A few Confessing pastors used their pulpits to denounce the violence. Bishop Theophil Wurm of Stuttgart, one of the more conservative leaders of the Confessing movement, made a protest. But the church largely remained silent about the atrocities of November 1938. Disgusted by the timidity of the Confessing Church and the inhumanity of the Third Reich toward the Jews and fearing he would be called up for military service, Bonhoeffer by 1939 again contemplated flight from Germany. He and Bethge spent five weeks in England in March and April of 1939, during which time the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, making a mockery of the Munich Agreement of the previous fall.
Through a visit with Reinhold Niebuhr, who was on holiday in London for a few weeks, Bonhoeffer received an invitation to visit New York. Upon his arrival in June, the Federal Council of Churches offered him a three-year post as coordinator of church work with German refugees. He had found his window of escape. However, he searched his soul, as he had while serving in the London pastorate in 1933, and decided flight from Germany was wrong. Regretting that so many had gone to so much trouble to find him a place of refuge, he wrote to Niebuhr in July explaining his decision to return to Germany: "I made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.
A Call to Resistance
Just as flight six years earlier had prompted Bonhoeffer to move into a new phase of his life and work, so again he began a new course when he arrived back in Germany. In his writing and actions, this last phase of his life exemplified the call to resistance he had articulated in his 1933 essay. He returned to the loneliness of Pomerania to lead what was to be the final group of seminarians through instruction at one of the collective pastorates. In March 1940 the Gestapo closed this pastorate down, and he tried to continue his instruction through personal visits and correspondence. By September authorities forbade him to speak in public or publish any of his writings. With his work now virtually shut down, Bonhoeffer spent much of his time in 1940 and 1941 writing Ethics, an unfinished work published eventually after the war. Also in these years he drew away from the institutional church and into the movement of resistance against Hitler, a decision that would bring about his death.
Bonhoeffer had been introduced to members of the conspiracy against Hitler as early as 1938 through his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, who had married Dietrich's older sister Christine. Dohnanyi was in the thick of the conspiracy led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Major General Hans Oster in the Abwehr, the counterintelligence office of the High Military Command. In 1939, Canaris had made Dohnanyi a staff lawyer in the Abwehr. Dietrich's older brother, Klaus Bonhoeffer, and Riidiger Schleicher, another brother-inlaw, both legal advisers for Lufthansa, also became involved with a Resistance circle there.
With his work taken away from him and still fearing being drafted into military service, Dietrich managed to secure an appointment as a civilian agent on Dohnanyi's staff in the Abwehr by November 1940. This post kept him safe both from military draft and arrest. Frequently during the next two years, he used his cover in the Abwehr and his accompanying travel permit to visit Spain, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, smuggling out information on behalf of the Resistance movement. Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi even traveled to Italy, where they made contact with the Italian Resistance. Bonhoeffer especially used his contacts in the ecumenical office in Geneva, particularly Willem Visser't Hooft, to transmit information." In 1942 he arranged to meet his friend Bishop Bell in Sweden to pass on plans drawn up by the CanarisOster Resistance circle for an impending putsch, plans that Bell transferred to the British foreign minister, Sir Anthony Eden. The British Cabinet chose, however, to ignore the plans, which went awry in any case."
Bonhoeffer's work for the Resistance coincided with the heightened persecution of Jews in 1941. Soon after he joined the Abwehr, Jews were forced to wear the yellow star for the first time. By the fall, deportation of Jewish families from Berlin had begun. The Bonhoeffer family in Berlin, in fact, helped a sixty-eight-year-old friend to pack when she received notification of her deportation to Theresienstadt. In October, Dietrich, along with Friedrich Justus Perels, the legal adviser to the Confessing Church, wrote up a report containing all the facts they could ascertain about the Jewish deportation. They presented the report via Dohnanyi to Oster and General Ludwig Beck, the leading conspirators in the German command, in the vain hope that the military would intervene or speed up the plans for the overthrow."
Bonhoeffer also became involved that fall in an Abwehr plan to rescue several Jews from deportation by getting them out of Germany. Called Operation Seven, the scheme involved sending a group of twelve to fifteen Jews, mostly personal friends of Admiral Canaris, to Switzerland on an Abwehr propaganda program to demonstrate to the foreign press that there was no persecution of Jews in Germany. It was a complicated affair, for the Abwehr actually had to employ the Jews, which required circumvention of the law and enormous amounts of red tape. Bonhoeffer worked with Dohnanyi, who was largely in charge of the plan, for over a year before the refugees all arrived safely in Switzerland."
Operation Seven became the downfall for the Bonhoeffer family, for through a Gestapo investigation of the misuse of funds within the Abwehr, the plan was uncovered. Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi were arrested in April 1943. The Gestapo had not yet uncovered, however, the Abwehr plot to overthrow Hitler, which culminated in the famous bombing attempt that nearly succeeded on 20 July 1944. Although the Gestapo found little hard evidence against him, Bonhoeffer remained under arrest until his execution with fellow conspirators Oster and Canaris on 9 April 1945 at Flossenburg concentration camp.
