Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyr

Dietrich Bonhoeffer died on this date in 1945.  He was a member and pastor in the Confessing Church of Germany.  His father was a noted professor of psychiatry and his mother was a teacher.  Bonhoeffer had seven brothers and sisters, one of the sisters being his twin.  He studied theology at Berlin University under Adolf von Harnack.  While at the university he read the works of Karl Barth extensively.  He wrote dissertations that so impressed the faculty that he became a lecturer in theology at age 24.  He was visiting professor at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, where he came under the influence of proponents of the “social gospel.”    He returned to Germany and experienced what he termed a “great liberation.”  From that point prayer and Bible study, which had been academic pursuits, became a way of life for Bonhoeffer.  He wrote The Cost of Discipleship, arguably his most important straight theological work, during this period.

He helped organize Christian resistance to Nazism in the time leading up to the Second World War.  He returned to New York in 1938 but became convinced that he could not minister to the German people after the war if he withdrew from them while the fighting occurred.  Against the pleading of his American friends he returned to his own country. He founded The Confessing Church and an underground seminary in Finkenwalde when the German government was taking over churches.  He wrote Life Together for his seminary students.  He grappled deeply with his personal theology and conscience before joining in an attempt to assassinate Adolph Hitler.  When the attempt failed, he was imprisoned.  He spent time at Tegal, Buchenwald and Flossenburg.  He had become engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer, but the arrest took place before they married.

He composed what is perhaps his best-known work, Letters and Papers from Prison, while in the concentration camps. As pastor to all who wished it in the camps – the incarcerated and guards alike – friendly sentries often smuggled his papers out of the prisons.

Records show that "Bonhoeffer was condemned to death on 8 April 1945 by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a drumhead court-martial without witnesses, records of proceedings or a defense in Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was executed there by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, just two weeks before soldiers from the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the camp, three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany."