Strange Glory
Page 52
On April 4, 1945, the diaries of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, were discovered by General Walter Buhle in a deserted safe at the Armed Forces Supreme Command headquarters, which had housed the Abwehr offices. Furious at what he read in them the next day, Hitler ordered the summary execution of all the imprisoned Abwehr conspirators. Himmler relayed the order directly to the Gestapo, who coordinated the hurried transfers.
By this time, Bonhoeffer had been in Buchenwald for two months. After being put on the bus to what turned out to be Stalag 13b in Weiden, Bonhoeffer told his friend and coconspirator Joseph Müller that he had stopped denying his role in “Canaris’s political information service,” and that indeed he had done everything in his power to avoid the draft. But when the transport bus arrived in Weiden—where more than twelve thousand refugees from the east now overwhelmed a town of 27,000 inhabitants—it was waved on due south, to Regensburg.
On April 8, in an abandoned schoolhouse in the village of Schönberg, in the far hinterlands of Bavaria, Bonhoeffer and a small group of prisoners celebrated the second Sunday of Easter with a short worship service. Bonhoeffer had expressed reluctance when Hermann Pünder, a Roman Catholic conspirator from the Rhineland and a former senior official in the Reich, had asked him to lead the service for the men, mostly Catholics. It was not simply that he was a Protestant minister—though despite his lifelong attraction to Catholicism he respected the limits of his evangelical ordination. Rather, Bonhoeffer was concerned about the effect the service might have on the morale of one of their company, a self-professed atheist. Only when the atheist insisted did Bonhoeffer oblige.68 He read the scriptural passages from the daily Losungen, Isaiah 53:5 (“But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed”) and 1 Peter 1:3 (“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”). Not long after the service concluded, two guards arrived for him. “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready and come with us!” one ordered.69
The SS transported him by bus to the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, a village in the Oberpfalz region of upper Bavaria near the border of Czechoslovakia, home to rich quarries and a ruined medieval castle. For three centuries granite had been mined in the stony ground of the Upper Palatinate Forest, so it was not surprising when the Nazis carved a concentration camp into a shallow valley on the outskirts of town. Since 1938 Flossenbürg had served the Third Reich, the German Stone and Building Works fabricating building materials by forced labor, quarrying granite for the Autobahn and the Reich party buildings.70 Among the several thousand prisoners undergoing the SS-designed “work cure” were “vagabonds,” “beggars,” “pimps,” “gypsies,” and “antisocials,” according to Himmler’s protocol, along with the men who formed the Pink Triangle, the special section in Flossenbürg for homosexuals.
On the night of April 8, in a hurriedly convened court martial, SS Judge Otto Thorluck arraigned, convicted, and condemned Bonhoeffer. No witness gave testimony, and the accused was allowed no defense counsel.
The next morning, April 9, Bonhoeffer and five others, among them Canaris and Oster, were forced to undress and were led naked down the short steps from the detention barracks to the gallows that had been erected against a high brick wall. In this small courtyard more than a thousand people had been executed in the past year. Later, at a war crimes tribunal, H. Fischer Hüllstrung, the camp physician who attended to Bonhoeffer in his final hour, would say that he saw the pastor “bow to his knees and pray fervently to God”; he would add that, again, at the place of execution, Bonhoeffer had spoken a short prayer, this before ascending the last few steps, “brave composed.… [H]is death ensued after a few seconds.”71
The disposition of Bonhoeffer’s remains is unknown. Most of the dead at Flossenbürg were cremated in a facility in the valley just outside the walls of the camp. Photographs show the crematorium and the heap of ash that collected in the shape of a pyramid beside the building. As one of the “special” prisoners, whom the Nazis knew would be of great interest to the Allies, Bonhoeffer was likely cremated shortly after his death. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, stricken to see Bonhoeffer and his other comrades murdered, also suffered the horror of watching from his cell window as the bodies were burned on “piles of wood out in the open.”72 “His ashen remains may rest here, then,” Schlabrendorff later speculated. The crematorium at Flossenbürg had broken down a few days earlier and was temporarily out of service.
But another possibility exists. When the Allies liberated the camp two weeks later, on April 23, they discovered piles of corpses. Writing in 1989, the American Leslie A. Thompson, chaplain of the 97th Infantry Division, recalled his arrival sometime after the liberation: “Two days later a mass burial ceremony was held for the unburied dead. The chosen site was a vacant area in the town of Flossenbürg. The Jewish chaplain gave the ceremony for the Jewish persons, the Catholic ceremony was given by Chaplain John Tivenan, and I gave the Protestant ceremony.” The American officers in charge ordered the townspeople to attend. It is possible that Bonhoeffer was buried in one of these unmarked graves.
