An Honourable Defeat (8 page)

In early August, a service of intercession for Niemöller took place, and, when the police tried to stop it, a spontaneous demonstration occurred which resulted in 250 arrests. One of those taken was the pastor Franz Hildebrandt. He was now in great danger, in view of his Jewish ancestry; but by dint of the enormous exertions of a friend and colleague who had also been present with Hildebrandt at Niemöller’s arrest, he was able to secure his release and escape to England. That friend was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer and his twin sister Sabine were born in 1906. They were two of eight children in a remarkable family. The father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was chief psychiatrist at Berlin’s main hospital, the Charité. He was later involved in the 1938 plot against Hitler to the extent of preparing a paper which demonstrated that the dictator was clinically insane. The mother, Paula, was the sister of General Paul von Hase, who was closely involved in the 20 July 1944 Plot. Sabine later married Gerhard Leibholz, a Jewish lawyer, and was thus obliged to leave Germany with him, spending the war in London. An older sister, Ursula, married another lawyer, Rüdiger Schleicher, who was also involved in the Resistance and killed by the SS in April 1945. Another older sister, Christine, married Hans von Dohnanyi, an important member of the Resistance who worked for the Abwehr. Dietrich’s older brother Klaus, a senior lawyer with Lufthansa who also worked for the Resistance, married Emmi Delbrück, whose brother Justus was on Oster’s staff and equally involved in the Resistance. The Bonhoeffer children were, moreover, distant cousins of Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, another leading figure in the Resistance.

But it is Dietrich’s story which must be told here.
[27]
A tall, blond young man, whose fine hair showed early signs of thinning, his chubby face and round, gold-rimmed spectacles belied a serious, rather lonely nature and a formidable intellect. He was also an excellent pianist and guitarist. Studies at Berlin led to his first thesis — on the nature of the identity and function of the Church — following which he took the curacy of the German Lutherans in Barcelona, where he stayed for one year from February 1928. This was the first time he had spent away from his family, which had provided all the society he had needed up until then, and his strong sermons, which reflected his view of Man’s dependence on God’s grace, breathed new life into the sleepy community.

That he had a profound need to define the meaning of God led him, with the encouragement of his extraordinary grandmother (she who defied the Nazis on National Boycott Day), to look beyond the Christian Church to Buddhism and Hinduism. For five years he dreamt of travelling to India, but he never got there. (He had, however, been very impressed by Gandhi’s acolyte Mira Bai — Madeline Slade — when he met her in London in the summer of 1934, and he had exchanged letters with Gandhi himself.)

Dietrich returned to Berlin early in 1929 and resumed his stud-ies, but by the autumn he had departed for the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he was to spend the next year. At home, the Weimar Republic was tottering and shortly after his departure the number of Nazi seats in the Reichstag leapt from 12 to 107. He barely reacted to this, being too much taken up with his impressions of the New World, which were not all good. He was critical of what he perceived as American indiscipline and mental flab, but he became very interested in black American life. When a black fellow student, Frank Fisher, introduced him to it, he took an active part in the Christian life of the Harlem community.

For the first and last time in his life he travelled extensively, visiting Mexico and Cuba, and when he returned to Germany his outlook was more international than it had been. He took the job of chaplain at the Technical University, Berlin, but he was unhappy, and for once his sense of humour deserted him. The state of his homeland depressed him profoundly. Positive youth work among underprivileged working-class boys in the Communist district of Wedding during the winter of 1932-33 re-energised him, but he could not ignore political developments. At the end of January — the day after Hitler became Chancellor — he gave a radio broadcast on ‘The Concept of Leadership’. This was moderate in tone, but it was still cut off before he reached the end. Soon afterwards, the complete talk was published and Dietrich circulated it, together with an angry note, to his friends.

