One day near the middle of the last century a minister in a prison camp in Germany conducted a service for the other prisoners. One of those prisoners, an English officer who survived, wrote these words:
“Dietrich Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of happiness and joy over the least incident, and profound gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive”¦ He was one of the very few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always near”¦ On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to the heart of all of us. He found just the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, and the thoughts and resolutions it had brought us. He had hardly ended his last prayer when the door opened and two civilians entered. They said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, come with us.” That had only one meaning for all prisoners”“the gallows. We said good-bye to him. He took me aside: “This is the end; but for me it is the beginning of life.” The next day he was hanged in Flossenburg.”
I read it every year on this day and every year it brings me to tears–KSH.
A beautiful passage — thank you.
It is one of history’s odd coincidences that one of Bonhoeffer’s fellow travellers to the gallows on April 9 was ADM Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr (German military intelligence), who was perhaps the highest ranking military member of the resistance, responsible for saving the lives of thousands of Jews. Reportedly, Canaris tried to turn over the German war plans to the British, who refused, believing it a trick. Last year, after seeing the Passion Play in Oberammergau, we were fortunate to visit the Resistance Museum in Berlin, where both Bonhoeffer and Canaris are remembered.
It is another irony that Bonhoeffer and von Dohnanyi got picked up in 1943 because of what was essentially a money laundering investigation. The Gestapo had no use for the Abwehr, but really didn’t have any smoking guns. They started an investigation of funds transfers to Switzerland that Bonhoeffer was linked to. The Gestapo really didn’t know what they would find, but they had the scent of something that might lead to something. The funds transfers were, in fact, part of the clandestine program to smuggle out Jews. While Bonhoeffer was incarcerated during that investigation, the von Stauffenberg plot failed spectacularly and the investigation of that plot uncovered links between the Abwehr suspects and the Army Valkyrie suspects, even though Bonhoeffer and his Abwehr colleagues had been imprisoned before the Valkyrie plot was formed and in motion. Flossenburg, where Bonhoeffer and Admiral Canaris were executed, was liberated a week after their deaths.
When I was a young lieutenant in a cavalry squadron in Germany, I served several tours at our squadron’s border camp from which we conducted surveillance patrols along 123 km of the German/Czech border. Flossenburg was in our sector and I visited it once and saw the modest memorials to Bonhoffer, Canaris and the thousands of other prisoners from all over Europe, as well as a handful of American airman, who died there. There was a small museum and not much else. A very low key and out of the way place.