others and to one’s self are certainly inadequate. One can give a reason for everything. In the last resort one acts from a level which remains hidden from us. So one can only ask God to judge us and to forgive us. . . . At the end of the day I can only ask God to give a merciful judgement on today and all its decisions. It is now in his hand.

That evening he wrote43 postcards and noted in his diary: “The newspaper grim again today. Readings: ‘The one who believes does not flee’ (Isa. 28.16). I’m thinking of work at home.” Later, this Losung text was said to have been the key to his decision, the one that spoke the most loudly of them all: “The one who believes does not flee.” To stay now was to flee. And to flee from America was to believe, to trust in the Lord.

The next morning, Bonhoeffer’s last in America, Paul Lehmann tried to talk Bonhoeffer out of leaving. He knew what his friend was returning to. But the decision was made: Bonhoeffer had set his face toward Berlin. He had been in New York twenty-six days.

It was then, exchanging one of his carrots for a stick, he vowed that Britain would defend Poland if Hitler attacked it. That time had come. But Hitler couldn’t simply attack. He must first make it look like self-defense. So on August 22, he told his generals, “I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war; never mind whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth.”

The plan was for the SS2, dressed in Polish uniforms, to attack a German radio station on the Polish border. To make the whole thing authentic, they would need German “casualties.” They decided to use concentration camp inmates, whom they vilely referred to as Konserven (canned goods). These victims of Germany would be dressed as German soldiers. In the end only one man was murdered for this purpose, via lethal injection, and afterward shot several times to give the appearance that he had been killed by Polish soldiers. The deliberate murder of a human being for the purposes of deceiving the world seems a perfectly fitting inaugural act for what was to follow. This took place on schedule, August 31.

Meanwhile, many men who had been part of Finkenwalde, Köslin, Schlawe, and Sigurdshof had already been called up. On the third day of fighting, one was killed. By war’s end more than 80 of the 150 young men from Finkenwalde and the collective pastorates had been killed.

In Berlin he met with Dohnanyi, who told him everything, as he always had. But Bonhoeffer now heard things he had not heard before, things that would fundamentally alter his thinking. It was worse than anything he had dreamed. And what Bonhoeffer now knew would make him feel more alone than ever because many in the church and ecumenical world were expending great energies toward ending the war. But Bonhoeffer was not. He now believed that the principal goal was to remove Hitler from power. Only afterward could Germany negotiate for peace. Knowing what he knew, any peace with Hitler was no better than war. But he couldn’t say such things, even in ecumenical circles. This was when he began to realize that he was already part of the conspiracy to remove Hitler. He couldn’t even share what he knew with his best friends. It had become too dangerous. More than ever now, he was alone with God, and he looked to God’s judgment upon his actions.

Dohnanyi told him that now, under the dark cover of war, Hitler had unleashed horrors that beggared description, that made the usual horrors of war quaint things of the past. Reports from Poland indicated that the SS were committing unspeakable atrocities, things unheard of in civilized times. On September 10, a group of SS men had brutally overseen the forced labor of fifty Polish Jews, who spent the day repairing a bridge. When the work was completed, the SS herded the workers into a synagogue and murdered them. That was only one example. On a widespread systematic level, the Wehrmacht’s advances in Poland were accompanied by the intentional mass murder of civilians.

Dohnanyi’s primary source was his boss, Admiral Canaris. It was so disturbing that Canaris insisted on a meeting with Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the German military. They met in Hitler’s private railroad train on September 12, and Canaris questioned the OKW chief about the heinous evils, which would destroy Germany. What Canaris could not have known at that civilized meeting was that it would continue and would get much worse.

It would not only destroy Germany, but would do so more completely than he had ever dared to fear. The German culture and civilization that he, Dohnanyi, and Bonhoeffer knew and loved would be obliterated from history. Future generations would be convinced that nothing good could ever have exist...

Hitler’s hour had arrived, and on the first of September, a brutal new Darwinism broke over Europe: the Nietzschean triumph of the strong over the weak could at last begin. The weak who could be useful would be brutally enslaved; all others would be murdered.

What seemed so offensive to the international community—that Hitler would take the territory of the Polish people by force—was nothing compared to what the Nazis were doing. Their racial ideologies demanded more than territory; Poland must become a giant slave labor camp. The Poles were to be treated as Untermenschen (subhumans). Their lands would not merely be occupied; they themselves would be terrorized and broken into utter docility, would be dealt with as beasts. The Germans would not tolerate the possibility of failure or the slightest manifestation of mercy. Brutality and mercilessness would be aggressively cultivated as virtues.

Some generals, however10—Brauchitsch was one—were less bothered. In January 1940, Blaskowitz wrote another memo and sent it to Brauchitsch; he described the attitude in the army toward the SS as alternating “between abhorrence and hatred,” and said “every soldier feels sickened and repelled by the crimes committed in Poland by agents of the Reich and government representatives.” Brauchitsch only shrugged. He didn’t want the army sullied with these evildoings, but if the SS was doing most of the dirty work, he wouldn’t make a fuss.

