The execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

At dawn on Monday 9 April 1945, in the yard of the prison bunker of Flossenbürg concentration camp in the Upper Palatinate, SS men hanged six prisoners: the former head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris; his deputy, Generalmajor Hans Oster; the Army’s Judge Advocate General, Karl Sack; Captain Ludwig Gehre; the lawyer Theodor Strünck; and the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The previous evening they had been sentenced to death by an SS drumhead court convened on the orders of Adolf Hitler. Germany’s surrender was four weeks away; the liberation of Flossenbürg itself, two.

Some chronologies speak of “Flossenburg prison”. Strictly speaking, it was Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria; the execution was carried out in its separate jail, the so-called bunker, where special prisoners were held.

Of those executed that day, it was Bonhoeffer who became the best known after the war. He was a theologian of one of the most important currents of 20th-century Protestantism, a co-founder of the Confessing Church, which opposed the subordination of the Church to Nazi ideology, and at the same time one of the few clergymen who joined the conspiracy to remove Hitler. His letters from prison, published after the war, are still read all over the world.

A theologian against Hitler’s state

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born on 4 February 1906 in Breslau (now Wrocław) into the family of the eminent psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer, which moved to Berlin in 1912. He grew up among the liberal academic bourgeoisie; he studied theology in Tübingen and Berlin, under Adolf Harnack among others, and was profoundly influenced by the theology of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. He completed his doctorate at 21; in 1930–1931 he studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he came into contact with the Black churches of Harlem, and after his return he lectured at the University of Berlin and was active in the ecumenical movement.

From the first days after Hitler came to power, Bonhoeffer sided with the opponents of the new regime. On 1 February 1933 he gave a radio talk on the concept of the leader, in which he warned against a leader who puts himself in the place of God; the broadcast was cut off before the end – whether deliberately is not known. In April that year, during the first wave of anti-Jewish laws, he wrote a paper on the Church and the Jewish question and opposed the introduction into the Church of the Aryan paragraph, which was to remove clergy of Jewish descent from office. The pro-Hitler German Christians movement had by then taken control of the Protestant Church’s leadership; its opponents, gathered around Pastor Martin Niemöller, formed the Confessing Church in 1934 and issued the Barmen Declaration, rejecting the subordination of faith to the state.

In 1933–1935 Bonhoeffer was pastor of German congregations in London, where he became friends with the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, George Bell. In 1935 he returned to run an illegal seminary of the Confessing Church, at first in Zingst on the Baltic and from June 1935 at Finkenwalde near Stettin (today Zdroje, part of Szczecin). The Gestapo closed it in September 1937, after which Bonhoeffer trained candidates for the ministry in secret, in vicarages in Western Pomerania. In 1936 he was stripped of the right to teach at the university, in 1940 he was banned from speaking in public and in 1941 from publishing. In 1937 his most famous book appeared, Nachfolge (published in English as The Cost of Discipleship), in which he set the “cheap grace” that demands nothing against the “costly grace” of the true disciple of Christ.

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Bonhoeffer wrote the date of the pogrom in his Bible beside Psalm 74. In the summer of 1939 he went to the United States, where friends offered him a safe post, but after a few weeks he returned, judging that he would have no right to take part in the rebuilding of Germany after the war if he did not share the fate of his people.

In the Abwehr and in the conspiracy

It was his family that opened the way to the conspiracy for Bonhoeffer. The husband of his sister Christine, the lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi, worked in the Abwehr alongside Oster and was one of the leading figures of the military opposition; his brother Klaus, a lawyer for Lufthansa, and his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher were also in the know. From 1940 Bonhoeffer formally worked for the Abwehr’s Munich office as an informant. This protected him from conscription and allowed him to travel abroad, but in reality he used these journeys for the conspirators. In Switzerland, Norway and Sweden he met clergy from the ecumenical movement; in May 1942, at Sigtuna in Sweden, he passed to Bishop Bell information about plans for a coup and a request for assurances about how the Allies would treat Germany after Hitler’s overthrow. The British government, holding to its demand for unconditional surrender, did not reply.

Bonhoeffer also took part in an operation known in the Abwehr as “Operation 7” (Unternehmen Sieben): in 1942, under the cover of an intelligence mission, a dozen or so people whom the Nazis regarded as Jews, including Christians of Jewish descent, were smuggled into Switzerland. Canaris shielded the operation, but the money given to the refugees later aroused the suspicions of currency officials.

