As much as he had heard about this fabled place, he was quite unprepared for what he saw. Bethel (Hebrew for “house of God”) was the fulfillment of a vision that Bodelschwingh’s father had in the 1860s. It began in 1867 as a Christian community for people with epilepsy, but by 1900 included several facilities that cared for 1,600 disabled persons. The younger Bodelschwingh took it over at his father’s death in 1910, and by the time of Bonhoeffer’s visit, it was a whole town with schools, churches, farms, factories, shops, and housing for nurses. At the center were numerous hospital and care
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