He was also allowed to receive books: books with infinitesimally small pencil marks under a letter every ten pages or so. It was a code—prearranged before the arrest—that allowed Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi to keep their stories straight when they were being interrogated by their jailers.
Bonhoeffer’s mother also sent her son homemade jam in a jar with a secret double lid. He and Dohnanyi communicated by hiding letters—in tiny script—in between the two thin pieces of cardboard in the lid.
EVENTS OF 1943–44
•July 1943—Allied troops land in Sicily.
•September 1943—Allied troops land in Naples.
•December 1943—Soviet troops defeat German troops in Kiev.
•June 1944—Allied troops land in Normandy, open a second front against Germany.
•August 1944—Paris is liberated; Allied troops arrive at German border.
The Nazis, however, were completely unaware of Bonhoeffer’s involvement in the assassination conspiracy. He had been jailed for sending money out of the country as part of Operation 7. The Nazis, it seemed, couldn’t imagine that the pastor on staff with the Abwehr would be disloyal. They couldn’t imagine that members of the German intelligence agency were helping Jews escape. They thought the transfer of German currency to Switzerland was some kind of money-laundering scheme—a greedy act, perhaps, but not a treasonous one.
Dohnanyi was interrogated relentlessly—about the monetary discrepancies, about Bonhoeffer’s travels—but as soon as he realized the Nazis were unaware of his involvement in the assassination attempts, he was able to breathe a little more easily. He sent Bonhoeffer coded messages inside a book, telling him the good news. And so Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer and the others continued their planning for the next assassination attempt—right under the noses of the Nazis.
Meanwhile, Hitler’s army was on the run in Russia. And Allied planes buzzed over Berlin night and day, dropping deadly bombs nearby. The prison windows shattered and the ground quaked. As they knelt amid broken glass, waiting to die, Bonhoeffer ministered to his fellow prisoners—and guards. During quiet spells, he continued working on his book or writing to Maria. He would be in prison for almost two years.
Bonhoeffer was interrogated, but his star status as the warden’s nephew meant that he was never tortured or subjected to the brutal questioning that Dohnanyi endured. When the Gestapo questioned him, he pretended to be a simple pastor, unfamiliar with the workings of the Abwehr. But he never gave up his belief that all his actions in the resistance were morally justified. “The thing for which I should be condemned is so irreproachable that I may only be proud of it,”4 he wrote.
No matter how uncomfortable the conditions, Bonhoeffer had his own way of escaping: He would lie on his plank bed and dream of lying under the rose arbor at his childhood home. “In my imagination,” he said, “I lie on my back in the grass, watch the clouds sailing in the breeze across the blue sky, and listen to the rustle of the leaves.”5
One day, Bonhoeffer’s uncle showed up at his cell with several bottles of champagne. The celebration could only mean one thing: The war would soon be over. Bonhoeffer was so certain that he’d be released at any minute that he wrote to Maria to tell her to go ahead with their wedding planning. “Our marriage,” he wrote to his fiancée, “must be a ‘yes’ to God’s earth.”6
THIRTY
ANOTHER ATTEMPT ON HITLER’S LIFE
1944
On July 20, 1944, two officers pulled up at the security checkpoint for a meeting at Hitler’s bunker at the Wolf’s Lair, his heavily guarded compound near Russia on the eastern front of the war. One of them, a young lieutenant colonel named Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, held a briefcase by his side. The other was his aide, Werner von Haeften, the young man who’d asked Bonhoeffer, “Shall I shoot?”
Stauffenberg entered the map room with his briefcase. Inside it was a bomb. Just before Hitler was due to arrive, he slipped into a private room. He pulled out a pair of special pliers, adapted so that Stauffenberg, who had lost his right hand in combat, could arm the bomb. A guard knocked on the door, telling him to hurry, the meeting was starting any minute. Stauffenberg returned to the conference room and put the briefcase under the map table—just six feet from Hitler’s leg.
With just three minutes before the bomb would go off, Stauffenberg excused himself. He walked out of the building, toward his waiting car, fighting the urge to break into a run. He and Haeften bluffed their way past the checkpoint and drove away. Moments later, the bunker erupted in flames.
When the smoke cleared, the heavy oak map table was in splinters and several people were dead. But Hitler was alive. His hair stood on end and his pants were in tatters. But he was giddy with relief. He went on the radio almost immediately to let the German people know that their leader was fine. “I see this as another sign from Providence that I must and therefore shall continue my work,”1 he said.
Stauffenberg and Haeften were caught and executed by firing squad a little after midnight the next day.
Bonhoeffer was in the sick bay ministering to a fellow prisoner when he heard the Führer’s triumphant voice on the radio. He was crestfallen. Then he got word that the Gestapo had gone on a massive raid, rounding up anyone they thought was connected to the conspiracy. They found letters, diaries, and documents that led to even more arrests. But Dohnanyi’s Chronicle of Shame, safely stored in a crate in a suburb of Berlin, was untouched.
Then they got word that Admiral Canaris, a key member of the conspiracy, had been arrested.
