Strange Glory

by Charles Marsh

  In February 1938, Bonhoeffer, a dissident since Hitler’s first appearance, made his first contact with the German resistance. His brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi, who’d married Christine Bonhoeffer, introduced Dietrich to members of a conspiracy based in a section of German military intelligence called the Abwehr. Hans and Klaus had no doubts about the inevitability of war.

  Son of the celebrated Hungarian pianist Ernö Dohnányi, Hans, now thirty-six, had been a schoolmate of Klaus and Dietrich’s at the Grunewald Gymnasium. Ernö had belonged to Hungarian nobility; therefore it was important to him when he came to Berlin in 1905 as a teacher that the prefix “von,” which indicated an aristocratic descent in Germany, be added to his name.

  Early on, Hans had distinguished himself as a brilliant lawyer, appointed a public prosecutor at the age of twenty-nine and an Oberregierungsrat (a high-level bureaucrat) at thirty-one, having made all the right choices. But in 1936 envious rivals at the Ministry of Justice had discovered a non-Aryan family member in his maternal line, and he had been hard put to obtain a ruling from Hitler to the effect that Minister Gürtner’s valued aide should suffer “no detriment” owing to “doubts” surrounding his grandfather’s pedigree. He would remain in office until 1938 but meantime could see the writing on the wall. As party to the state’s most sensitive “legal” actions, Dohnányi was able to construct a chronicle of Nazi brutalities. “From murder and attempted murder in concentration camps,” Christine would recall, “from the … abominations in those camps to garden variety foreign-exchange rackets run by Gauleiters [regional paramilitary leaders] and the distasteful goings-on in the higher reaches of the Hitler Youth and SA.” Dohnányi’s “chronicle” would bring to light a variety of iniquities and a system whose corruptions reached as high as the Führer. Since 1933, Dohnányi had exploited his position at the Ministry of Justice and access to the Nazi regime’s confidential records to compile a “Chronicle of Shame,” a day-by-day listing of war crimes, military plans, and genocidal actions and policies. “To Dohnanyi, the logical inference was that his elimination would rid the country of a moral cancer,” explained Heinz Höhne.5

  In April 20, 1938, Friedrich Werner, director of the Protestant consistory, used every legal, financial, and administrative power at his disposal to bring all refractory clergy into line with the Reich. True German faith—the manly de-Judaized faith of the kind that would be propagated in various research centers, such as Walter Grundmann’s Institute for the Study of the Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life (established on May 6, 1939, at Wartburg Castle in Eisenach), and in the theology faculties of the Nazi-controlled university faculties—must inspire a glorious surrender to the Führer. Reforms that Werner had earlier sought to implement “with a certain spontaneity” he now carried out by brute force, both bureaucratic and spiritual.6 His pronouncement read:

  Whereas only those may be office bearers in the Church who are unswervingly loyal to the Führer, the people and the Reich, it is hereby decreed:

  Anyone who is called to a spiritual office is to affirm his loyal duty with the following oath: “I swear that I will be faithful and obedient to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, that I will conscientiously observe the laws and carry out the duties of my office, so help me God.”

  The oath was administered to all new clergy, obviously. But even pastors who had been called before Werner’s decree were required to take it, and it would apply retroactively, meaning that any dissident activity prior to the decree was deemed actionable. Refusing the oath subjected one to dismissal and criminal detention.7 To some degree, the underlying idea was consistent with the traditional Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms: Christians must be obedient to the earthly authorities as unto God.8 But Werner went to an unprecedented extreme, turning a doctrine that had historically yielded a variety of views on church-state matters into an absolutist principle: make a “personal commitment to the Führer under the solemn summons of God,” and forge an “intimate solidarity with the Third Reich” and with the saintly man who both “created that community and embodies it.”9 “Submit to Hitler with a joyful heart, in gratitude, as pleasing to the Lord.”