His father was suspicious of Hitler from the first, seeing right through to the power-hungry demagogue behind the traditionalist bluster. As a liberal with a Jewish son-in-law, he was quickly sensitive to the laws the Nazis introduced banning Jews from the Civil Service, and the more terrible ones that followed as the thirties progressed. Dietrich himself was among the first to argue that the Church should raise its voice against oppression, and he took a very public stance against State attempts to take over the Church. After the infamous Brown Synod, he was one of those who with Niemöller formed the Young Reformers in protest, from which the Confessing Church would soon stem. But for a time Dietrich would have to help in the fight from a distance. It was not an easy decision to take, but he accepted the post of pastor to a German community in Sydenham, a district in south London.

He was there from the summer of 1933 and remained throughout 1934, but there is no doubt that watching the battle from the sidelines was a painful and frustrating experience for him. Such was the telephone bill he ran up to Germany on one occasion that the British Post Office, in a kinder, pre-computerised age, took pity on him and cancelled it. He united the German clergymen of London in a repudiation of the German Christian movement, but he could not keep himself away from the centre of action, and soon returned to Germany to organise and run a seminary set up by the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde, in the depths of Pomerania, near Stettin. His optimism was high, but his confidence in the invincibility of the Confessing Church against Nazi attack was too great.

Dietrich ran Finkenwalde in a spirit of asceticism and comradeship designed to instil a sense of personal integrity and self-discipline in the seminarists. They would need it, because on qualification they would find it a cold world. As the Nazis tightened their grip on the Confessing Church, eroded its power, and enticed its weaker members away, they would find it impossible to find a normal pastoral job with a fixed salary and a home available. Finkenwalde alumni kept in touch by newsletter and managed to maintain a certain
esprit
de
corps
, but the Nazis kept up their body-blows and, under the provisions of a new Act of September 1935 ‘For the Settlement of the German Evangelical Church’, all the seminaries of the Confessing Church were declared illegal.

Hidden as they were deep in the country, the seminarists did not feel the force of this law immediately. Dietrich’s typical reaction to the fresh oppression was to organise and carry out an entirely ‘illegal’ tour of Scandinavian churches for his seminarists early in 1936, and he kept Finkenwalde going, though this was a rearguard action now and graduates would be lucky to escape arrest, let alone find a job. But Dietrich’s personality was still a lodestone, and there were still enough young men whom conscription or the Nazis had not claimed. The seminary continued its work until the end of 1937, when the authorities finally closed it.

Still undeterred, Dietrich became involved in setting up new, secret theological colleges even deeper in the Pomeranian countryside, at Koslin and Gross-Schlönwitz. But he was in an embattled position, and the seminarist who wrote to him wondering if, after all, the Confessing Church was at the end of the road, was not alone.
[28]
Berlin was far away, and Dietrich was banned from visiting it on any form of Church business, but he did go to see his family often. He found comfort also in a great friendship with his disciple and future biographer, Eberhard Bethge, and in the company of a local landowning family. At their house he made the acquaintance of a little girl called Maria von Wedemeyer. In 1942, on a return visit to Pomerania after many years of struggle, he met her again, and fell in love with the beautiful eighteen-year-old woman she had become. They got engaged, an action which showed that Dietrich had by no means given up hope of the future.

In Berlin he began to involve himself with the Resistance work which already occupied his brother Klaus and his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi. By this time it was clear that war was imminent, and that everything possible had to be done to avert it. Dietrich made the contacts now that would help him in his own contribution to the fight against Hitler after 1939, but, before that, he had one more journey to make.

