BONHOEFFER (VENUS)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, born February 4, 1906, Breslau, Germany. Flossenburg, Germany. A German Protestant theologian important for his support of ecumenism and his view of Christianity’s role in a secular world. His involvement in a plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler led to his imprisonment and execution. His Letters and Papers from Prison, published posthumously in 1951, is perhaps the most profound document of his convictions.

Bonhoeffer grew up amid the academic circles of the University of Berlin, where his father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was a professor of psychiatry and neurology. Later, Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied theology at the universities of Tubingen and Berlin and was influenced by the historical theologians Adolf von Harnack, Reinhold Seeberg, and Karl Holl but also was strongly attracted to the new “theology of revelation” propounded elsewhere by Karl Barth.

Starting in 1933, Bonhoeffer was involved in protests against the Nazi regime, especially its anti-Semitism, during which he served as pastor of two small German congregations in London, where Bonhoeffer became a leading spokesman for the Confessing Church, the centre of German Protestant resistance to the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer was fierce in his defense of a nonracial definition of Jews. In 1935 Bonhoeffer was appointed to organize and head a new seminary for the Confessing Church at Finkenwalde,where he introduced the practices of prayer, private confession, and common discipline.

In 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested and eventually imprisoned. His fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer, the granddaughter of his close friend Ruth von Kleist Retzow would visit and provide food and news from the outside. For a year and a half, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned at Tegel military prison awaiting trial. There he continued his work in religious outreach among his fellow prisoners and guards. Sympathetic guards helped smuggle his letters out of prison to Eberhard Bethge and others, and these uncensored letters were posthumously published in “Letters and Papers from Prison”. After the failure of the 20 July Plot on Hitler’s life in 1944 and the discovery of secret Abwehr documents relating to the conspiracy, Hitler ordered that the Abwehr conspirators be destroyed. Bonhoeffer was condemned to death in 1945 by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a court-martial without witnesses in Flossenburg concentration camp. He was executed there by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, just two weeks before soldiers from the United States liberated the camp, three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany.