Thinker, Fighter, Pastor, Spy
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hard as nails. Physically imposing, intellectually sharp and incredibly charming, he was a double agent, a smuggler of refugees and a would-be assassin. He was also an ordained minister in the Lutheran-Reformed Church. Even had the rise of Fascism and the ensuing world war not intervened, it is very probable that Bonhoeffer would be remembered as one of the great theological minds of the twentieth century. However, his was to be a life shaped not just by books but by bombs and bullets too. His is in many ways a swashbuckling tale, one that takes in all sorts of places and people, from the dreaming spires of Oxford to the mean streets of Harlem, from caring for the street kids of interwar Berlin to trying to kill the Führer himself.
In many ways, Bonhoeffer’s tale is a tragedy. He failed in his attempts to convince the majority of his Church to actively oppose Nazism, he failed in his plot to kill Hitler and, ultimately, he failed to save his own life. And yet Bonhoeffer’s story tells us something crucial about Christian resistance to Fascism: in the Gospel according to St John it says, ‘He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life shall keep it unto life eternal.’ Success or failure, therefore, is not measured in terms of achieving goals or even avoiding death, but by clinging to the idea of the life, and the love, that is eternal. Bonhoeffer’s resistance was crucial in that he kept that flame alive, even though acting on it led him to the scaffold. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s steeliness came not from a robust confidence in his own abilities, or charm, or attractiveness, but from a faith in the idea that love would conquer death, and that his own life counted as nothing. As he was led out to execution, a Nazi prison camp doctor (not a breed renowned for their emotional observations) commented on how, in his whole grim career of sending people to their deaths, he had never seen anyone approach the scaffold as bravely as Bonhoeffer. The sight of this bravery deeply perturbed him, unable as he was to comprehend it. Bonhoeffer lived a life that made Nazis quake with rage and he died a death that made them quake with fear.
His father was a pre-eminent psychiatrist at the psychiatric medicine unit at the University of Breslau. Despite Bonhoeffer senior being a famous opponent of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, it was pretty clear from the sizeable brood of children he and his wife produced that this opposition didn’t extend to an absolute rejection of the sexual. Dietrich was one of eight children and was born a twin. In a family of pragmatic and scientific thinkers, he was always marked out for his deep interests in philosophy, metaphysics and, of course, religion. Many years after his death, Bonhoeffer’s younger sister would reminisce about when she and Dietrich’s twin sister were moved out of their communal nursery to a new room separate to Dietrich. He informed the sisters that he could hear them chattering each evening after praying and so, considerate elder brother that he was, offered to ‘rap on the wall three times’ to remind them to ‘think about the dear Lord’.
In 1912, when Dietrich was just six years old, his father took up the post of senior psychiatry professor at the University of Berlin. The move to the capital threw the family into the social and intellectual elite of the German Empire. While his father was agnostic, his mother was a woman of faith and ensured that holidays such as Christmas and Easter were celebrated accordingly. However, Bonhoeffer’s parents were primarily concerned with giving their children the broadest intellectual grounding possible and would read them academic tracts alongside Bible stories and nursery tales. The children would routinely be called to discussions round the dinner table with some of the pre-eminent scientists and philosophers of the day. All this undoubtedly made for an intellectually engaged childhood, but, it seems, a happy one.
Having waited out the majority of the First World War, the Bonhoeffers tried to use their connections to prevent Dietrich’s elder brother, Walter, from being called up at all. But by 1918 they could put it off no longer, and Walter was sent off to France to fight for the Kaiser. Just two weeks later, he was dead, riddled with shrapnel in the horrific mire of the Western Front. As he lay dying of his wounds, he found time to pen a final letter to his family, begging them not to worry. The family was wracked with grief. Dietrich, now twelve, was given his brother’s Bible and, always a child of faith, began to take his beliefs much more seriously, drawing on a strength that eluded his heartbroken parents. It was still a surprise, however, when, after passing his exams at secondary school, Dietrich announced his desire to be a pastor. His intellectual capacity was clear, even as an adolescent, and it was naturally assumed that he would follow his father into a career in psychiatry or, at a push, his surviving brother into the legal profession. But with a stubborn sense of his own calling that was to become a hallmark of his life and death, Dietrich was adamant: he wanted to study theology and he wanted to be ordained. This he did, racing through bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees at the University of Berlin before he was twenty-three.
