The promise made by Gestapo officials that those affected by this action have the opportunity to seek new accommodations was a despicable lie. Baptized Jews were included in the round-up as well.7
Speer had only become head of armaments in 1942; until then, he functioned as the General Building Inspector for the Reich, where his spectacular projects included plans to redesign Berlin as the Welthauptstadt Germania, the “World Capital of Germania,” showcased by a massive sprawl of fortress-like government and commercial buildings, spacious boulevards, and an ornamental lake encircled by Nazi statuary, all ordered along an East-West axis that climaxed to the oceanic Grand Hall, planned (had it been built) as the largest enclosed space in the world, enough to hold sixteen St. Peter’s Domes. Emerging from a desert of stone, Germania would be the capital of the thousand year Reich.8 Following the deportation the apartments were sealed by the block captains.
On November 22, Bonhoeffer had recovered enough to compose a Finkenwalde newsletter, informing the dispersed and shrinking brethren that two more of them, Edgar Engler and Robert Zenke, had been killed at the front. “It is very, very sad,” Bonhoeffer wrote.9 By early December, he felt up to resuming work on Ethics, installing himself at Klein Krössin, the Kleist estate in Kieckow owned by his friend Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, for this purpose. But on the fourth Sunday of Advent, he would return to Berlin for Christmas. He and Bethge celebrated their reunion with a rendition of “Es ging ein Sämann aus zu säen seinen Samen” (“The sower went out to sow his seed”), one of Heinrich Schütz’s cantatas for voices and instruments. They would reprise the piece for Paula’s birthday on December 30.
New Year’s 1942 would see Bonhoeffer fully restored to health but anguished at word that more brethren had perished. In his second pastoral letter in as many months, he informed his former seminarians that “our dear brothers Bruno Kerlin, Gerhard Vibrans, and Gerhard Lehne … now sleep awaiting the great Easter Day of resurrection.” The next month there would be more losses still: Christoph Harhausen, Günther Christ, Wolfgang Krause, and Johannes Staedler; Joachim Staude had been missing since August. The aforementioned Vibrans was Eberhard’s cousin—the same one who years earlier had been the unintended cause of Bonhoeffer’s jealous anger after being invited by Bethge to join the pair on a trip to Switzerland—had been vaporized by an air-strike bomb “just as he was about to sing with his comrades from Ein neues Lied.”10
On January 20, 1942, in the third year of war, fifteen high-ranking civil servants, SS, and party officials gathered on the Grosser Wannsee, at Villa Minoux, the guesthouse of the Gestapo and the Security Service in the southeast suburbs of Berlin. The narrow road along the lake’s southern shore connected the lavish summer homes of Berlin’s industrial and cultural elites. But of course it was not a summer holiday that drew the Nazi caravan of black limousines to the snow-covered road and finally to 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee in the early hours of that morning. Their purpose: to outline the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”11
Reinhard Heydrich, an ambitious thirty-eight-year-old navy officer from an artistic Catholic family in Halle, had been personally selected by Hitler as the chief executor of the mission. On September 24, 1941, Hitler had appointed him Reich protector of Bohemia-Moravia, giving him the authority to crush the Czech resistance and to hasten the deportations of Jews from the occupied Czech territories to Poland.12 By the time of the meeting on the Wannsee, just a few months later, he had risen to become chief of the Reich Security Office, overseeing the Gestapo, the general police force, and the homeland security service (the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) for all of Germany.13
In a calm and meticulous manner, Heydrich outlined “the expulsion of the Jews from the living space of the German people” and “from every sphere of life of the German people.”14 For maximal efficiency as specified in section II of the four-point Wannsee Protocol (drafted by Heydrich and his assistant, Adolf Eichmann), the “organizational, policy and technical prerequisites for the Final Solution” would now need to be coordinated by Himmler, the Reichsführer-SS, and Heydrich himself as the chief of the SD.15 Yet the Wannsee Protocol reached far beyond the German-speaking nations, far beyond Europe, in fact, envisioning a day when the entire world would be made free of Jews; when all “enemies, parasites, and germs” (as Hitler called them) have been exterminated, there would reign a “supra-individual” Aryan purity.