Evidence long available to scholars but often neglected in popular accounts contradicts Hüllstrung’s story of Bonhoeffer’s relatively merciful—or at least mercifully quick—end. There is in fact reason to believe that he and his fellow conspirators—Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Canaris’s deputy general Hans Oster, the military jurist General Karl Sack, General Friedrich von Rabenau, the businessman Theodor Strünck, and the resistance activist Ludwig Gehre—died a slow and tortured death, after “prolonged barbarity.”73 The Danish commercial attaché and resistance organizer Jørgen L. F. Morgensen, one of Bonhoeffer’s fellow prisoners in Flossenbürg, dismantled the prison doctor’s claims in a narrative written shortly after the camp’s liberation.74 “Those who were sentenced to death were always murdered individually,” Morgensen explained. “The prisoner was taken from his cell and lead to the washing rooms, where they undressed him and tied his arms behind his back with a strong paper-cord they had previously prepared. The nude prisoner was then led to the exit in the middle of the compound and forced to walk along the building on the outside, past the windows, to the canopied place of execution where the rope was waiting for them above the hooks on the wall.” The executions of April 9, 1945, took an unusually long time: from six a.m. until noon.75
FLOSSENBÜRG CONCENTRATION CAMP, THE SITE OF BONHOEFFER’S EXECUTION
Though Morgensen was not an eyewitness, the day after Bonhoeffer’s execution he saw in the prison courtyard an L-shaped hook, its long cantilevered arm culminating in a thick tip, in the prison courtyard. Bonhoeffer must have been hanged like “animals in a slaughterhouse,” Morgensen concluded. “Under the weight of a normal person, the hook would be elastic, so that, given the appropriate length of rope the victim would slightly touch the ground. In this way the long duration of the hanging can be explained. I met one of the prison guards in the afternoon, who was still visibly thrilled.”76
And the barbarism would not end all at once. On April 23, the same day the Americans liberated the concentration camp in Flossenbürg, Klaus Bonhoeffer and Rüdiger Schleicher were taken from the prison at Lehrter Strasse 3 and shot in cold blood by firing squad. By then the meadows and fields of Flossenbürg and the Upper Palatinate Forest had already greened in the warm sunshine of an early spring.
Schlabrendorff would owe his survival to a bookkeeping error. Distracted by the chaos engulfing the camp—as the Allied troops approached, and the remaining prisoners were hurriedly evacuated, either transported to Dachau or marched to death by the indefatigable SS—an administrator at Flossenbürg accidentally omitted Schlabrendorff’s name from the killing roster. At first it appeared deserted. But as soldiers made their way inside, they discovered more than sixteen hundred crit
ically ill men: Jews and other non-Aryans, political prisoners, and homosexuals, who had been abandoned in the evacuation. Thompson, accompanied by the American rabbi assigned to the XII Corps, reported seeing “a large cistern-like area with an opening about six or eight feet in diameter,” full of charred bones, and then, farther toward the forest, a stack of decomposing bodies. “As I looked down,” the minister said, “I prayed that God would have mercy on those who had been so mercilessly treated.”77
Bonhoeffer had always lived with premonitions of an early death. His cousin Hans-Christoph von Hase recalled a visit to Grunewald in spring 1929, when a twenty-three-year-old Dietrich, “sitting at the window of his study,” suddenly declared, “I will not grow old; I’ll die when I’m forty years old.” Hase was taken aback by the remark, which seemed, with its hint of vanity and bravado, unbecoming a young theologian. He counseled his cousin to “give thanks to God for his robust health and energy” and anticipate a full and happy life. But gazing into the lush spring garden below, Bonhoeffer would not relent, only replying, “Yes, that’s how it is.”78 He would share this premonition many times with friends and other relatives over the next decade. “In a more dangerous period in 1937,” Gert Leibholz, Sabine’s husband, visited him as he lay stricken with pneumonia at his parents’ new house in Charlottenburg. From his sickbed, the young pastor prophesied, “You and I will not live long lives.” As it happened, Leibholz would live to eighty, dying in 1984. “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? Follow thou me.”
By late May 1945, Bethge, who had been released from prison on April 25, was able to confirm the prisoners’ deaths and convey the news to the families. Shortly after his arrest, Bonhoeffer had written his last will and testament, addressing the envelope: “To be delivered to my relatives in the case of my death.” To his parents he offered his eternal gratitude. To his godchildren, six in all, he willed his Mexican rug, a painting by his great-uncle Leopold Kalckreuth, the jewelry box he’d purchased in Spain, his clavichord (if Christophe von Dohnányi “would take pleasure in it”), his baptismal watch, a gold pencil, a chair from Trent, the crucifixion scene painted on canvas, and books. To Maria Wedemeyer, who had made a desperate, futile attempt to find her fiancé in Flossenbürg—walking seven kilometers to the camp after spending two days on trains, only to be turned away “without any prospect of hearing anything”—Bonhoeffer left word that she could select an item among his belongings that she might “cherish as a remembrance.”79
BONHOEFFER’S CELL, FLOSSENBURG CONCENTRATION CAMP. PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN BY THE AUTHOR, MARCH 2013
Bonhoeffer bequeathed the bulk of his worldly effects and his most precious possessions to Bethge: his library and Rembrandt Bible, the Dürer Apostles, his grand piano, the Audi and the motorcycle, the standing desk he’d used in Altdamm, the Chinese and all the Persian rugs, the Grunewald reproduction that hung over his bed in Finkenwalde (“where is that, by the way?”), his fountain pen, the Fra Angelico print, and one of his two icons. All these things, Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend, had “significance for their shared labor and life,” since they had first met in 1935 on a summer evening near the Baltic Sea. Bethge should also have their six Indian scorpion spoons (which Paula Bonhoeffer was safeguarding in Charlottenburg), along with the alpine landscape by Stanislav Kalckreuth (Bonhoeffer’s great-great-uncle, and Leopold’s father), his entire life’s savings, and whatever remained of his clothes.
