Transcript
Narrator
“While all the powers of good aid and attend us,
boldly we’ll face the future, come what may.
At even and at morn God will befriend us,
and oh, most surely on each newborn day!”
The Protestant theologian wrote his most well-known verses in late 1944 in a cell: he was meanwhile being held in the infamous house prison of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. After twenty months in custody, his situation had thus worsened considerably. He nevertheless intended the poem as a means to convey confidence to his family. It was in the last letter they received from him.
Sheltered, fostered and highly gifted, Dietrich Bonhoeffer grew up in a villa in the Grunewald district of Berlin. He earned his A levels at the age of seventeen, his doctorate at twenty-one, his habilitation at twenty-four, and then spent a year studying in New York. A splendid academic career seemed to lie ahead.
However, then Hitler came into power. As early as 1933, Bonhoeffer was already considered a staunch anti-Nazi. Nevertheless, he returned to Germany in 1935 from a pastorate in safe London and also again in 1939 after a stay in the US.
He tried to offer resistance to the regime from within the church, and was one of the leaders of the Confessing Church, which withstood the political pressure to conform to Nazi ideology. However, the church opposition’s pastor training programme, directed by Bonhoeffer, was banned, and the Gestapo prevented the continuation of its secret seminaries. From 1936 onward, Bonhoeffer himself was subjected to one ban after another: from teaching at universities, from speaking in public, from printing and publishing his texts.
Yet there were other means of actively opposing the Nazi regime. In around 1938, Bonhoeffer was made privy to the plans of the resistance group around his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi to overthrow the government. Partially as a way of evading conscription to the Wehrmacht, he followed Dohnanyi into service in the German military intelligence organization. Starting in October 1940 – the war was already raging – Bonhoeffer travelled Europe as a double agent: to Norway and Sweden, Switzerland, the Vatican. He made use of his international ecumenical contacts to inform the Allies about coup plans and explore possibilities for armistice after Hitler’s death. Bonhoeffer was the only Protestant pastor who advocated Hitler’s assassination and helped prepare for it.
Attempts to assassinate Hitler failed. The Gestapo made gradual headway in tracking the group down, and Bonhoeffer was arrested in early April 1943 for conspiratorial activities against the Nazi state. Initially he did not appear to be in grave danger; it took a while for the Gestapo to recognize the full extent of his participation in the resistance: on 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life failed and it was only in the course of the ensuing investigations that documents turned up implicating Bonhoeffer.
He was transferred from the Wehrmacht prison in Berlin-Tegel to the Gestapo house prison. In early February 1945, as the Red Army drew closer, he was sent to Buchenwald. There he and other members of the resistance were held in the detention cellar of an SS casern for two months before being “evacuated” once again, in early April 1945. On the very night of his arrival in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, a summary court martial sentenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer to death; he was hanged immediately.
Bonhoeffer was one of the few prominent theologians to come out openly in opposition to the National Socialists and their politics and to condemn the church’s complicity with the regime.
It was not until 1996 that the Berlin district court reversed the death sentence of 8 April 1945 and rehabilitated Bonhoeffer.