THIRTY-ONE
EVIDENCE OF TREASON
1944
By now, some of the conspirators had moved Dohnanyi’s secret files to another hiding place, in a cellar at a hunting lodge in the country. But a few items were left behind at the military base outside Berlin, and someone tipped off the Nazis that there was information there that they might find interesting.
On September 20, a search party found the rest of Dohnanyi’s Chronicle of Shame. Inside the crate were documents that tied him directly to the July 20 bombing. And inside one file were three handwritten notes from Bonhoeffer, notes that implicated him as an Abwehr spy.
Hans von Dohnanyi wrote a coded letter to his wife, Christel: “I don’t know who the traitor is. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me, but they have everything.”1 Soon, he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Bonhoeffer knew it was only a matter of time before he would be tied to the conspirators. He wrote to his old friend Eberhard Bethge that day, including a poem that said, “Death / Come now, thou greatest of feasts on the journey to freedom eternal.”2 The eternity he’d been imagining since those long ago nights in his childhood bedroom seemed to be at hand.
Maria came to see him the day after Dohnanyi was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. She had begun to suffer headaches, insomnia, and fainting spells, but on that day, Bonhoeffer would write, she was “steadfast . . . in a way I’ve rarely seen.”3 It was the last time they would ever see each other.
Now the days became grim. The Gestapo threatened to go after his parents—or even Maria—if he didn’t divulge what he knew about the conspiracy. And Bonhoeffer, despite his faith, suffered doubts about his ability to sustain much more. He even considered suicide, “not from a sense of guilt,” he wrote, “but because I am basically already dead.”4
But one of the guards who had grown fond of Bonhoeffer had a plan. A guard named Knoblauch had gotten a mechanic’s uniform in Bonhoeffer’s size and sneaked it into the prison. He had also hidden food coupons and money in a garden shed near the prison. When the time was right, he told Bonhoeffer, all he had to do was slip on the uniform and simply walk out with Knoblauch at the end of his shift. After his escape, he could go to the garden shed and get the supplies he needed to flee the country.
Then Bonhoeffer got word that the Gestapo had arrested his brother Klaus. Soon, his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher would be taken. Now, the four men—two
brothers and two brothers-in-law—who had been gathered around the piano at the Bonhoeffer home were all imprisoned.
A few days after Klaus’s arrest, Colonel Knoblauch knocked on the door to the Bonhoeffer home. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had decided not to escape, he told them; it would only make things worse for everyone, especially Klaus and Rudy.
On October 8, 1944, Bonhoeffer was led from his prison cell to a courtyard outside. It was the first time he’d seen the sunlight in eighteen months. He was taken to an underground Gestapo prison in Berlin. Before he got into the van that would take him away, his brother Walter’s Bible, the one he had carried with him everywhere since he was fifteen, was taken from his hands.
It was not until their parcels and letters were sent back to them that Bonhoeffer’s family and fiancée realized he was no longer at Tegel prison.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the yard of Tegel prison in Berlin, July 1944
THIRTY-TWO
THE END OF THE WAR
1945
On February 3, 1945, the skies over Berlin darkened as nearly one thousand Allied Flying Fortress bombers roared overhead, dropping three thousand tons of bombs.
Some of the bombs hit the Gestapo prison where Bonhoeffer was being held. And some landed on the court where, just the day before, Klaus Bonhoeffer and Rüdiger Schleicher had been sentenced to death.
The war was coming to an end, and it would only be a matter of time until Germany was defeated. Bonhoeffer prayed for the strength to hang on. Then, without warning, he was transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Huddled in the cold with his fellow prisoners at Buchenwald, Bonhoeffer urged them to keep faith. At any moment, they might be liberated. Or they might find a way to escape.
What he didn’t say was that at any minute they might also be killed. Even as the Allies inched closer, the killings at Buchenwald continued. On April 1, Easter Sunday, the Allies got so close, the guards told the prisoners to get ready to leave.
Days passed. Then, with no explanation, Bonhoeffer was hauled out of his barracks and put in a van crowded full of prisoners. As he and the other inmates traveled through the Bavarian hillsides, Bonhoeffer shared his last small stash of tobacco. After traveling for hours, the van stopped and the doors opened.
Somehow, in the midst of war, spring had arrived. The prisoners, a dozen or so men and two women, climbed out of the van into an impossibly beautiful April day. They were standing in front of a picture-book farmhouse, where the farmer’s wife brought them fresh rye bread and a jug of milk. After this small picnic, they climbed back in the van and continued on their way to a small town called Schönberg, where they would be temporarily held in a schoolhouse.
On Sunday, April 8, 1945, some of the prisoners asked Bonhoeffer to conduct a prayer service. In the whitewashed classroom where they were being held, he prayed and read to the prisoners as if he were teaching Sunday school back in Harlem—with a clear, patient, and comforting tone. Just as he finished the closing prayer, the door opened, and two men took him away. He would be dead the next day.
THIRTY-THREE
ETERNITY AT LAST
APRIL 1945
The stench of death filled the air even before the van reached Flossenbürg concentration camp. Initially a work camp where inmates quarried gravel for Hitler’s building projects, such as the Autobahn, Flossenbürg now housed all kinds of “social aliens,”1 such as gypsies, gays, vagabonds, dissidents, and Jews. It was surrounded by a tall wall with an electrified fence and six granite watchtowers; the SS flag, with its skull and crossbones insignia, flew overhead. A plaque greeted the new arrivals: “There is a path to freedom and its milestones are obedience, hard work, honesty, order, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness, a spirit of self-sacrifice and love of the Fatherland.”2
The camp was rife with disease and overcrowded beyond imagining. Barracks designed to hold 250 people now held a thousand, with inmates sleeping four to a bunk. The crematorium, where inmates were taken after they’d been worked or starved to death, had been operating so incessantly, it had temporarily broken down.
When Bonhoeffer arrived at Flossenbürg he was taken to a special barracks for political prisoners. A low, white building, it was divided into open stalls, where Bonhoeffer was held along with other inmates, including two other members of the conspiracy, Admiral Canaris and General Oster.
Bonhoeffer was only at Flossenbürg one day. The next morning, April 9, he, Canaris, Oster, and three other men were forced to undress and led to a gallows in a small courtyard right in front of their barracks. Before he was hanged, Bonhoeffer knelt and prayed. A doctor who observed the execution said, “I have never seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”3 As the noose was put around his neck, he whispered a prayer, completely calm and ready, at last, to meet eternity.
A little while later, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, the man who’d put the bomb on Hitler’s plane, watched from a window in his cell as Bonhoeffer’s body was carried away. His corpse was thrown on a giant bonfire and burned in the open.
Two weeks later, on April 23, the Allies marched into Flossenbürg. The camp was nearly deserted. Most of the SS officers had fled before their arrival, but the Allied soldiers found 1,600 desperately ill prisoners—and a stack of charred bones and decomposing bodies. They buried the remains in a mass grave at a cemetery in Flossenbürg and forced the local citizens to attend the ceremony.
There is no way to know if Bonhoeffer’s body was cremated in the bonfire or if his remains are in that mass grave. There is no headstone to mark the grave of the boy who dreamed of eternity.
Flossenbürg concentration camp, ruins of the execution yard where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9, 1945
EPILOGUE
Hans von Dohnanyi was killed on April 8, 1945, on direct orders from Hitler.
Klaus Bonhoeffer and Rüdiger Schleicher were killed by a firing squad on April 23, the same day the Allies liberated Flossenbürg.
On April 30, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, taking a cyanide capsule, then shooting himself in the head.
The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.
Maria von Wedemeyer, Bonhoeffer’s fiancée, traveled for two days, then walked seven kilometers to the camp at Flossenbürg, desperately seeking news about him. She was turned away with no information.
Back in Berlin, Bonhoeffer’s parents got word about the deaths of Dohnanyi, Schleicher, and their son Klaus. But they knew nothing about Dietrich. Months passed. Someone even claimed to have seen him alive. On July 27, they turned on the radio to hear the voice of Archbishop George Bell, Bonhoeffer’s secret contact in London, giving a eulogy for a young pastor he’d met years earlier “as an emissary of the Resistance to Hitler.”1 This was how Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s parents learned that their son was dead.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All of us see injustice. In our schools, in our country, in the world. But very few of us speak out—especially if we ourselves aren’t directly affected. And even fewer of us put our own lives at risk on behalf of others.
When I heard about a young minister involved in the conspiracy to kill Hitler, I could hardly believe it. What would make a quiet, scholarly pastor commit treason? What would make a pacifist sign on to an assassination plot? How could a man of faith justify murder?
Hans von Dohnanyi, the man who brought Bonhoeffer into the conspiracy, put it quite simply when he said that the members of the resistance were “on the path that a decent person inevitably takes.”1
We all like to think that we would follow that path if we were confronted with injustice. But so few do. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had every opportunity to avoid it. Yet he committed himself, heart and soul, to a journey that would lead him to break the law and trespass against the commandments. Why? Because, as he put it, to do nothing “in the face of evil is evil itself.”
Does the fact that he didn’t succeed in his aims make him any less of a hero? Or does the fact that he died for his beliefs tell us something important a
bout the nature of heroism?
There are no easy answers to these questions, but it is interesting to know that Bonhoeffer himself wrestled with them.
After his death, the secret writings that he had hidden in his parents’ attic would be unearthed, and his prison writings would be published. Those words are just as relevant today, as they ask who among us will speak out. They are words that have inspired many acts of civil disobedience in the years since they were written.
His writings were translated into English and passed around jail cells in the South during the civil rights movement and read to discouraged protestors. Martin Luther King, Jr., seemed to echo Bonhoeffer’s words when he said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps perpetuate it.”2 Bonhoeffer’s famous speech calling on people of good will to “jam a stick in the wheels of government”3 was quoted by student demonstrators in the United States in the 1960s. And they were invoked by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. All around the world, they have inspired those who risk their personal freedom to stand up for justice.
The letter Bonhoeffer hid in the attic the day the Nazis came to arrest him seems to ask a question of all of us even today:
We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?4