Bonhoeffer spent most of his last two years in Tegel Prison in Berlin, where because of family connections, he received special treatment, better food, and visitor privileges. At Tegel he was able to write letters, essays, and poetry, all edited later by Bethge as Letters and Papers from Prison. This workalong with his Ethics, begun while in Pomerania early during the war and continued while he worked for the Abzvehr-reveal his state of mind during this last phase of life. They show that his call to resistance meant more than his personal involvement with the conspiracy against Hitler. It meant also new theological views that moved away from the traditional Lutheran stance he had taken earlier.
While working with the Resistance to circumvent, in what limited way he could, the deportation of the Jews in the early 1940s, Bonhoeffer, in his Ethics, denounced the program as theologically wrong: "Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah of the Israelite-Jewish people, and for that reason the line of our forefathers goes back beyond the appearance of Jesus Christ to the people of Israel. Western history is, by God's will, indissolubly linked with the people of Israel, not only genetically but also in a genuine uninterrupted encounter. The Jew keeps open the question of Christ. He is the sign of the free mercy-choice and of the repudiating wrath of God. 'Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God' (Rom. 11:22). An expulsion of the Jews from the west must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew.""
In this intriguing passage, which has been much and variably interpreted, Bonhoeffer as never before linked Christianity with the Jews as Jews, not as potential Christians. Bethge, as always, wishes to put the most positive construction on Bonhoeffer's words by suggesting Bonhoeffer meant the Jews were the church; "they themselves 'constitute' the church as church."" But this passage contains the characteristic ambivalence of Bonhoeffer's work. The ultimate importance of Jews for Bonhoeffer's Christianity lay in their rejection of Christ, their role as a sign both that belief is a choice and that God punishes unbelievers. This latter idea came close to Bonhoeffer's 1933 view about a punishing curse.
In his 1933 essay on the Jews, Bonhoeffer had articulated the possibility of political action against the state but stopped short of a
ctually calling for it. By the early 1940s, when he wrote his Ethics, his thinking had changed. Now he said, "an apocalyptic view of a particular government would necessarily have total disobedience as its consequence, for in that case every single act of obedience obviously involves a denial of Christ." Breaking the laws of the state through the use of violence would be the lesser of two evils, he said, in extraordinary situations. Breaking the law might be the only way to preserve the law. The only evil greater than violence, he concluded, came when violence served as the law and standard, as Bonhoeffer certainly believed had become the case in the Third Reich. In such an extraordinary situation, "there can only be a complete renunciation of every law, together with the knowledge that here one must make one's decision as a free venture, together also with the open admission that here the law is being infringed upon and violated and that necessity obeys no commandment.""' Read in the light of what we know now about Bonhoeffer's involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, these words sound like an attempt to convince himself or theologically justify to others a violent political revolution.
At about the moment he entered the Abwehr and thus came into a more active role in the Resistance movement, Bonhoeffer confessed his personal guilt and that of the church for what they had failed to do under the Nazi regime: "I am guilty of cowardly silence at a time when I ought to have spoken. I am guilty of hypocrisy and untruthfulness in the face of force. I have been lacking in compassion and I have denied the poorest of my brethren." He saved his sharpest words, however, for his indictment of the church: "The Church confesses that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims and has not found ways to hasten to their aid. She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenceless brothers of Jesus Christ."" Bonhoeffer's use of the phrase "brothers of Jesus Christ" indicates that he spoke here of the suffering and murder of Jews, a year before the Wannsee Conference sanctioned such brutality as official policy. Elsewhere in his Ethics, however, he broadened his scope by denouncing euthanasia of the physically and mentally ill and deficient.42
Bonhoeffer's last writings, published in Letters and Papers from Prison, are perhaps the most famous and widely read of his works. These works show a decisive theological turn toward what Bonhoeffer called "secular" or "religionless Christianity," catchphrases that would keep theology students talking for the next four decades. While Bonhoeffer's work from prison took a greater interest in the Old Testament, it says little explicitly about the Jews. However, the historical context that framed his work-a criminal regime that persecuted Jews-doubtless shaped the meaning of Bonhoeffer's concept of religionless Christianity.
In his younger years, Bonhoeffer had followed Luther and Barth's lead in distinguishing between the church and the world, between theology and science and, to use H. Richard Niebuhr's words, between Christ and culture. During Bonhoeffer's early or ecclesiastical phase, his concern was that the church be the church by making an authentic confession of the truth about Jesus Christ. Bitterly disappointed when the Confessing Church fell into division and especially after most Confessing pastors took the loyalty oath to the Fiihrer, Bonhoeffer finally realized that the church itself was a victim of culture, that religion was a culture. This realization meant that Christians must move out of their sanctuary, the church, into a godless world; they must confront the world; they must be part of the world. Instead of remaking the world into a Christian culture in a medieval fashion, Bonhoeffer's new Christianity offered redemption to a godless world by taking it seriously. Perhaps Bonhoeffer's preoccupation with "this worldliness" reflects the theological explication of his move, as a Protestant pastor, into active resistance against the state. In any case, Bonhoeffer came to his new theological insights in prison, without doubt through his consideration of the political situation at hand and the suffering of the Jews.'