It was with this affair that the downfall of the circle of conspirators in the Abwehr began. On 5 April 1943 the Gestapo arrested Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer; Christine von Dohnanyi was released after a few weeks. Bonhoeffer was charged with evading military service and undermining the nation’s fighting strength, not with taking part in the conspiracy, of which the investigators knew nothing at the time. For a year and a half he was held in the military remand prison at Berlin-Tegel. Judge Karl Sack, himself linked to the opposition, deliberately dragged out the proceedings.

Letters from Tegel

Tegel prison became the place where Bonhoeffer wrote his most important texts. With the help of sympathetic guards he smuggled out letters to his friend and former student Eberhard Bethge. In them he wrote of “a world come of age”, of a Christianity that must learn to speak of God without religious formulas, and of the responsibility a Christian takes upon himself by acting in the world. He also wrote poems there, among them “Who Am I?”. His fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer, to whom he had become engaged in January 1943, was allowed to visit him and write to him.

After the 20 July 1944 plot the prisoner’s position changed fundamentally. On 22 September 1944 the Gestapo found, in a safe at the army headquarters at Zossen, documents hidden by Dohnanyi concerning the conspiracies of 1938–1940; among them were notes on Bonhoeffer’s foreign contacts. A guard at Tegel was ready to help him escape, but when his brother Klaus was arrested in early October, Bonhoeffer gave up the idea so as not to endanger his family. On 8 October he was moved to the cellars of the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. There, at the end of 1944, he wrote the poem “Von guten Mächten” (“By Gracious Powers”), sung today in churches as a hymn. When an American air raid on 3 February 1945 destroyed the buildings of the Reich Security Main Office, some of the prisoners were moved out; on 7 February Bonhoeffer and Gehre were taken to Buchenwald concentration camp, and Canaris and Oster to Flossenbürg.

At the same time further trials of members of the opposition were taking place before Roland Freisler’s People’s Court; in January 1945 Helmuth James von Moltke was hanged, whom Bonhoeffer had met during a journey to Norway. The case of the Abwehr circle, however, never came before the People’s Court. At the wish of Heinrich Himmler these prisoners were to remain in the hands of the SS – according to some historians, also as a possible bargaining chip.

The order from the bunker

In early April 1945, as the Allies were closing the Ruhr Pocket and the Red Army stood on the Oder, further volumes of Canaris’s diary were found at Zossen. The head of the Reich Security Main Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, presented them to Hitler. According to the post-war testimony of Walter Huppenkothen, the SD official conducting the investigation into the Abwehr circle, Hitler ordered at the midday conference on 5 April that the conspirators must not survive the war. The order was not given in writing, and its exact wording is known only from the accounts of those present.

Huppenkothen carried it out within a few days. On 6 April, at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, an SS drumhead court with him as prosecutor sentenced to death Hans von Dohnanyi, who lay on a stretcher, barely conscious after a serious infection. Dohnanyi was murdered at Sachsenhausen on 8 or 9 April – sources give both dates. Huppenkothen then went to Flossenbürg, where the court was to be presided over by the SS judge Otto Thorbeck from Munich.

The last journey

By then Bonhoeffer was no longer in Buchenwald. On 3 April, as the Americans approached the camp, the SS took a group of a dozen or so special prisoners away by lorry. Among them were Gehre; the British intelligence officer Sigismund Payne Best, abducted by the SD in the Venlo incident of 1939; and the Soviet prisoner of war Vasily Kokorin, who claimed to be a nephew of Vyacheslav Molotov. On the way, at Weiden, Gehre and two other prisoners were handed over to nearby Flossenbürg, while the rest were driven on, through Regensburg, to the village of Schönberg in the Bavarian Forest, where from 6 April they were held in a school.

On Sunday 8 April, the first Sunday after Easter, his fellow prisoners asked Bonhoeffer to hold a short service. As Best later described it, the pastor read the texts for the day – the words of the prophet Isaiah, “with his stripes we are healed”, and the passage from the First Epistle of Peter about a “living hope” – and spoke about them. Soon afterwards two civilians appeared in the doorway: “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready and come with us.” According to Best’s account, Bonhoeffer took him aside and asked him, should he survive, to pass on his greetings to Bishop Bell together with the words: “This is the end – for me the beginning of life.” That same day he was taken to Flossenbürg.