The Swiss human rights commissioner Carl Jacob Burckhardt would later call Heydrich “the young evil god of death.” His squinting, suspicious gaze could indeed produce a chilling effect, but there was nothing demonic, let alone godlike, in his background. Like the fifteen other participants—including SS Oberführer Gerhard Klopfer, Otto Hofmann, who ran the Office for Race and Settlement, and Nazi Foreign Minister Martin Luther—Heydrich, a classically trained violinist and competitive fencer, was a respectable scion of the educated German middle class. Two-thirds of those in attendance possessed a university degree, and more than half had earned a doctorate. The drafters of the Wannsee Protocol were also conspicuously young: half in their forties and five in their thirties.16
In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented the various department heads a plan of unprecedented ambition, one to achieve the destruction of the entire Jewish population of Europe and French North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). Those fit for labor might be assigned, temporarily, to roadwork and other construction projects, but there would be no ultimate exemptions from the Final Solution: the workers, too, would be annihilated once their work was done. As Mark Roseman notes in The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, “Despite the euphemism of evacuation, the minutes unmistakably contain a plan for genocide—formulated in sober, bureaucratic language, deliberated on in civilized surroundings in a once cosmopolitan suburb of Berlin.”17
Police actions against Jews since 1933, Heydrich explained, had been woefully deficient, though not for want of effort: there had been the continual pogroms, the disease-infested ghettos, the campaigns of “relocation,” the forced-labor camps, as well as various other strategies of legalized repression and humiliation. And as Soviet and Allied forces steadily pushed back the German lines in late 1942, most Jews in German-occupied Europe were being sent directly to the death camps if not murdered on the spot. Even so, by the time of the Wannsee Conference, with the war entering its third year, 75 percent of those European Jews eventually to be exterminated were still alive. Two years later, however, by Christmas 1943, the same percentage of the eventual six million would be dead. As Roseman writes, “Nineteen forty-two was the most astounding year of murder in the Holocaust, one of the most astounding years of murder in the whole history of mankind.”18 It was largely thanks to the villainous efficiency of Heydrich, who by the spring of 1943 managed to have five new killing centers up and running in occupied Poland.
The months between January 1942 and his arrest in April 1943 would be among the most wrenching for Bonhoeffer, the demands of discipleship becoming ever more difficult to reconcile with the duplicity he’d undertaken. He would concede uncertainty. He would renounce pretensions of saintliness. He would seek only to discern the responsible course of action. It meant learning to see “events from below” and banishing pious cant. Only by aspiring to be “simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings” could he and his comrades navigate a way through the “great masquerade of evil,” the ubiquitous fog of propaganda and deception. Still, his struggle would not end heroically.19
Three days after the Wannsee conference, Bonhoeffer and his brother Klaus, who was now the chief legal counsel of Lufthansa, met with Helmuth von Moltke, Ludwig von Guttenberg, and Klaus’s brother-in-law Justus Delbrück, at the Venetia Hotel. The wider German resistance network was seeking various means of overthrowing the regime, but in Berlin the conspiracy focused solely on killing Hitler. It had been so ever since Hitler assumed the role of commander-in-chief, after removing the head of the army on December 19, 1941. Also present at the
Venetia was the young lawyer Fabian von Schlabrendorff, adjutant to Henning von Tresckow, chief of staff of Army Group Centre, the force that carried out Operation Barbarosa, as the invasion of the Soviet Union was called. Bonhoeffer had been introduced to Schlabrendorff one year earlier at Klein Krössin. Now, as plans began to develop quickly, Bonhoeffer assured him and the others that, despite knowing nothing about guns and explosives, he was willing to “join any attempt on Hitler’s life if such action were asked of him.” His one condition was that he be given “sufficient warning” so that he might first officially sever his pastoral ties to the Confessing Church. Tyrannicide was a crime that the church would not condone—nor would he have wished it to.20
It must be allowed that prevailing views of Bonhoeffer’s part in the resistance retain a certain gilt of hagiography. Even the assertion of his membership can be misleading; the resistance would remain a fluid entity, spread over numerous cells, mostly uncoordinated and unrelated. One might work on behalf of the general cause, but one could not join the movement as one might a club or political party. Bonhoeffer would indeed be drawn into treasonous conspiracy and pay for it with his life. But as the scholar Sabine Dramm argues in her seminal study of Bonhoeffer and the resistance, the actions for which he would be condemned are but “a component” in “the complex inner and outer developmental process of his life as a whole”; which is to say, his decisions are fraught with doubt and largely unscripted, as perhaps most heroic deeds are in retrospect. Nevertheless, to speak of Bonhoeffer as a hero is to promote an oversimplified understanding—in Dramm’s words, a “bland interpretation,” one that ill-serves the reality of his role or the complexity of his motivations, in particular his deep ambivalence about the proposed assassination.21
