Within months of his arrival, he wrote theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, "I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period in our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.
Bonhoeffer, though privy to various plots on Hitler's life, was never at the center of the plans. Eventually his resistance efforts mainly his role in rescuing Jews was discovered. On an April afternoon in , two men arrived in a black Mercedes, put Bonhoeffer in the car, and drove him to Tegel prison. Bonhoeffer spent two years in prison, corresponding with family and friends, pastoring fellow prisoners, and reflecting on the meaning of "Jesus Christ for today.
In another passage, he said, "To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself a sinner, a penitent, or a saint on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man—not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us. It is not the religious act that makes the Christian, but participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life. On April 9, , one month before Germany surrendered, he was hanged with six other resisters.
A decade later, a camp doctor who witnessed Bonhoeffer's hanging described the scene: "The prisoners … were taken from their cells, and the verdicts of court martial read out to them. Through the half-open door in one room of the huts, I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer.
At the place of execution, he again said a prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued in a few seconds. In the almost 50 years that I have worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.
Bonhoeffer's prison correspondence was eventually edited and published as Letters and Papers from Prison , which inspired much controversy and the "death of God" movement of the s though Bonhoeffer's close friend and chief biographer, Eberhard Bethge, said Bonhoeffer implied no such thing.
His Cost of Discipleship , as well as Life Together about Christian community, based on his teaching at the underground seminary , have remained devotional classics. In October , Dohnanyi used his connections to help Bonhoeffer avoid military service, obtaining an assignment for him in the office of Military Intelligence.
Led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the Military Intelligence office became the center of the German military resistance groups that eventually culminated in the July 20, , attempt to overthrow the regime. On behalf of the Military Intelligence office Bonhoeffer made several trips outside the Reich between and , informing ecumenical contacts in Geneva and the Vatican of the resistance plans.
The first deportations of Berlin Jews to the east occurred on October 15, A few days later, Bonhoeffer and Friedrich Perels, a Confessing Church lawyer, wrote a memo giving details of the deportations.
The memo was sent to foreign contacts as well as trusted German military officials, in the hope that it might move them to action.
Bonhoeffer was initially charged with conspiring to rescue Jews, using his foreign travels for non-intelligence matters, and misusing his intelligence position to help Confessing Church pastors evade military service. After the failed July 20, , coup attempt, his connections to the broader resistance circles were uncovered and he was moved to the Gestapo prison in Berlin. On April 9, , he was hanged with other conspirators. We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia.
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Wise — International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. About This Site. Glossary : Full Glossary. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian known for his opposition to National Socialism. Key Facts. The same is true for past motives. One motive or mental attitude surely lies behind another. What makes one mental state and not an earlier state the ultimate ethical phenomenon is something other than the fact that it is a mental state. Since neither motives nor consequences have a fixed stopping point, both are doomed to failure as moral criteria.
Without a reason for the relevance of specific motives or consequences, all moral judgments become hopelessly tentative and eternally incomplete. What is more, general principles have a tendency to reduce all behavior to ethical behavior. To act only for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or to act only so that the maxim of an action can become a principle of legislation, become as relevant to haircuts as they do to manslaughter.
All behavior becomes moral behavior, which drains all spontaneity and joy from life, since the smallest misstep now links your behavior with the worst crimes of your race, gender, or culture. Ethics cannot be reduced to a search for general principles without reducing all of the problems of life to a bleak, pedantic, and monotonous uniformity. Reliance on theory, in other words, is destructive to ethics, because it interferes with our ability to deal effectively with evil.
Bonhoeffer asks us to consider six strategies, six postures people often strike or adopt when attempting to deal with real ethical situations involving evil and vicious people. Any of these postures or orientations could employ principles, laws, or duties from ethical theory.
But, in the end, it makes little difference what principles they invoke. The ethical postures themselves are what make responsible action impossible. A resort to the dictates of reason, for example, demands that we be fair to all the details, facts, and people involved in any concrete moral situation Ethics , p.
The reasonable person acts like a court of law, trying to be just to both sides of any dispute. In doing so, he or she ignores all questions of character, since all people are equal before the law, and it makes no difference who does what to whom.
Thus, whenever it is in the interest of an evil person to tell the truth, the person of reason must reward him for doing so. The person of reason is helpless to do otherwise, and in the end is rejected by all, the good and the evil, and achieves nothing. Likewise, Bonhoeffer argues, the enthusiasm of the moral fanatic or dogmatist is also ineffective for a similar reason.
The fanatic believes that he or she can oppose the power of evil by a purity of will and a devotion to principles that forbid certain actions. Again, the concern is exclusively on action, and judgments of character are seen as secondary and derivative. But the richness and variety of actual, concrete situations generates questions upon questions for the application of any principle.
Sooner or later, Bonhoeffer notes, the fanatic becomes entangled in non-essentials and petty details, and becomes prone to simple manipulation in the hands of evil Ethics , p.
The man or woman of conscience presents an even stranger case. When faced with an inescapable ethical situation that demands action, the person of conscience experiences great turmoil and uncertainty. What the person of conscience is really seeking is peace of mind, or a return to the way things were, before everything erupted into moral chaos.
Resolving the tensions is as important as doing the right thing. In fact, doing the right thing should resolve the conflicts and tensions or it is not the right thing. Consequently, people of conscience become prey to quick solutions, to actions of convenience, and to deception, because feeling good about themselves and their world is what matters ultimately.
An emphasis on freedom and private virtuousness are even less capable of dealing effectively with evil.
No, freedom here means the freedom to make exceptions to general rules or principles. The free person is the person who has the where-with-all to ignore conscience, reputation, facts, and anything else in order to make the best arrangement possible under the circumstances. This is the freedom to act in any way necessary, even to do what is wrong, in order to avoid what is worse, e. On the other hand, the escape to a domain of private virtue is, perhaps, of all temptations the most dangerous to the Christian.
This is a pulling back from the petty and vulgar affairs of the world in order to avoid being contaminated by evil. This monastic urge is rejected by Bonhoeffer, because for him there is no such thing as escaping your responsibility to act. When faced with evil, there is no middle path. You either oppose the persecution of the innocent or you share in it.
No one can preserve his or her private virtue by turning away from the world Ethics , p. If a devotion to duty does not discriminate in terms of character, it will end up serving evil. Bonhoeffer replaces philosophical ethics and its pursuit of criteria to justify action in advance with an ethics grounded in the emergence of Christ as reconciler. In any given context there is always a right thing to do.
This reality is a direct result of his Christology. The reality of the sensible world, with all its variety, multiplicity, and concreteness, has been reconciled with the spiritual reality of God.
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