In the last month before the Allied victory in World War II, the embattled Nazis embarked upon a final round of brutal killings of their political enemies inside Germany. One of the victims of this purge was a thirty-nine-year-old Lutheran priest who was tortured and hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp at dawn on April 9, 1945.
The young minister was Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), who would be hailed after the war as one of the few German religious figures brave enough to defy the Third Reich.
Bonhoeffer was born into a prominent German family in Wrocław, a city in present-day Poland. Although too young to fight in World War I, he witnessed the destruction wrought by the war and was devastated by the death of his older brother, Walter. After receiving his doctorate in 1927, Bonhoeffer traveled to Spain, Britain, and the United States; he began publishing well-received books on Protestant theology and was officially ordained a minister when he returned to Germany in 1931.
Bonhoeffer was living in Berlin in 1933, when the Nazis took power and began forcing the German Protestant and Catholic churches to submit to government control. Under pressure from Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), the German Protestant church became the Protestant Reich Church. That year, Bonhoeffer helped organize the Confessing Church and its seminary, insisting that Christianity was incompatible with Nazism. He also objected to the pervasive anti-Semitism of Nazi propaganda.
During the 1930s, the Gestapo shut down Bonhoeffer’s seminary. As war loomed, he briefly fled to the United States, but returned to Germany to join the resistance, declaring that he would have “no right to take part in the restoration of Christian life in Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people.”
Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 when he was caught helping Jews escape from Germany. Although he was in prison on July 20, 1944, the day of a failed assassination attempt on Hitler, he was implicated in that plot. He, along with other conspirators, was executed in brutal fashion at Flossenbürg.
Just fourteen days later, the Allies liberated the death camp—and within a month, the war was over.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- In total, four members of Bonhoeffer’s immediate family were executed for their roles in the plot to assassinate Hitler, including his brother, Klaus, and two brothers-in-law.
- As a theologian with pacifist leanings, Bonhoeffer agonized over his own decision to join the plot to kill Hitler. He explained the thinking that informed his choice in his 1943 book Ethics: “Christians are, therefore, faced with a dilemma: when assaulted by evil, they must oppose it through direct action. They have no other option. Any failure to act is simply to condone evil.”
- A statue of Bonhoeffer was erected in Westminster Abbey in London, celebrating the German priest as a modern Christian martyr.