The German Evangelical Church (a union of Lutheran and Calvinist denominations that represented the mainstream of German Protestantism) knew they had a bright (possibly dangerously so) young man on their hands. Proclaiming that he was too young to be made a minister, but wanting to stretch him just a little further to test his mettle, the Church arranged in 1928 to send him on a series of placements around the world. It began with a job assisting the German-speaking congregation in Barcelona. Here, following the line of almost all his fellow pastors at the time, his sermons and lectures expressed a tacit approval of nationalism (especially as a bulwark against Communism, the horrors of which were becoming clear in the USSR). Overall, however, his time in Spain was to foster little more than a lifelong fascination with the mechanics of bullfighting. He briefly returned to Germany to submit a dissertation and sort out his next trip abroad. What was to follow was a whirlwind of road trips, revelation and (in his own words) ‘rapturous passion’, that was to change the direction of Bonhoeffer’s life forever.
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In the summer of 1930, among the mass of different languages, garbs and skin tones that composed those queuing up to get their papers checked at the Ellis Island immigration station in Upper New York Bay stood the unmistakable tall, blond figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His primary focus in New York was supposed to be a consolidation of his academic reputation, lecturing at the prestigious Union Theological Seminary, where the East Coast’s white, liberal, Protestant establishment taught polite platitudes to its potential pastors. It did not take long for Bonhoeffer to express frustration at his surroundings. ‘In New York,’ he wrote, ‘they preach about everything; the only thing they do not mention is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.’ Increasingly morose and sceptical during the winter months, Bonhoeffer headed south on a road trip that December, ending up in Cuba, where he indulged his predilection for a good cigar. (It was a love he would carry with him all his life, once declaring that a particular cigar – a gift from the theologian Karl Barth – was so good that it made him question ‘the probabilities of reality’.) His route took him through the Southern states of the USA at the very height of the Jim Crow laws. What he saw shocked him deeply. He wrote letters home decrying the treatment of black people as ‘shameful’ and ‘repugnant’. The trip prompted a development in his interest in black theology as, he said, it was from a black preacher alone that he had heard the ‘genuine proclamation of the gospel in America’. On his return to New York, he set about deepening his relationship with another outsider in the great Protestant broiling pan that was the Union Seminary – namely one of the few black students, Albert Franklin Fisher, who, in turn, persuaded Bonhoeffer to deepen his relationship with one of New York City’s most prominent black churches.
Quite what the congregation of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, West 138th Street, Harlem, thought of the tall, dapper German who appeared in their midst one day is not recorded. It is said that, even today, eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning remains the most segregated time in the United States. Bonhoeffer threw himself into the community there, leading Sunday schools, taking part in worship and even preaching, though the congregation were more used to the exuberant hallelujahs of the great minister Adam Clayton Powell than the notoriously analytical and close textual style of the bespectacled German.
Bonhoeffer had been changed, even if his preaching style remained somewhat more rigid than that of his black counterparts. In his own words, Christianity had moved from ‘phraseology to reality’. When his Easter break came, Bonhoeffer planned another road trip, setting out with a Frenchman named Jean Lasserre (who would spend the Second World War hiding a British wireless transmitter in his bedroom, in the style of René from ’Allo ’Allo, and who later became a sort of travel agent for international pro-peace speakers). The two Europeans travelled the length and breadth of America, even making a foray into Mexico. Where possible, Bonhoeffer insisted that they stop and worship in black churches, deepening his conviction that a lived-out, active faith was needed to replace the dry academia he had known in Germany.
Yet it was back to Germany that Bonhoeffer was called, and so, in 1931, he was finally made a minister in the Church of the Evangelical Union. Now a pastor in Berlin, he insisted on taking a class of the naughtiest boys – against the advice of the elderly volunteer who had the pleasure of teaching them at the time. The classroom was at the top of the building and, as the Prussian pensioner led the single-minded young minister up the stairs, they were met by a hail of books, pencils and board erasers from the assembled catechumens above. Reaching the relative safety of the mezzanine floor, the elder man made his apologies and darted back down to safety. Bonhoeffer, however, continued up the stairs. Once there, he told the gathered prepubescent malcontents that he wished simply to tell them a story. If they behaved, he would tell them more the following week; if not, he wouldn’t. It doesn’t technically qualify as a miracle, but the following week when he arrived, he was met not with a hail of books but a quiet, rapt audience waiting for the second instalment of the Gospel narrative. The analytic, Teutonic caterpillar of old had become a passionate, spellbinding butterfly.
Soon, however, Bonhoeffer was to come across challenges much greater than recalcitrant schoolboys. On 30th January 1933, Adolf Hitler finally became Chancellor of Germany after a period of intense political wrangling. Just two days later, Bonhoeffer took to the airwaves, warning in a radio broadcast that the man his party called Führer was, in fact, a Verführer, a seducer, sent to lead the German people astray. Bonhoeffer’s astonishing diatribe was taken off the air while he was still mid-flow.