In her own forthright efforts to temper the heroic narrative, Victoria Barnett, a Bonhoeffer scholar and director of church relations at the United States Holocaust Museum, has claimed that Bonhoeffer acted more on the margins than at the center of the resistance, such as there was a center. His voluble opposition to Hitler was a stirring counterpoint to the compliant rhetoric of most Protestant ministers, paralyzed as they were by a typically Lutheran veneration of the state. His clarion eloquence would justly win him many admirers—among not only popular chroniclers but scholars as well. But it has also given rise to “a kind of mythology”—one that proposes a more dramatic and central involvement for Bonhoeffer than can be asserted by the evidence.22
Bonhoeffer received no financial compensation from the Abwehr. Whatever income he had during these years, modest to say the least, came from a half-time stipend from the Old Prussian Union, the so-called “love offerings” of wealthy friends, and, as ever, his parents. His duties as a conspirator were actually few, as were the fruits of his efforts. He played no active part in any of the assassination plots—which, by one count, numbered well over a hundred. There may even be some truth to Dramm’s assertion that Dohnányi might have drawn his brother-in-law into the conspiracy for the sole purpose of securing the exemption from military service he so desperately wanted.23 The point of such observations is not to detract from Bonhoeffer’s contribution but, rather, to emphasize the peculiarity of his vocation as a minister to the conspirators, of his straining to establish within the chaos of the conspiracy a space for Christian reflection.24
Bonhoeffer himself would never imagine his actions as heroic in the least, describing himself as an “accomplice conscious of his guilt.”25 He offered the sacraments to traitors, subversives, and deserters. He prayed for the conspiracy, for the defeat of his nation. And when asked, he prayed with the conspirators. To those who had acquiesced to the imperative of killing Hitler, and even to those plotting the deed directly, he presented a priestly objectivity—more so than detachment. His flock ran the gamut from Christians, atheists, and chastened romantics; these were men and women whose courage and commitment to righteous action—to the good of humanity—existed beyond churchly constraints and exhortations. Bonhoeffer’s distinctive contribution to this fellowship was to articulate with authority the moral justification for their goal, unsettling, as Robin Lovin has described it, the state’s traditional claim upon the individual’s absolute loyalty, a claim “based on patriotism and the sanctity of military oaths.” Luther’s Large Catechism had taught that only God or his governments on earth could justly take a life. It was for Bonhoeffer to stake out the moral ground for action that tradition condemned as the sin of murder.26
Meetings with Barth—with perhaps the one exception—had formed some of the most pleasant memories of his previous two trips to Switzerland. In the professor’s study on the second floor of the plain house on Bruderholzallee, the two would ruminate over “history and eschatology,” “Christian responsibility,” the “forgiveness of sins,” and other doctrinal matters, great and small. Bonhoeffer would leave Basel with “the confidence” that he would enjoy such stimulation again.
But in the past year, Barth had grown suspicious of Bonhoeffer’s freedom to travel abroad, and then baffled by news of his affiliation with the Abwehr. Where once his travel and speech had been severely restricted, now suddenly, it seemed, he was free to go anywhere. His errands, Barth is reported to have said, were “unsettling as to [their] objectives.” His third and final trip to Switzerland would thus occasion Barth’s most serious doubts concerning “the circumstances of Bonhoeffer’s visit.”27
For his part, Bonhoeffer was not unaware of the impression he was leaving among all but the small circle of friends who knew what he was up to. He realized that in certain quarters it was whispered that he’d become a Nazi sympathizer. His ecumenical contacts alerted him that Barth was among his doubters, which claim, initially at least, Bonhoeffer was prepared to dismiss as “overinflated rumor.”28 When it was confirmed, however, Barth’s suspicion hit him hard. Deeply embittered, Bonhoeffer wondered how his friend could possibly suspect him of having so compromised his theological convictions. In fact, such suspicion on Barth’s part was not so unusual: after his ouster from Bonn, he tended to imagine anyone who disagreed with his dogmatic theology to be guilty of all kinds of mischief.
