That semester we worked on the exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount; later he worked this into his book Discipleship. It became clear to us on the basis of this Bible study that it is not possible for Christians to justify killing or to justify war. So, of course, we also had to talk about the very immediate question of what we would do if it came to war or even if it didn’t come to war, what we would do if we were drafted, since the draft had been introduced. . . . When it came to the point when we were in fact drafted—I was called up on May 15, 1939—we went in with a bad conscience. It was
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