Aware of the potential power of the state Protestant Churches, Hitler called and subsequently rigged elections to key Church positions in July of that year. Bonhoeffer rallied behind pastor Martin Niemöller who opposed the so-called Deutsche Christen faction, which sought to include statements about the superiority of the Aryan race in the Creed and remove the Old Testament from the Bible altogether. The campaign against the Nazification of the Lutheran Church was a failure, partly, as Bonhoeffer himself saw it, because there had been too many attempts at compromise to win over those who saw Hitler as a bulwark against Communism. Niemöller later reflected on the capitulation of the German intellectual and religious establishments in the face of Nazism with the following poem, written after his release from Dachau concentration camp in 1945:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer became determined that he would speak out – even if his own Church body would not. He, Niemöller and others formed the Confessing Church, splitting from the now Nazi-controlled Evangelical Church with the stated aim of opposing the government. Unable to take any official post under the new regime, Bonhoeffer was on the move again and, in late 1933, accepted a post to minister to a small German congregation in the glamorous surroundings of Sydenham, south London. He faced enormous criticism from his colleagues, including Karl Barth, for ‘abandoning the house of the Church while it is on fire’. The insult stung and Bonhoeffer’s time in London was comparatively brief. It was not, however, without its benefits: his new contacts would prove crucial when he became a spy.
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It was a cold Pomeranian evening and, in the hall of an ancient Prussian estate about seventy miles from Gdansk, a group of pale would-be pastors was gathered around the piano, singing the African American spiritual ‘Go down Moses’ with a lustiness that only several large lagers can bring. Their circumstances were even more astonishing than their choice of music – they were in Pomerania as part of a ‘seminary on the run’ training for ministry despite the explicit order of Himmler against the enterprise. Bonhoeffer was seated at the piano, playing the spiritual with a dramatic, even melodramatic, flair that would not have been out of place in the praise bands of New Orleans. Bonhoeffer had returned to Germany in 1935 (despite being sorely tempted by an offer from Gandhi to study under him in India) and had begun an underground theological college to train up ministers who could resist the Nazification of Christianity in Germany. Barth had been forced into exile in neutral Switzerland in 1935 and Niemöller was under the constant watch of the Gestapo, culminating in his incarceration in Sachsenhausen in 1938, leaving Bonhoeffer, at the age of just thirty, de facto head of the largest Christian body dedicated to resistance in Nazi Germany. The training of ministers for the Confessing Church had been illegal since the summer of 1937, and Bonhoeffer’s own teaching licence had been indefinitely suspended since August 1936, and so, behind the masks of smoke, drink and song, there was a genuine fear, a risk of betrayal and arrest, and of ending up in one of the concentration camps whispered about behind closed doors. Yet by the winter of 1938/9, Bonhoeffer was moving towards a more explicit position in his desire to oppose the Nazis, one that pushed him to engage in activities much more dangerous than even the underground seminary, one that was ultimately to cost him his life.
In early 1938, he got in touch with contacts from his days in Berlin high society at the Military Intelligence Bureau, known as the Abwehr. The Abwehr had become the centre of anti-Nazi activity within the German military establishment. Staff there passed information to the British and others and helped Jews and those threatened by Nazi policies to escape to safety. Through his Abwehr contacts, Bonhoeffer became aware of the Nazi plan to unleash ‘total war’ upon Europe. He soon realised that, despite the fact he was now banned from any public position or even from entering the German capital, his call-up papers would be processed with particular care and attention by the Gestapo. Utterly unable to swear an oath to Hitler, he returned to America. And there he might have stayed, but, aware of the theology of action he had developed, his own conscience began to niggle at him. A couple of months after his arrival, war was declared in Europe and Bonhoeffer made the fateful decision to get back on the last scheduled steamer to Germany. On arrival, he joined the Abwehr, ostensibly so that they could use his wide international contacts in the war effort. In fact, the bespectacled clergyman had swapped theology for espionage and was now a double agent, actively seeking to bring down the Nazi regime from the inside.
