Born in 1906 in Breslau, which is now part of Poland, Bonhoeffer was a twin and born into a large family of 8 children. They were a religious family but didn’t think church attendance was especially important, they weren’t big church goers – which is ironic because Bonhoeffer’s later dissertation was all about the church. Despite that, Bonhoeffer’s mother – being the daughter of a pastor and theologian – educated them as children, including the Bible.
During the first world war, his older brother died on the front, when Dietrich was 12. He was given his brother’s bible, which he held onto for the rest of his life. Being a child in Germany in WW1 would not have been easy, and he witnessed a lot of death – to the point that he apparently wished to die to demonstrate that Christians need not fear death, which is pretty heavy for a 12-year-old.
He disappointed his father when he decided to study theology, but before doing so he did some traveling, exploring Italy with his brother Klaus, and was impressed by the Catholicism he experienced. Up until now the church hadn’t been particularly important to him, but his experience in Rome began to change that. He decided he wanted to focus his studies on the nature of the church, and he did so, leading to a doctoral dissertation on the very topic. Humans, he argued, need community and should not exist as self-autonomous individuals. It is the church, when Christian believers come together, where one experiences Christ. We experience Jesus in one another.
He also spent some time in Spain and began to see the inherently diverse nature of the church. He is a bit of a backpacker on his trips, crashing on people’s spare beds, so spent a lot of time with others and learnt to recognize the true Christians from the nominal Christians. All of this would become important later on when the Nazi’s came to power.
In Germany, in order to become a professor, you need to complete what is essentially a second PhD, called a habilitation. I’ve completed one PhD and man that was hard enough. So Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin and published his dissertation called Act and Being, where he essentially argued for the importance of the church for true Christian community. There’s a lot more theology to it than that, but that’s kind of the gist.
Then he did some teaching in New York, but didn’t love the theology there. But he was inspired by the activism he witnessed and was utterly shocked by the segregation between black and white Americans. This would really stick with him and was in his mind when he saw similar things happening to the Jewish Germans.
Back in Germany he was a pastor and became friends with the great theologian Karl Barth, who became something of a mentor to Dietrich, and the two of them would write to one another for the rest of Dietrich’s life.
And then he joined the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches, which is a bit of a mouthful. But this organization pushed for friendly, ecumenical relations between the churches. But this endeavour became increasingly distrusted as nationalism increased in Germany.
Following World War One, nationalism was on the rise in Germany. The hefty fees they were forced to pay with the Treaty of Versailles that ended hostilities crippled the nation economically. This was made worse by the Great Depression. Many Germans thought that the Treaty was simply an armistice, not a surrender, so they didn’t think they had been defeated. So lots of them resented the Allied nations, paving the way for a growing nationalism.
They were discontent and angry. Extremist and populist groups emerged, seizing on that anger. Adolf Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party in 1919, which was reorganised into the Nazi Party and gained power throughout the 1920’s. Hitler became leader in 1921 and then in 1923, feeling disenfranchised and disappointed in the governing Weimar Republic and inspired by Mussolini’s march on Rome the year prior, approximately 2000 from the Party marched on a beerhall in Munich where Hitler declared a revolution had begun and that a new government would be installed. This attempted coup failed and Hitler was arrested. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison but was released after only 8 months. During this time in prison he wrote Mein Kampf (My Struggle in English). He returned as the leader of the Nazi Party.
In 1933, Hitler was democratically elected as chancellor, but wasn’t especially happy with the makeup of parliament. So what to do…what to do…who to blame…I know – the communists!
A fire broke out in parliament, which Hitler blamed on the communists, and used the incident as an opportunity to push through a bill that enabled him to rule independently of parliament. It was a very conveniently timed fire. But, it’s probably just that: convenient. Historically, it’s not especially likely that the Nazi Party committed arson and set the communists up to take the fall. It’s very neat and makes for a thrilling story, but it’s probably more likely that the communists were angered by some comments Hitler had made and that they genuinely set the place on fire.
In any case, by 1934, the Nazi Party was the only political party and democracy gave way to totalitarianism. Germany became a police state and they quickly began the process of re-armament and expansion.
The Bonhoeffer family didn’t like Hitler from the very beginning, with Dietrich’s father describing Hitler’s speeches as “demagogic”, “propagandistic”, and “psychopathic”, and that Hitler had the potential to become a tyrant. Karl Bonhoeffer was a psychiatrist, so he knew what he was talking about, and history has proven him correct.
On the 1st of April, 1933, the National Socialists passed the “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service,” which included the infamous Aryan Paragraph, which states that anyone with a Jewish parent or grandparent must be dismissed from their employment in state and civil occupations. This didn’t apply to churches or private businesses, but it didn’t take many of them long to follow suit. This Aryan Paragraph was a huge moment in the German Jewish tensions.
The German Christian Faith Movement, or simply the German Christians, were one of the groups who adopted this antisemitic policy. They had formed in 1932 and were a strongly nationalistic group, characterised by a suspicion – if not outright hatred – of the Jews. They were inspired by one of their German heroes, Martin Luther. Luther, 500 years earlier, had published some documents which have not aged particularly well. To put it as nicely as I can, it seems that he did not care much for the Jewish people. In fact, I can say that for certain. He wrote a book called, On the Jews and Their Lies. That basically sums up how he felt about the Jews. But he was a 16th century person, where these sorts of attitudes were common. Come the 20th century and such attitudes are no longer excusable. And though Luther was opposed to the religion Judaism, not the ethnicity, he never called for their eradication. The German Christians de-emphasised the Old Testament, because it was too Jewish, and then stripped Jesus of any of his Jewishness. Jesus essentially became an Aryan.
In 1933, the Nazi Party installed Ludwig Müller as Reich Bishop over the churches, with the goal of unifying all Protestant German Churches into a single Reich Church. The church was now just another weapon within the state’s arsenal.
Believing the Third Reich to be fulfilment of biblical prophecy, the German Christians wanted the church to be at the forefront of this growing nationalism, stating:
“In race, ethnicity and nation we see orders of life given and bestowed upon us by God, and it is God’s law that we tend to their preservation…We view the mission to the Jews as a serious threat to our ethnonational traditions. It is the doorway of alien blood into our national body. …In particular, marriage between Germans and Jews should be forbidden.”
And so emerges what is known as the Church Struggle, which were ongoing debates between the Protestant churches over whether or not to support this nationalist and anti-Semitic movement, and whether or not the Aryan paragraph should be adopted and enforced within the churches. This affected Dietrich because his friend Franz Hildebrandt had a Jewish mother and his brother-in-law Gerhard Leibholz, who was married to his twin sister, also came from a Jewish family. They would later emigrate to London.
Regarding the relationship between the church and the state, Bonhoeffer argues that there are three options:
- The church can ask the state if it was upholding its duty to ensure justice and order and the wellbeing of its citizens.
- The church should help the victims of the state’s actions and work as a charity.
The third option, he stated,
“Is not just to bind up the wounds of the victims beneath the wheel but to seize the wheel itself. Such an action would be direct political action…and is only possible if the church sees the state to be failing in its function.”
However, the German Christians gained the majority position and implemented the Aryan paragraph. Bonhoeffer’s involvement in ecumenical activities meant that this sort of division between different people groups was obviously deplorable, but for Bonhoeffer, the overarching issue had to do with church governance and took issue with the fact that the state was now essentially determining how the church should function.
Barth encouraged Bonhoeffer to keep being loud in his defiance and told him to stand and tell the church that if they incorporate the Aryan paragraph they are no longer the church of Christ.
In 1933, he with several others, including Martin Niemoller, formed the Pastors Emergency League, with the explicit aim of helping those impacted by the Aryan paragraph.
For various reasons, but partly because of the frustration he felt toward the church not doing enough about the Nazi’s racial policy, Bonhoeffer couldn’t continue in his role in Germany, so became a pastor in London, overseeing a German congregation. Many were confused by his decision to leave Germany, seeing that he been such a vocal critic of the German Christians. But he still kept in touch and up to date with what was happening.
The leader of the German Christians, Reinhold Krause, called for an ethnic church, stating that they had to be freed “from the Old Testament with its Jewish economic morality, from these tales of cattle traders and pimps…When we draw from the Gospel that which speaks to our German hearts then the essentials of the teaching of Jesus emerge clearly and revealingly, coinciding completely with the demands of National Socialism.”
What a fortunate coincidence!
There was considerable backlash to this statement, which included the Pastor’s Emergency League upping their game and the Confessing Church was founded in 1934. Karl Barth published the Barmen Declaration, affirming the beliefs of the Confessing Church as well as attacking the beliefs of the German Christians, which they called heresies, as well as the general nationalism of the time. Barth was very concerned to put Jesus first, and not Hitler. The movement grew and Bonhoeffer’s church in London joined.
He returned in 1935 to help the Confessing Church establish a new seminary, which had multiple campuses and doubled as a sort of refuge. A particular emphasis within the curriculum was engaging with the world, rather than either retreating from it or capitulating to it. A very high call for the time. But they also stressed the need for discipline and meditation, and from this emerged Bonhoeffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship. Here he argues for a distinction between costly and cheap grace. Cheap grace is not real grace, because grace came with a great cost to Jesus, and so it costs us as well. Costly grace means doing the hard work of being disciple of Jesus.
The call to stand up for your beliefs is all the more extraordinary and difficult when we remember that this is occurring in 1930’s Germany, under and in resistance to the Nazi Party.
The State Church continued to intrude on the Confessing Church, which Bonhoeffer resented and he called for support, but he was no longer allowed to teach at the University of Berlin, being called an enemy of the state, the seminaries were shut down, and the Confessing Church became all but illegal. And so the movement shifted underground.
By 1937, the Confessing Church and the seminaries were decreed illegal, and the Gestapo were involved in shutting these down over the next few years and routing out the pastors. But the pastors still continued to work in secret, and Bonhoeffer would visit them and provide some teaching.
Then in 1938, Bonhoeffer was banned from Berlin, but his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, who was married to Dietrich’s older sister Christine and who was also very politically involved, introduced Dietrich to a German Resistance movement, some of whom were part of the Abwehr which was the German intelligence service. From there he learnt that war was imminent, which frightened Dietrich because he was a pacifist and opposed to the Nazi regime – so being conscripted and being forced to swear allegiance to Hitler was a horrifying thought. Refusal could mean his execution and could cause problems for the Confessing Church.
He was also invited to Union Theological Seminary in New York, but was only there for two weeks because he felt guilty for leaving. His friends wanted him to stay in America because returning to Germany was an enormous risk for him, but he felt he needed to be in Germany to support and help in whatever way he could. He stated:
“I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
On the 1st September 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, starting World War 2, and back in Germany, life was not easy for Dietrich. The Gestapo followed him around and he had to report his activities. He published a short book on the Psalms where he argued that this very Jewish book was the prayer book of Jesus. This obviously did not go down well with the Nazi authorities and so he was forbidden to speak or to publish.
He had joined the Abwehr, the intelligence agency, which meant he avoided conscription and within this organization could liaise with members of the resistance movement. Considering his involvement in the Confessing Church and his very outspoken position on Nazism, he was greatly mistrusted, but it was argued that his international connections would prove valuable to Germany and he was able to operate in a sort of counterintelligence fashion.
There were a number of plots against Hitler, and it’s likely that Dietrich knew about these plots, because Dohnanyi, his brother-in-law, played an important role in those plots. As a pacifist, he did struggle with being involved, even if not explicitly or directly, with these plots, but he decided to simply accept the guilt.
However, his main role in this resistance movement, aside from intelligence gathering and connecting with his international contacts, was his involvement in smuggling people out of the country to Switzerland. In 1941, Operation Seven freed a small group of people who were on their way to a concentration camp and disguised them as counterintelligence informants sneaking into Switzerland.
During all of this he struggled with the inevitable ethical questions that came up, such as his involvement in deception, disobeying his government, and what the German church would look like after the war.
he was arrested with Dohnanyi and his sister Christine, because the Reich Central Security Office suspected, rightly, the Abwehr was conducting conspiracy activities. So they shut it down. Dohnanyi was in possession of plans for what Germany would look like after the war, which involved Dietrich, and so he was implicated for treason, and sent to Tegel military interrogation prison in Berlin. He was there for a year and a half awaiting trial.
On the 20th July 1944, the German Resistance movement attempted another assassination attempt on Hitler, which is known as Operation Valkyrie, led by Claus von Stauffenberg. The plan was that a bomb within a briefcase would be positioned under a conference table at Wolf’s Lair where Hitler and other Nazi leaders were meeting. However, for a number of reasons it failed and the coup was crushed.
Following this, the Gestapo took a closer look at known associates, and Dietrich was connected to the conspirators. So he was transported to a high security detention cellar and then to Buchenwald Concentration camp and then Flossenburg Concentration camp.
He was there executed on the 9th April 1945 among a flurry of executions as the allied forces drew closer.