Interesting that as of 1939 the SS were responsible for th atrocities i associated with tbe German army

Many felt that to be good Germans and faithful Christians at that time meant turning against the man leading their country. They knew that if they weren’t careful to plan other details of the coup, the death of Adolf Hitler might bring worse things. Two things were vital. First, they must communicate with British officials to guarantee that they, the conspirators, would be recognized as separate from Hitler and the Nazis. If the death of Hitler only emboldened the British to destroy Germany, little would be gained. Second, they must get enough of the army leaders on their side to pull it off in toto. If they succeeded only in killing Adolf Hitler, other Nazis would likely seize control and continue his work.

In August 1939 every doctor and midwife in the country was notified that they must register all children born with genetic defects—retroactive to 1936. In September, when the war began, the killing of these “defectives” began. In the next few years five thousand small children were killed. It wasn’t until later that fall that attention was formally focused on the other “incurables.”

As soon as the Polish campaign was under way, a number of adult patients deemed the least “fit” were put on buses for these “transfers.” The places to which these poor souls were transferred would murder them. At first the method was via injection, and later on via carbon monoxide gas. The parents or relatives of these patients had no idea of these goings-on until they received a letter in the mail, informing them of the death of their loved one, who had already been cremated. The cause of death was usually given as pneumonia or a similarly common ailment, and the ashes of their loved one’s remains arrived shortly thereafter. Hitler’s memo on this subject was postdated September 1, to coincide with the beginning of the war. The rationale given for the killings was that the patients were taking up medical facilities and beds that should be used by soldiers wounded while fighting for the fatherland.

The methods of killing used at these euthanasia centers and the methods of cremation were the first attempts by the Nazis to undertake mass killings. The lessons learned in murdering these helpless patients helped the Nazis streamline their killing and cremation methods, which would culminate in the death camps, where hundreds of thousands and then millions of innocents were killed.

It was a performance13. Of course the unspoken terms of his absurd Diktat were that no one mention the blood-soaked piece of German-occupied territory formerly known as Poland. Nor the place once upon a time known as Czechoslovakia. If no one was foolish enough to bring them up, peace was in the offing.

They didn’t want Britain and France to simply take advantage of Hitler’s sudden demise to mete out their own harsh justice on Germany. They needed peace assurances from these countries. And they couldn’t take their eyes off Russia in the east. Stalin was always waiting for any moment of weakness when he might pounce and tear away another piece of Europe at bargain basement prices. For the conspirators, cultivating friendly foreign contacts, and convincing them that the conspiracy was credible, was a vital part of the whole.

This was where Dietrich Bonhoeffer would come in. His role in reaching out to the British would be a crucial one over the next few years. His connections with Bishop Bell and others—and Bell’s connections with top men in the British government—were significant. Bonhoeffer also had connections in Norway and America. But would this pastor really take that last step beyond providing emotional and intellectual support for others and actively participate along with them? That remained to be seen.

Meanwhile, with or without Bonhoeffer, the conspiracy moved ahead with renewed vigor. Dohnanyi got in touch with Dr. Joseph Müller, a Munich lawyer with strong ties to the Vatican. Sometimes referred to by those in the conspiracy as “Herr X,” Müller was a man of great physical strength. Since childhood, friends had called him Ochsensepp (Joe Ox). Müller’s assignment in October 1939 was to travel to Rome, seemingly on official Abwehr business. But in reality he was to make contact with the British ambassador to the Holy See and gain some assurance of peace from the British if those in the conspiracy could oust Hitler. Müller succeeded; the British terms required Germany to shed the lands added during Hitler’s binge of the previous two years. But Müller went further. He convinced the pope to agree to act as an intermediary between Britain and the fledgling German government that formed following Hitler’s demise. It was all very promising. Bonhoeffer and Müller immediately hit it off, and a year later, Müller provided Bonhoeffer’s entree to the Alpine monastery at Ettal. But for now, Bonhoeffer continued traveling between Sigurdshof and Berlin.

The conspirators planned to launch the coup when Hitler gave the green light to attack the West. But he would set a date, everyone would gear up, and at the last minute, Hitler would call it off. He did this twenty-nine times over several months, driving everyone half mad. The chain of command in pulling off a full-blown military coup was terribly complicated, and unfortunately it was General Brauchitsch who must give the final go-ahead. It had been very difficult to convince him to be involved, and the whip-sawing of emotions from the constant postponements sapped what little courage he had. Numerous opportunities were lost. When Hitler finally issued the order to go in May 1940, the unwieldy coup tripped over itself and nothing happened. They had failed.

Suddenly a trumpet fanfare on the radio loudspeakers announced a special news flash: France had surrendered! Twenty-two years after Germany’s humiliation, Hitler had turned the tables. People went wild3. Some of them leaped up and stood on chairs; others stood on tables. Everyone threw out his arm in the Nazi salute and burst into “Deutschland über Alles” and then the “Horst Wessel Song.” It was a pandemonium of patriotism, and Bonhoeffer and Bethge were pinned like beetles. At least Bethge was. Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, seemed to be a part of it. Bethge was flabbergasted: along with everyone else, his friend stood up and threw out his arm in the “Heil, Hitler!” salute. As Bethge stood there gawking, Bonhoeffer whispered to him: “Are you crazy? Raise your arm! We’ll have to run risks for many different things, but this silly salute is not one of them!” Bethge’s extraordinary friend and mentor had schooled him in many things over the previous five years, but this was something new.