The drumhead court at Flossenbürg

Flossenbürg camp, founded in 1938 beside granite quarries, was by April 1945 overcrowded with prisoners evacuated from other camps. On the evening of 8 April an SS drumhead court convened in its jail: Thorbeck presided and Huppenkothen prosecuted. There were no defence counsel, no witnesses and no record. Thorbeck testified after the war that the hearings lasted several hours and that Huppenkothen shouted the charges at the accused and allowed brief answers. Canaris, Oster, Sack, Gehre and Bonhoeffer were sentenced to death; that same morning Theodor Strünck, an Abwehr officer and associate of Hans Bernd Gisevius arrested after 20 July, was hanged with them.

During the night Canaris, as described by his neighbour in the next cell, the Danish officer Hans Lunding, tapped out a last message on the wall: that his nose had been broken during interrogation, that he was not a traitor and that he had done his duty as a German.

At dawn on 9 April

The sentences were carried out early on the morning of 9 April in the yard of the camp jail. The condemned were made to undress and were led naked to the gallows; they were hanged one at a time. The best-known account of Bonhoeffer’s death comes from the SS camp doctor Hermann Fischer-Hüllstrung, who testified ten years later that he had seen the pastor praying on his knees before the execution and then calmly climbing the steps to the scaffold; death was said to have followed within a few seconds. Eberhard Bethge quoted this account in his biography of his friend, and for decades it was regarded as reliable. Some later researchers, however, have challenged it: its author was an SS doctor concerned with his own image, and a former prisoner of the camp stated that the executions that morning dragged on for several hours, which does not square with the description of a swift death. The real circumstances can no longer be established.

The bodies of the executed were most probably burned; Bonhoeffer’s resting place is unknown. That same day at Dachau the SS shot Georg Elser, who had carried out the bomb attack on Hitler in a Munich beer hall in November 1939 and had been held for years as a special prisoner. On 23 April Flossenbürg was liberated by the Americans.

After the execution

The persecution of the Bonhoeffer family did not end on 9 April. On the night of 22/23 April 1945, with fighting already under way in Berlin, an SS squad took a dozen or so prisoners out of the prison on Lehrter Strasse and shot them on nearby ground; among them were Dietrich’s brother, Klaus Bonhoeffer, and his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher. Dietrich’s parents learned of his death only at the end of July 1945, from a BBC broadcast of a memorial service in London conducted by Bishop Bell.

In 1951 Bethge published the letters and notes from prison under the title Widerstand und Ergebung (“Resistance and Submission”). The book, translated into dozens of languages, especially in its English edition Letters and Papers from Prison, had an enormous influence on post-war theology and on civil rights movements. In Germany, however, the memory of those executed long remained ambivalent. Part of society still saw the conspirators as traitors, and in 1956 the Federal Court of Justice held the Flossenbürg drumhead court to have been formally lawful and acquitted Thorbeck; Huppenkothen, convicted on only some of the charges, was released in 1959. That judgment is widely regarded today as one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the West German judiciary. The sentences of 8 April were formally quashed only in the 1990s, and in 1998 a statue of Bonhoeffer was placed among the ten martyrs of the 20th century above the west door of Westminster Abbey.

Its place in the history of the war

The execution at Flossenbürg was one of the regime’s last acts of revenge on its own opposition. In the last weeks of the war the SS murdered prisoners who might testify against it or survive the fall of the Reich – in camps, in prisons and on death marches. The deaths of Canaris, Oster, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer closed the story of the circle that had been preparing Hitler’s overthrow within the Abwehr since 1938, and together with the trials after 20 July completed the destruction of the German military and civilian opposition.

For post-war Germany Bonhoeffer became one of the few examples of a clergyman who did not confine himself to defending the rights of his own Church, but stood up for the persecuted and took the path of active resistance – aware that, as a Christian, he was taking upon himself the guilt of helping to prepare a killing. His last words, passed on by Best, and the letters from Tegel turned an execution in a small camp in the Upper Palatinate, a few weeks before the end of the war, into one of the best-known testimonies of the German resistance.