In the final months, the Germans evacuated the area, including tens of thousands of prisoners – most of whom died on the way to other concentration camps, mainly Dachau near Munich. The United States Army arrived in the area on the 23rd of April, only two weeks after Dietrich’s execution. The Germans then surrendered a week later.
Dohnanyi was executed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp on 6th April 1945 and Klaus Bonhoeffer was executed at Lehrter Strasse prison in Berlin on the 1st of October 1944. Barth was Swiss, on so just kicked out of the country, but he returned as soon as the war ended.
So that’s the story, in a very brief nutshell, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who criticised those Christians who capitulated to the antisemitism and nationalism of Nazi ideology. He stood up and it cost him his life. As a result, he’s often considered a martyr and treated like a saint, or at least as close to a saint as a Protestant might be comfortable.
But it is conflicting story and there is a lot to consider as we reflect on Bonhoeffer’s life.
The first, of course, has to do with the ethics of resistance and of violence. How many of us have thought about what we would do if we were in Germany and bumped into Hitler on the streets, or if we had a time machine, would we go back and kill him before he rose to power?
Bonhoeffer was an idealist pacifist, he wrote and spoke passionately about the need for non-violence and for peace and unity. He spoke against all forms of violence, bigotry, racism. And yet he was part of a resistance movement and his intelligence was probably used in assassination attempts on the life of Hitler. Now, he wasn’t ever directly involved with these assassination attempts – a lot of people often mistakenly assume that Bonhoeffer was arrested for trying to kill Hitler. This actually isn’t true, and the big assassination attempt – operation Valkyrie, the one that got turned into a movie featuring the well known German actor Tom Cruise – occurred when Bonhoeffer had actually already been in prison for over a year.
But he was part of the resistance movement, defied orders, smuggled people out of the country, used his international connections to get the truth of what was happening to the allied nations, he spoke about taking direct action against evil, tyrannical governments, and he once said:
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
So, ethically, it is a difficult, complicated issue. And I’m not going to give you a nice, clean answer. Let’s think about it, grapple in our minds with ethical issues like this, and just hope and pray that we never have to be in the position that Bonhoeffer was. Where standing up for our convictions might lead to violence and might result even in violence done to us.
But of course, let’s be fair to those Christians who joined the German Christian Faith Movement, or those who remained silent. It was an impossibly difficult situation for so many of them. Bonhoeffer wasn’t married, and he didn’t have children, where so many of the other pastors did. What Bonhoeffer did was still really difficult, risking his life, but he didn’t have a responsibility to a wife or children. The others were stuck between a rock and a hard place. To speak out against Hitler meant endangering not just yourself, but your whole family.
Yes, antisemitism is bad. And let’s just quickly clarify one thing: the Jews did not kill Jesus; the Romans did. So let’s stop blaming the Jews for that, like Luther did. But I suspect that many of the Germans pastors didn’t actually believe it, but had to walk the party line. They went along with, because if they didn’t, their lives would be made very difficult. And of course, at least at first, they generally didn’t know the extent of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. Most didn’t know about the concentration camps. Plus the propaganda being shoved down their throats, the intimidation of the soldiers marching the streets, the rhetoric coming from the leaders of the churches. So many of us like to think that we’d be like Bonhoeffer or Barth or the others who stood up to Hitler and the Nazi Party, but were we in that situation, it wouldn’t be so easy to come to that conclusion.
I’m glad that they did, that there was a voice of resistance to the horrors being committed by the Nazi Party, to the nationalism and the antisemitism, the bigotry and the violence, the unification of church and state. But, to be honest, I don’t know if I could’ve done it. I don’t know if I’d have the courage. I don’t know if I’d be able to risk the life and livelihoods of my wife and my son.
So for us today, the task is to make sure that we don’t ever end up in that situation where we would be forced to make those decisions. Let’s raise our voice before it is too late, to injustice, to discrimination. Let’s look for the warning signs before the swastikas are hanging from the communion table or we are forced to salute the tyrant before we pray.
The execution of so many millions of Jewish people, for no other crime than for being born Jewish, is a mark against humanity. It’s not quite right to say that the German church didn’t speak out against it, but when the German Christians and the Third Reich, the church and state, coupled up together, it enabled atrocities. In hindsight it’s easy for us to say that the church should have done more, but like I mentioned they were in a very difficult position. So let us learn from history and avoid getting ourselves into that position again.
A. K. Chidgzey 
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