The Execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In 1937 Dietrich Bonhoeffer published Nachfolge, known in English as The Cost of Discipleship. Its first chapter calls “cheap grace” the deadly enemy of the church: a grace that justifies the sin and not the sinner, so that everything can stay as it was. Grace, he wrote, is costly because it calls a person to follow Jesus Christ (Bonhoeffer, Nachfolge, ch. 1, Die teure Gnade (DBW 4, pp. 29–40, extracts)). In prison he remembered Finkenwalde, one of the places in Pomerania where the Confessing Church kept its seminary for preachers (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, letter of 28 November 1943, p. 83, with the editor’s note). On that church see the Barmen Declaration.

He was arrested on 5 April 1943 and spent the next eighteen months in the military section of Tegel prison in Berlin, as Eberhard Bethge, his friend and the editor of his letters, records (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, editor’s foreword, pp. 7–8). A German court later found that he was held as a member of the resistance circle in military intelligence (Bundesgerichtshof, judgment of 19 June 1956 (1 StR 50/56), Gründe A.I). From Tegel he wrote to Bethge on 30 April 1944 that the question which never left him was who Christ really is for us today, and that a time without religion was coming (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, letter of 30 April 1944, pp. 131–132). On 21 July 1944 he wrote that he still stood by Nachfolge but now saw its dangers, and that a person learns to believe only by living fully in this world and taking seriously the suffering of God in it (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, letter of 21 July 1944, pp. 182–183).

After files of the conspirators were found at Zossen in September 1944 the Gestapo moved him to its own prison in Berlin, and from there, as his family later learned, to Buchenwald and Schönberg (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, editor’s foreword, pp. 7–8). On Sunday 8 April 1945 he led a service for his fellow prisoners at Schönberg and was then called away. The English prisoner Payne Best, who was among them, reported that Bonhoeffer gave him a greeting for the Bishop of Chichester, with the words that this was the end, but for him the beginning of life (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, appendix Die letzten Tage, pp. 219–220).

The court found that he cannot have reached Flossenbürg concentration camp before the late afternoon of that day (Bundesgerichtshof, judgment of 19 June 1956 (1 StR 50/56), Gründe A.I). There an SS judge, sitting with the camp commandant and one other, tried him and four others: Admiral Canaris, General Oster, the army judge Sack and Captain Gehre (Bundesgerichtshof, judgment of 19 June 1956 (1 StR 50/56), Gründe A.I) (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, appendix Die letzten Tage, pp. 219–220). The appendix to the letters names a sixth man, Strünk, among those heard (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, appendix Die letzten Tage, pp. 219–220). No defence counsel was appointed and no clerk was present to keep a record. All five were sentenced to death, and on the morning of 9 April they were hanged, naked, before any confirmation of the sentences had been obtained (Bundesgerichtshof, judgment of 19 June 1956 (1 StR 50/56), Gründe A.I). The court held that the law required such confirmation in every case (Bundesgerichtshof, judgment of 19 June 1956 (1 StR 50/56), Gründe C.II.1 b).

Six months later the council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, meeting at Stuttgart, declared itself bound to the German people in a “solidarity of guilt” and accused itself of not having confessed more courageously or prayed more faithfully (Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt). The church’s own account says that the document was addressed to the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, whom it calls Bonhoeffer’s friend (Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt introduction by the Evangelical Church in Germany). Bethge’s edition of the letters from prison followed in 1951 (Bonhoeffer, Widerstand und Ergebung, editor’s foreword, pp. 7–8).