Already used to smuggling seminarians across the forests of East Prussia, Bonhoeffer now put the contacts made abroad to good use and helped smuggle a number of people out of the country. This mostly consisted of arranging the contacts to help Jews escape across the mountains into neutral Switzerland, but also included arranging the flight of his twin sister Sabine and her Jewish husband, whom he managed to get to London, despite the perils of war and blockade, in 1940. His time in England had earned him the friendship of the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, whom Bonhoeffer used as a conduit to try and pass Abwehr information to the British government. His intricate knowledge of the forests and boltholes of the East Prussian wilderness from his days running the seminary enabled him to arrange the delivery of supplies as well as potential escape routes for resistance movements seeking to sabotage Nazi operations there. Unlikely though the joint role of clergyman and spy might already seem to be, it is difficult to emphasise just how much Bonhoeffer would have been seen as going against the grain of what it meant to be a German Christian at the time. The Nazis and their plants in the mainstream Protestant churches were using the theology of turning the other cheek, of submission and sacrificial obedience to cajole the vast majority of German Christians into either active or tacit support of the government. Bonhoeffer, by contrast, viewed the constant frustration of the Nazis as a mission from God: ‘The defeat of our nation,’ he wrote, ‘is necessary for Christian civilisation to survive.’
Bonhoeffer’s role in smuggling Jews to Switzerland could not last long. The Gestapo was already incredibly suspicious of the Abwehr’s claims that this man who had denounced Nazism from the very beginning could be of any use to the war effort. Indeed, his Gestapo file read that he was ‘totally in opposition’ to the regime. Initially, Himmler’s secret police decided to investigate his frequent trips to the Swiss border in terms of fraud – the idea of a corrupt cleric making money from people smuggling would have made a great propaganda victory. Consequently, Bonhoeffer was arrested in April 1943, just a few months after he had become engaged to his long-term friend and associate Ruth von Kleist-Retzow. He was kept in the infamous Tegel prison, where his fiancée managed to smuggle him food and letters, enabling him to keep up his contacts and, as if things had gone full circle, return to some theological writing in his correspondence. The great theological work of Bonhoeffer’s, still in print and read across the world today, had already been written in 1937. Entitled The Cost of Discipleship, after just over a year in prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was about to discover exactly how costly his discipleship was.
On 20th July 1944, a suitcase was smuggled into the operations room of Hitler’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’ headquarters in East Prussia. It was a warm day and so the Führer ordered that his situation conference about the progress of the war (now being fought on two protracted fronts) should take place with his military staff in the main room of the complex, as opposed to his reinforced bunker. The handsome aristocrat Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was the only man in the room who knew exactly what was in the suitcase, namely a bomb, designed to kill Hitler and precipitate a mass mutiny of the German army leading to a coup d’état, known as Operation Valkyrie. At 12.40, von Stauffenberg left to take a telephone call. Two minutes later, the bomb exploded, killing four people. Unfortunately for the conspirators – and for Dietrich Bonhoeffer – Adolf Hitler was not among them. Hitler lost hearing in one ear and his trousers, which were blown to shreds by the blast, but not his life.
His revenge was brutal. The plot had been hatched and executed with the full support of the Abwehr, the culmination of the efforts of a circle of resistance agents in the organisation, including Dietrich, his brother and his brother-in-law. The conspirators weren’t stupid, and the extent of the plot took some time to unfold. However, by September 1944, the Gestapo had finally found documents incriminating Dietrich, and, after continued harsh treatment in Tegel, in February 1945 they moved him to concentration camps (first Buchenwald and finally Flossenbürg) to await his fate. It is testament to Abwehr ingenuity that it was only in early April 1945 (not even a month before Hitler’s own demise) that the full extent of the plot became known. In the frenzy of the collapsing Nazi state, the home of the Abwehr’s ultimate head, Admiral Canaris, was ransacked, his diaries found and the scale of the organisation’s (and Bonhoeffer’s) efforts against the Nazis was revealed. Hitler flew into a rage and, with the Allies closing in on Berlin, ordered one last liquidation of prisoners.
On Sunday 8th April 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had just said a service for his fellow prisoners, as had been his custom during his whole time in the concentration camp. As he finished his prayers, a group of soldiers arrived to drag him away to a hastily convened show trial masquerading as a court martial. Bonhoeffer calmly turned to a British prisoner who had been worshipping with him and asked him to pass a simple message on to his old friend Bishop Bell of Chichester: ‘For me this is the beginning of life.’ He said not a single word in his defence when he was dragged before the SS judge but quietly accepted his fate. The following morning, he was led out to a hastily constructed gallows and stripped. Before being executed, he knelt quietly to pray and commended his soul to God. Then they hanged him with piano wire. The prison camp doctor, watching the events from behind a shed on the other side of the yard, said he had, in nearly a half century as a doctor, ‘never seen anyone die so submissive to the will of God’. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hard as nails.