He left Germany for New York again in June 1939. His decision to do so was based on a refusal to serve a criminal government in any capacity in a time of war, but he came to it only with great difficulty. His friends in America hoped that by persuading him to come over they would have saved him from Nazi imprisonment; but Dietrich had by no means decided yet to make the move a permanent one. He was leaving his family and friends behind, and he was never a man to turn his back on a fight. He had barely arrived in New York before he knew he would have to return. On 15 June he wrote in his diary:

Since yesterday evening I can hardly tear my thoughts away from Germany...I found a drive to visit a friend in the hills, in itself delightful, almost unendurable. We sat for an hour and chatted, not all that stupidly, but about matters to which I was entirely indifferent...and I thought how usefully I might have employed this hour in Germany. I should have liked best to board the next ship home
.
[29]

He caught the ship home on 7 July. He wrote: ‘Last day. Paul [Lehmann — a young theologian] tries to make me stay. No longer possible...Packing...11.30 farewell. 12.30 departure. Manhattan by night. The moon riding above the skyscrapers. It is very hot. The journey is finished.’

He was already committed to the Resistance and he knew it. On arrival, he returned to his work in Pomerania, but these were feverish years of transition, of coming to terms with what he had to do. He spent his time between conspiratorial work and absorption in theological reflection — periods of intense activity and relaxation. He became a passionate bridge player, and went to chamber music concerts when he stayed at his parents’ house — which became his permanent base — in Berlin. The Catholic diplomat and conspirator Josef Müller arranged for him to take retreat over the winter of 1940-41 to the monastery of Ettal near Munich, whose monks were involved in helping those persecuted by the regime and in disseminating ‘illegal’ political literature. At about this time he wrote his most famous theological work,
The
Ethics
, in which he strove to accommodate Christian ethics with the need to fight evil by force:

Today there are once more villains and saints, and they are not hidden from the public view. Instead of the uniform greyness of the rainy day we now have the black storm cloud and the brilliant lightning flash. The outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Reality lays itself bare. Shakespeare’s characters walk in our midst. But the villain and the saint have little or nothing to do with systematic ethical studies. They emerge from primeval depths and by their appearance they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.

The Confessing Church was dying. Its members were being called up, dispersed by the war. Dietrich applied for permission to become an Army chaplain. It was refused. He undertook his first mission for the Resistance on 24 February 1941. The course of the last four years of his life was fixed.

Hitler had to approach the Roman Catholic Church with greater caution than the nationally based Lutherans and Unionists, though when he had one of the Catholics’ leading lay figures, Erich Klausener, shot dead during the purge of 30 June 1934, not one German cardinal or bishop protested. But the Roman Church did not approve of the Führer, nor was it ignorant of his moves against Christianity. However Eugenio Pacelli, who became Pope Pius XII in 1939, had before his elevation been the Vatican’s not unsympathetic expert on Germany — indeed had spent much of his career there (since 1917 in fact). Furthermore his successor as Nuncio in Berlin, Diego Cesare Orsenigo, was an all but open supporter of the Nazis.

Perhaps the greatest hindrance to any co-ordinated opposition within the Catholic Church was deference to Rome. Even considering the potential problem of being a tiny neutral state in the middle of a fascist dictatorship allied to Hitler, the Vatican — particularly after the accession of Pacelli — gave vent to very little criticism of the regime. However Rome never approved of it, and provided a forum for discussions between representatives of the Resistance and the Allies. Characteristically, the ancient and international Catholic Church took a long-term view: the German problem was a local one, and clearly the Nazi form of government would neither dominate the world nor last a thousand years. On the other hand, if it were left to the Russians to destroy Nazism, that might throw Eastern Europe open to secularism and Communism.

Encouraged by Pacelli, but also for the sake of harmony and in order to protect its own interests, Rome promptly signed a Concordat with Hitler on 20 July 1933. This agreement was so hurried through that it was signed before all the details of its terms were defined, especially (and crucially) those protecting the rights of Catholic organisations. Pope Pius XI asked Hitler to give him his word of honour that the New Germany would continue to base its constitution on Christianity. This Hitler gladly did — he was always happy to make promises if they would get him his way and people were naive enough to believe he would keep them. In fact, his government had just promulgated its first Sterilisation Law, something which was not made public until the Concordat was signed, on the advice of the oily von Papen.