On May 17, 1942, Bonhoeffer complained in a letter to Barth that notably lacked the accustomed deferential tone. “It is most reprehensible to sow and encourage mistrust,” he said. “Our duty is rather to foster and strengthen confidence wherever we can.” Trust was the only thing left in a world consumed by “deception and lies.” But under the “curse of suspicion,” no friendship could be expected to survive. Bonhoeffer told Barth he could imagine no greater, rarer, or happier blessing than that of erring on the side of charity when a friend appears to be moving in strange ways.29
As a Swiss academic, Barth was an outsider to the German plotters, but that would not keep him from expressing sharp criticisms of the resistance, as he became aware of their plans. The Berlin conspirators operated with a naive confidence in the dissident members of the military: so he’d concluded in spring 1942, as if he were the first one to hold the view.30 In fact, both the Allied governments and the majority of those in other parts of the German resistance had come to the same conclusion. But those like Dohnányi would continue to believe that only the critics had the luxury of criticism. As far as he was concerned, there was no better hope for overthrowing the Reich than the plan involving the upper echelons of the military.
Barth would never respond to Bonhoeffer’s letter directly, being consumed with work on the latest volume of his Church Dogmatics. In March 1942, volume II/2, his monumental study of the doctrine of election (covering the thorny issue of divine predestination), had been rushed to press. “A number of unbound copies” would soon be smuggled into Germany—under the innocuous title Calvin Studies—one finding its way to Bonhoeffer. Now Barth was focused on the doctrine of creation, beginning with a “thorough-going exposition of the contents of the first two chapters of the Bible”; this minutely detailed work he would pursue with the music of Mozart “in my ears”—especially the flute conce
rtos, The Magic Flute, and the horn and bassoon concertos.31 Nevertheless, Barth knew he had injured Bonhoeffer, and he sought to reassure him, albeit through his assistant, Charlotte von Kirschbaum. Above all, Kirschbaum wrote, Bonhoeffer should be assured of a welcome in Barth’s home no less gracious than he’d known before. Overnight accommodations, however, would need to be arranged elsewhere, as “we no longer have a guest bed here.” Kirschbaum denied that Barth had even “for a second” distrusted Bonhoeffer and further claimed that despite whatever misgivings he may have had, the master had written “to you immediately and directly.”32 He had not provided grist for the rumor mill.
Bonhoeffer, needless to say, had never received any such communications. Still, he was thrilled to have a signed copy of Church Dogmatics II/2, carrying the galley proofs with him for a leisurely stay at a friend’s summer cottage on Lake Geneva, and various other travels, often in the company of Bethge, to whom he read passages aloud.
Bonhoeffer and Barth would meet briefly on the afternoon of May 25. During their visit, news broke on BBC radio that Vyacheslav Molotov had arrived in London to sign the British-Soviet treaty.33 When the presenter remarked that the treaty precluded either country from reaching a separate peace with Germany, Bonhoeffer said, “Well, now it’s all over!”34
Through the spring of 1942, Bonhoeffer’s base remained his parents’ house on Marienburger Allee—at least this is where he kept his books, notes, and other worldly possessions. Three days after returning from Switzerland—this was his third trip to Zurich and Basel in the past year and would be his last—he traveled to Sweden on a small aircraft through a violent summer storm, where a secret meeting with George Bell had been arranged in the village of Sigtuna, twenty miles northwest of Stockholm. It was to prove mainly an exercise in solidarity, like most of his meetings, achieving no tangible result. But to the resistance, Bonhoeffer’s ability to articulate with utmost clarity the state of the nation and of the conspiracy mattered greatly; for Dohnányi and the others believed that what their emissary said to Bell would be transmitted to the highest “levels of the British government.” The job Dohnányi had entrusted to Bonhoeffer was, they thought, vital to the greater purpose of persuading the Allies to back the conspirators.
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