Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

The conspiracy against Hitler had finally reached the point where they were ready to make an attempt on Hitler’s life. The first plot involved sneaking a bomb onto Hitler’s plane. This was accomplished, with almost everything going according to plan, except that the bomb mysteriously failed to detonate. The next attempt was to have one of the conspirators volunteer to wear an overcoat stuffed with bombs at an event where he would be close to Hitler, but the Führer did not stay as long at the event as anticipated, and the chemicals in the bombs did not have sufficient time to work through the seal and explode.

The conspirators among the Bonhoeffer clan were all together, nervously awaiting news of the assassination attempt while they prepared for a celebration of Karl Bonhoeffer’s 75th birthday. Their hopes were dashed by the news of the second failure. The birthday celebration would be the last time the Bonhoeffers were all together, as the Gestapo was beginning to close in on the circle of conspirators.

In early April 1943, the Gestapo arrested both Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer, which began the period of incarceration that took Bonhoeffer all the way to his execution. He was taken first to Tegel Prison and put in Cell 92, which would be his home for the majority of the period to follow.

This lengthy chapter chronicles Bonhoeffer's 18 months of imprisonment. His treatment in the prison, at first suffering abuse, moderated somewhat as the prison officers came to respect him. During this period, he wrote many letters to his parents and Eberhard Bethge, as well as romantic notes to Maria. He knew all of his letters would be looked over by prison officials or intelligence officers, so careful codes were used, often by way of marked books that were sent back and forth in packages.

During his imprisonment, Bonhoeffer continued his theological reflections and writings, especially in his correspondence with Bethge (many of these letters would later be published as Letters and Papers from Prison). From these thoughts emerged his controversial concept of “religionless Christianity.” This idea posited that religion often distorts Christianity, with Bonhoeffer suggesting that true faith involves wholly dedicating oneself to discerning and acting upon God's will. Metaxas leans on Bethge’s own reflections to argue that liberal theologians, who have regarded the idea as proof of Bonhoeffer’s own liberal theological leanings, have in fact misinterpreted the notion by interpreting the term “religion” far more broadly than Bonhoeffer intended.

Meanwhile, in the ongoing conspiracy to eliminate Hitler, the leaders of the first attempts were slowly being identified and cleared away by the Gestapo. This made their involvement in subsequent attempts almost impossible, but it also cleared the way for a new group of conspirators to emerge, centered around Claus von Stauffenberg.

Claus von Stauffenberg, a member of the Nazi leadership who had long been disillusioned with the regime, made a desperate last effort to assassinate Hitler as Germany faced inevitable defeat. He planted a bomb under a table in direct proximity to where Hitler was standing, and although this time the bomb actually went off and devastated the room, Hitler himself emerged almost entirely unscathed.

This assassination attempt brought a renewed crackdown on conspiracies. The Gestapo’s fervent efforts to root out all possible conspirators led them back to Dohnanyi’s files, in which Bonhoeffer himself was implicated. Bonhoeffer had hoped he might be let off from the minor charge for which they had been holding him (the financial exchange with Switzerland in the earlier covert Abwehr work), but now the extent of his involvement began to come into the open.

As Germany was bombed into submission, Bonhoeffer and his fellow prisoners were moved to harsher prisons, first to a Gestapo facility, then to the Buchenwald concentration camp. An earlier escape attempt had not come to fruition, and so Bonhoeffer knew that his future lay either with Allied liberation or execution at the Nazis’ hands, but he was prepared for death as the final stage of his journey if it came to that.

Having been moved from Tegel, Bonhoeffer was no longer able to keep in contact with family and friends via letters, so the only sources about this period in his life come from reflections later written down by fellow prisoners, such as the British officer Captain S. Payne Best. Best described Bonhoeffer as consistently cheerful and deeply connected to God, more so than anyone else he had ever known.

The little group of prisoners who were incarcerated together were a broad mix of personalities, including intellectuals, officers of the military and the civil service, prisoners of war, and even disgraced former Nazis, like the man who had helped invent the mass murder systems in the gas chambers. After seven weeks in a Buchenwald cellar, the prisoners were loaded into a van to be taken somewhere else, but no one knew where.

Bonhoeffer, Best, and their fellow prisoners were at the mercy of the van drivers, who did not always seem to know what they were doing or where they were supposed to go. The prisoners initially thought the van was designed to gas them to death, as it was full of smoke and fumes, but this turned out merely to be the mechanism of the van’s engine.

They were first taken to Flossenburg, another concentration camp, but were turned away due to overcrowding. Eventually, they were moved to another facility where they were reunited with other prisoners. The morning after their arrival, Bonhoeffer—ever seeking to be a pastor to those around him—led a prayer service. Then Nazi officers arrived to take him back to Flossenburg, where he and several conspirators were tried and sentenced to death. He approached his sentence with courage and grace. According to Best’s account, “[Bonhoeffer] drew me aside—‘This is the end,’ he said. ‘For me the beginning of life’” (528).

Two weeks after his execution, Flossenburg was liberated by the Allied advance, and the world received news of Bonhoeffer’s passing. His family grieved, but were proud in their grief. Bonhoeffer’s friend, Bishop George Bell, organized a memorial service for him at Holy Trinity Brompton church in London, at which both Bell and Hildebrandt spoke.