Dietrich Bonhoeffer
1906 – 1945 · Germany
Known for: Lutheran theologian executed for his resistance to the Nazi regime
“This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.”
Biography
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau, the sixth of eight children in a cultivated and religiously reserved Berlin household; his father Karl was a leading psychiatrist, his mother Paula a teacher descended from theologians and painters. He played the piano well enough that a career in music seemed possible, but announced at fourteen that he would study theology, to the dismay of his older brothers. At twenty one he completed a doctorate at Berlin with a dissertation on the church as a community, Sanctorum Communio, and in 1930 he went to Union Theological Seminary in New York. There a fellow student took him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where the preaching and the congregation's experience of racial injustice changed his sense of what theology was for.
Ordained in 1931, Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazi regime from its first days. Two days after Hitler took office he gave a radio address warning that a nation which made an idol of its leader would find itself misled; the broadcast was cut off. He helped to found the Confessing Church, which refused the state's claim on Christian doctrine, and he ran its outlawed seminary at Finkenwalde until the Gestapo closed it in 1937. Out of those years came Nachfolge, known in English as The Cost of Discipleship, with its attack on what he called cheap grace, and Life Together, an account of the seminary's shared life. He was forbidden to teach, then to publish, then to speak in public. In 1939 he accepted a post in the United States and turned back after a few weeks, unwilling to sit out his country's ordeal abroad.
Through his brother in law he joined the Abwehr, the military intelligence service that sheltered part of the conspiracy against Hitler, and used its foreign travel to carry word of the German resistance to contacts abroad. He was arrested in April 1943 for his part in Operation 7, an Abwehr scheme that brought a group of Jews into Switzerland as supposed agents. He was held at Tegel prison in Berlin, where he wrote the letters later published as Letters and Papers from Prison, and where he became engaged to Maria von Wedemeyer. After the July 1944 plot failed and papers were found that implicated the conspirators, he was moved through Gestapo custody to Flossenbürg concentration camp and hanged there on 9 April 1945, weeks before the end of the war. He was thirty nine.