  Werner viewed his decree as a personal gift to his Führer, who on April 20 celebrated his fiftieth birthday. Hitler, evidently moved, returned Werner’s tribute with a worshipful word of his own. “My feeling as a Christian,” he said, “points me to my Lord and Saviour as fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who—God’s truth!—was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter.… As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.”10

  On January 30, 1939, in a speech before the Reichstag, Hitler announced his objective of the total destruction of “the Jewish race in Europe.” He did not say whether accomplishing that goal would complete the work of Luther, but his militant defense of Germany’s aggressive foreign policy portended even greater devastation in pursuit of that larger purpose ascribed to Luther’s twilight vision: a world without Jews.11 “Set their synagogues and schools on fire,” Luther had written in his 1543 work “The Jews and Their Lies,” “and whatever will not burn, heap dirt upon and cover so that no human ever again will see a stone or a cinder of it.”

  Jewish-owned businesses in Germany were liquidated that month, and in March German troops invaded Czechoslovakia. In the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, the city library near the Philharmonie at the Potsdamer Platz, a file from the more than twenty-five cases of Bethge papers contains a document called “List of Confessional Pastors Subject to Measures of Oppression by Police and Church Authorities as of June, 1939.”12 This was not Dohnányi’s “chronicle” but a report compiled by Dietrich and Eberhard from assorted letters, dispatches, and bulletins. Included in the list of the ministers recently detained in the concentration camps was an update on the Lutheran pastor Paul Schneider of the Rhineland, imprisoned in Buchenwald. He had been arrested for “resisting the order of expulsion from his parish” in his village of Dickenschied; his wife and their six small children were then evicted from the parsonage. With chilling frankness the document reports the way the case was closed: “[Schneider] has now died as a result of maltreatment. Age 38.”

  There was also Pastor Alfred Leikam, a twenty-three-year-old chaplain, imprisoned “for his active Christian work among young people and for circulating news about the Church situation.”

  Pastor Karl Steinbauer was taken from his church in Bavaria on March 28, 1939, and locked in a cell in the Sachsenhausen camp “for his fearless Christian witness and warnings against paganism.” As a matter of conscience, he refused to offer proof of his Aryan descent when it was required as a condition for his continued work as a teacher.

  There was also, of course, the case of Martin Niemöller, who was sent to Sachsenhausen—where, according to his own testimony, he remained “morally and physically unbroken.”

  TORCHLIGHT PARADE IN THE BERLIN OLYMPIC STADIUM, SUMMER SOLSTICE DAY, JUNE 1938

  The report further listed the following oppressive measures: “103 curtailed in their functions by reduction of salary and various restrictions of their activities; 10 prohibited to leave their residence; 37 prohibited to stay in certain districts. 44 prohibited to speak in public. 100 expelled from their parishes. 4 expelled and forced to reside in small places in the country. 30 subject to measures after the Intercession-Service during the September crisis 1938 (suspension from functions or reductions of salary).”13

  Now infamous for its meticulous record keeping, the state documented an impressive decimation of the dissenting clergy. Trusting as we should that no “oppressive acts” escaped mention, we must also see that the majority of dissident pastors were brought to heel; relatively few were those who forced the state to make good on the threat of Werner’s decree. And so the perseve
rance of these few would finally be overshadowed by the expediency of the many. The difficulty of holding out was not a new one in Christian history: “I shall strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered abroad.” When ministers of the Confessing Church met on June 11, 1938, for their final disputation on “the Jewish question,” Bonhoeffer was depressed to learn that the majority had taken the oath of allegiance to Hitler: 60 percent in Rhineland, 70 percent in Brandenburg, 78 percent in Saxony, 80 percent in Pomerania, 82 percent in Silesia, 89 percent in Grenzmark.14

  It would be giving the dissenting clergy the benefit of the doubt to say that they had retreated into the insularity of theological debates. Most members of the Confessing Church had in fact taken the oath of allegiance fully aware of the “impending order for all non-Aryans to have a large ‘J’ stamped on their identity cards.” And for the sake of confessional peace they were even prepared to subscribe to the view of Hanns Kerrl, one of the few irenic German Christians, whom Hitler had appointed to run the new Ministry for Church Affairs around the time of the roundup of 1935 (after the feckless Müller had made such a hash of things). Kerrl praised the Führer “as the bearer of a new Revelation,” in fact as “Germany’s Jesus Christ.”

  Bonhoeffer had worried since 1933 that the Confessing Church was more concerned with ecclesial purity—which is to say, its own organizational autonomy—than with Hitler’s world-scale epochal ambitions. On Jewish suffering and persecution, it would remain hopelessly, infuriatingly silent, if not indifferent.

  Bonhoeffer had also long seen himself as the Christian voice to challenge Hitler directly, which made him perilously conspicuous, though it is not clear who else might have been willing or able to be that voice.

  At a Confessing Church meeting in October 1938, he asked his colleagues whether, “instead of talking of the same old questions again and again” (by which he meant the now effectively irrelevant issue of the church’s authority versus the state’s), it would be better instead “to speak of that which truly is pressing on us: what the Confessing Church has to say to [this] question of church and synagogue?”15 He would now moreover begin speaking of an equivalence before God of the church and the synagogue, between the body of Christ and the chosen people of Israel. It was, to say the least, a stretch of Christian Orthodoxy, in which there is a clear view of the New Covenant of Christ as superseding the one God made with Moses. In Bonhoeffer’s telling, the Jews—and not merely those who had become Christians—must be embraced as the “brothers of Christians,” “children of the covenant,” and the “children of Bethlehem,” in their own right.16 It is possible that his understanding of the question had truly evolved to such a point since his anguished refusal to officiate at the funeral of Sabine’s father-in-law. Or he may have deemed this leap a moral necessity, however dogmatically dubious; he had always insisted on theology’s obligation to respond to the here and now. Whatever the case, it was a claim that would set him at odds not only with the state but with most dissident Christians. He could have little hope for further solidarity with these brethren.

  After Nazi gangs stormed Germany’s synagogues and plundered Jewish-owned businesses, murdering scores and arresting thousands, in the Night of Broken Glass— Kristallnacht—Bonhoeffer underlined in his Luther Bible the haunting line from Psalm 74:8, “they burned all the meeting-places of God in the land,” and added the date, “9.11.38,” and alongside the next verse, “there is no longer any prophet,” an exclamation mark.17

  In 1939, with the Confessing Church movement in tatters, Bonhoeffer would take another leap, into a new sphere of action, meeting with members of the Berlin resistance to discuss a most audacious plan.18

  The “lure of the political”: that is what Bethge would later ascribe to the solicitations of Klaus Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnányi’s proposal following the Confessing Church’s effective demise. Indeed Bonhoeffer’s decision to shift the focus of his activism from the church-based opposition to the mostly secular resistance, or Widerstand, was born of a great disappointment, not only with his fellow German dissident Christians but with the ecumenical movement: despite campaigning for nearly five years, he had been unable to persuade the leaders of the influential Faith and Order Commission—which had been founded by American Episcopalians shortly after the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh to promote ecumenical understanding of the global churches—to acknowledge the dissenting body as a church. Now, with the Confessing Church having forfeited the theological high ground it could once claim, Bonhoeffer decided that the time was ripe for a new kind of engagement, a bolder vocation.

  He would, however, make a final effort at solidarity with the dissident Christians at home and the Protestant churches abroad, calling on Leonard Hodgson in Oxford. Hodgson, a distinguished Anglican theologian, was secretary of the Commission on Faith and Order; he and Bonhoeffer had met twice since 1935 to discuss the crisis in the German Protestant church. Now, writing in English, Bonhoeffer expressed his concern that the “Confessional” pastors in Germany were “becoming cut off from our foreign friends.” Certainly this intensifying sense of isolation was the result of the censorship, travel restrictions, and speaking bans under which Bonhoeffer and other pastors found themselves.19 But that was not what Bonhoeffer wanted to talk about. The leaders of the ecumenical movement still recognized the Reich Church as the only legitimate Protestant church in Germany. Bonhoeffer pled for Hodgson’s intercession to secure the “permanent representation” of the Confessing Church in the “oecumenic [sic] movement.” If the Reich Church’s legitimacy could be challenged, perhaps there was hope yet for the Confessing Church, if only as a scattering of beleaguered collective pastorates across the north German plains. Perhaps the body of Christ in exile was its true mission all along.

  During a meeting in London at the end of March 1939, Bonhoeffer told Hodgson he needed the “theological help of other churches in order to bear the burden of responsibilities which God has laid upon us.” He could have gone on at length about the insights “which God has given us anew during the last years,”20 but as time was of the essence, Bonhoeffer got straight to his request: he wanted Hodgson to approve the creation of a permanent German secretary to represent the World Alliance in Geneva. Bonhoeffer was under no illusions about the effect of such representation. He surely did not think it would put any political pressure on Hitler. But the affirmation of the Confessing Church as a church was, at a minimum, what the Christian dissidents in Germany needed just to survive at all. Hodgson was unmoved. Whatever its sins, the Reich Church remained the only legitimate Protestant communion in Germany, controlling the faith’s infrastructure and institutions and thereby holding sole authority to administer the sacraments in accordance with canon law. The matter, Hodgson insisted, was beyond his control. Bonhoeffer found this response pharisaical and pedantic, though not surprising. Two years earlier, Hodgson had refused to bend to Bonhoeffer’s petition that he unseat the Reich Church representatives at international church synods. Now, in March 1939, he was justifying himself with the same canonical casuistry, though with notably less sympathy and patience. The dispiriting exchange would only confirm Bonhoeffer in his suspicions that the ecumenical movement had folded its hand vis-à-vis the German church crisis.

  When Hitler’s army occupied Prague, the same month, most Germans were content to believe that their nation’s growing territorial demands could be achieved without bloodshed, through a “skillful combination of intimidation with infiltration and propaganda.” But the Bonhoeffers and their dissident circle “were convinced that Hitler’s military policies meant that European war was inevitable, and in all probability imminent.”21 If so, Bonhoeffer would be called for military service within a year. And so it was, as his disgust with ecclesial bureaucrats abroad exacerbated his anxieties about refusing conscription, he decided to leave Berlin for his second visit to America.22

  Reinhold Niebuhr had had his own sharp disagreements with leaders of the ecumenical m
ovement. He was outraged to discover that he had not been consulted about the request to Hodgson or any member of the Commission on Faith and Order. For, as he assured Bonhoeffer, he would have sided with the Confessing Church without reservation. Nonetheless, he was now more concerned about the escalating persecution of dissenting Christians in Germany than with WCC protocol. In fact, despite theological differences—Bonhoeffer for all his new realism remaining fairly neo-orthodox—Niebuhr was still the young German’s most ardent supporter on the American scene, writing numerous dispatches in the Christian Century, Dissent, and his own magazine, Christianity and Crisis, on the Confessing Church. As a result of Niebuhr’s efforts, Bonhoeffer was now known throughout Protestant circles as the courageous, lonely voice crying out against the Nazi church, and as founder of an illegal seminary. With recent reports from Germany telling of a steady increase in crackdowns and mass arrests, Niebuhr had concluded that Bonhoeffer’s only hope for avoiding prison was swift flight to the United States. But neither Niebuhr nor Bonhoeffer’s other America contacts knew that a year earlier, he had taken “the first step” into the resistance and its plot of tyrannicide.

  In the spring of 1939, Niebuhr had taken a leave from Union Theological Seminary to prepare to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Niebuhr was but the fifth American who had been invited to give these annual lectures on “natural theology” endowed in 1888 by Lord Gifford with a gift of 80,000 pounds sterling.23 The other four Americans had been William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, and William Hocking. Niebuhr’s talks would lead to his book The Nature and Destiny of Man. On a trip to London to visit Sabine and Gert, Bonhoeffer, joined by Bethge, spent a few days in April with the Niebuhrs on the northeast coast. Niebuhr’s wife, the former Ursula Mary Keppel-Compton, was a native of Southampton who had earned a double first at Oxford. She had heard a lot about Bonhoeffer from her husband and others who followed the German situation. When she finally met him, something in Bonhoeffer’s bearing and style convinced her immediately of his pomposity. It was not only the manner in which he sat on a “very inartistic sofa, updating Reinie on the situation in Germany.”24 Bonhoeffer was “too Teutonic,” “too Prussian,” Ursula said, for her tastes.25