Conclusion
Bonhoeffer's theology, like his short life, had its twists and turns. In a decade's time he passed through three distinct stages: his call to obedience to the state that nonetheless preserved the integrity and autonomy of the church, his call to suffering for the cause of justice and truth, and last, his call to resistance and active participation in the life of the world. In comparison, Bonhoeffer's Confessing Church did not get past the first stage. The German Protestant Church failed to protect its own turf; much less did it take a united stand on behalf of Jews or other victims of Nazi persecution; even less did it resist the state.
For those who come to Bonhoeffer through a study of the German church struggle, adulation might indeed seem the appropriate response to his life. However, those who arrive at Bonhoeffer from a study of the Holocaust most likely have a different view, one that describes Bonhoeffer's ideas as part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Truly in the shadow of the Holocaust, Bonhoeffer's words and actions appear small, tentative, restrained, and ambivalent. Yet his life was like a small candle in the black hole of his time. The Bonhoeffer phenomenon, the public reception of this man, illustrates that people would rather huddle around one point of light, no matter how feeble and flickering the flame, than sit alone in darkness.
olf Hochhuth's controversial "Christian tragedy," dealing with the failure of Pope Pius XII to protest publicly against the incredible horrors that Nazi Germany was inflicting upon the Jews of Europe, has dramatized a problem that is as old as Christianity itself. Hochhuth, to be sure, relates this failure to the personality of Pius XII himself, who is portrayed in The Deputy as a cold, unfeeling politician worried only about the interests of the Church. But the truth is that the Pope's stand cannot adequately be understood in terms of personalities. For one thing, we must remember that the Nazi assault upon the Jews of Europe took place in a climate of opinion conditioned by centuries of Christian hostility to Jews and Judaism. And for another, we must realize that in acting-or failing to act-as he did, Pius XII was to a considerable extent influenced by the behavior of his "constituency" within Germany itself. Consequently, it is with German Catholicism that any effort to explain the Pope's silence must begin.
2. The Weimar Period
From the time the National Socialist movement appeared in the '20s, organized German Catholicism came into repeated conflict with it, but antisemitism was not one of the primary bones of contention. On the contrary, many Catholic publicists-like the Franciscan Father Erhard Schlundagreed with the Nazis on the importance of fighting "the destructive influence of the Jews in religion, morality, literature and art, and political and social life," and objected only to the extremist tone of the movement.' Thus, for example, the Jesuit Gustav Gundlach, writing in a reference work edited by Bishop Buchberger of Regensburg, argued that a political antisemitism, directed against the "exaggerated and harmful influence" of the Jews, was permitted so long as it utilized morally admissible means.' And Bishop Buchberger himself, while deploring racialism, concluded that it was "justified self-defense" to ward off the rule of "an overly powerful Jewish capital."'
Concentrating its fire upon liberals and free thinkers, many of whom were of Jewish descent, the Church did practically nothing to stem the inroads antisemitism was making on German life throughout the period of the Weimar Republic. Though the German bishops during these years spoke up against Hitler's glorification of race and blood, they rarely found anything specific to say about the virulent antisemitic propaganda the Nazis were spreading or about the acts of violence against Jews that were becoming more and more common. So far as individual Catholic clerics in the pre-Hitler years were concerned, the Verein fur die Abwehr des Antisemitisnms, an organization of Christians and Jews struggling against the rising antisemitic agitation, counted two Catholic priests as members of its board of sponsors, while only a few Catholic laymen-like the journalist Franz Steffen and the editor Felix Langer-ever raised their voices against the antisemitic tirades of the Nazi
s and their allies.'
2. The Prewar Spitler Years
On April 26, 1933, shortly after coming to power, Hitler had a talk with two dignitaries of the German church, Bishop Berning and Prelate Steinmann. In the course of this talk he reminded his visitors that the Church for 1500 years had regarded the Jews as parasites, had banished them into ghettos, and had forbidden Christians to work for them; he, Hitler said, merely intended to do more effectively what the Church had attempted to accomplish for so long.'
The reaction of the two Church dignitaries to Hitler's attempt to identify his brand of antisemitism with the age-old anti-Judaism of the Church is not known. What we do know, however, is that from the time Hitler came to power all the German bishops began declaring their appreciation of the important natural values of race and racial purity, and they limited their dissent to insisting that this goal be achieved without resort to immoral means. The article on "Race" in an authoritative handbook on topical religious problems, edited by Archbishop Gruber, expressed this position in the following words:
Every people bears itself the responsibility for its successful existence, and the intake of entirely foreign blood will always represent a risk for a nationality that has proven its historical worth. Hence, no people may be denied the right to maintain undisturbed their previous racial stock and to enact safe guards for this purpose. The Christian religion merely demands that the means used do not offend against the moral law and natural justice.'
Similarly, in his celebrated Advent sermons of 1933, Cardinal Faulhaber observed that the Church did not have "any objection to the endeavor to keep the national characteristics of a people as far as possible pure and unadulterated, and to foster their national spirit by emphasis upon the common ties of blood which unite them." To what, then, did the Church object? To hatred of other nations, said Faulhaber, and to setting loyalty to race above the obligations one owed to the Church.'
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