Two
Years in
Prison |
American friends invited Bonhoeffer to New York in the summer of 1939 and arranged for him to be one of the many German refugees in this country. But he stayed only briefly. He explained to one of his hosts, Reinhold Niebuhr, that he did not believe he would have the right "to take part in the restoration of Christian life Germany after the war unless I share the trials of this time with my people."
On the way home he stopped in London, England, to visit his sister and brother-in-law, Sabine and Gerhard Leibholz, who because of his Jewish background, had fled Germany the previous year. Dietrich and his twin sister then were 33 years old. He was about to return to Germany, to the church struggle and — in a year's time — to join the Conspiracy.
Bottom photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer with a prison guard and three captured officers of the Italian air force in the courtyard of the Tegel Prison during the early summer of 1944. |
Scene from Tegel Prison
In addition to his continuing work with the Confessing Church and his theological writing, Bonhoeffer became a part of the political conspiracy during the first year of the war. He was associated with the conspirators who used the Abwehr, the intelligence agency of the German army, as a cover. Hans von Dohnanyi, Dietrich's brother-in-law, was a high official in this agency and a leader among the conspirators.
Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo on April 5, 1943, on a minor charge but on suspicion of larger involvement. He spent the next 18 months in the Tegel military prison in Berlin. Because guards came to appreciate the sort of man he was and some broke rules in his favor, he had opportunities to receive books and personal items from his family and to correspond with family and friends. His Letters and Papers from Prison, composed mostly of letters to his friend Eberhard Bethge, is the best known of several things he wrote during this period. A writer in The New York Times (July 19, 1994) wrote that it is "among the most compelling literature in the German language."
The conspirators' failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 29, 1944, meant that Bonhoeffer's fate was sealed. After October 8, 1944, he was moved to a series of Gestapo prisons and finally, on Hitler's personal orders, was executed by hanging April 9, 1945, at the Flossenbrug concentration camp in south Germany. Eleven days later American troops captured the prison area.
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