Bonhoeffer left Bethge his letters and papers as well, hinting that one day they might deserve a fresh reading. “It would be very nice if you didn’t throw away my theological letters,” he said. “One writes some things in a more uninhibited and lively way in a letter than in a book, and in a conversation through letters I often have better ideas than when I’m writing for myself.” At the time of Bonhoeffer’s arrest in April 1943, his Ethics remained in preliminary drafts, and the writings that would be collected, under the title in English Letters and Papers from Prison, were still scattered throughout the family.
Bonhoeffer insisted finally that Bethge not bother himself with funeral arrangements. It would be quite appropriate if the surviving brethren took care of these details. Bonhoeffer offered these final lines to Eberhard with “the grateful awareness” of having lived richly and abundantly, in the certainty of forgiveness, and in the hope of eternal life.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
~
In 2007, I served as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Visiting Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin. With a cozy office on Burgstrasse just across the River Spree from the Berliner Dom, soon enough I made my first trip to the Staatsbibliothek, the capacious city library designed by Hans Scharoun near the Potsdamer Platz, and there, with the kindly assistance of Dr. Jutta Weber, the director of special collections, gained access to the Dietrich Bonhoeffer archives. This collection, which had been recently obtained from the estate of Bonhoeffer’s biographer and closest friend, Eberhard Bethge, filled more than twenty-five cases and included lectures, letters, books, photographs, notebooks, and journals; and while many appeared in the sixteen-volume Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, the singularities of Bonhoeffer’s life, the evidence of which I held in my hands—his registration papers for a new Audi convertible, a bank slip from the joint account he shared with Bethge, his file of magazine articles and pamphlets about African Americans, inventories of his wardrobe, and landscape photographs he made in Libya and Morocco—illuminated an intriguingly different character from the one I had carried with me since writing a doctoral dissertation on his philosophical thought nearly two decades earlier. I felt the gentle nudge into biography.
Since 2007, I have returned often to Europe, with Berlin as my home base, and with the goal of visiting the towns and regions where Bonhoeffer had lived and that influenced his journey from sheltered child of the Berlin-Grunewald to conspirator in a plot to kill Hitler. This meant trips to Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), Tübingen, Rome, the Baltic seaboard and Pomeranian plains, Barcelona, London, Sigtuna-Stockholm, New York, Geneva, Ettal, Prague, Friedrichsbrunn in the eastern Harz Mountains, and the village and concentration camp of Flossenburg, where Bonhoeffer was executed on April 9, 1945. When circumstances forced me to cancel my trip to Tripoli and Tetouan, I turned to Brian L. McClaren’s Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya and Paul Bowles’s memoirs for atmospherics on Bonhoeffer’s two weeks in North Africa. The travels were rich and rewarding, but always the best part was returning to Berlin and to quiet and easygoing Prenzlauer Berg, my adopted neighborhood. I offer my heartfelt thanks to the friends and acquaintances in this wonderful city who helped make the difficult work so enjoyable: Kara and Wolfgang Huber, Helmut and Erika Reihlan, Christian Nowatsky, Theresa Clasen, Wim and Donata Wenders, Sibylle Tönnies, Webster Younce, and Tammy Murphy.
Time is indeed the writer and scholar’s most precious commodity. But the time to read and write and amble through another person’s story requires money as well; so I hope to be ever mindful—and appreciative—of the persons, institutions, and programs that allowed me to focus on large sections of the book with a minimum of distractions:
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for the award of a Fellowship in the Creative Arts in the fall of 2009;
the Lilly Endowment of Indianapolis, and especially Craig Dykstra, former vice president for religion at Lilly, and his successor, Chris Coble, apart from whose generous support the small village of students and scholars that clustered this project—and the countless discussions on matters Bonhoefferesque—would never have found structure or nourishment;
the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, Meredith Woo, who offered encouragement when it was sorely needed and during her successful tenure inspired new institutional partnerships with Humboldt University, Berlin; and Cristina Della Coletta, associate dean for the arts and humanities, who coordinated logistical details for the research leaves, including a semester leave generously funded by the UVa Sesquicentennial Fellow
ship in the academic year 2011–12.
In 2010, the American Academy in Berlin honored me with the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Prize and a six-month writing residence. The daily exchanges with fellow scholars and writers in the Academy’s beautiful research community on the Wannsee entertained as often as they inspired; and over the course of the term—and a winter that brought the longest stretch of days without direct sunlight in recent memory—I found the confidence to turn what had originated as a book on Bonhoeffer in America into a full life. I will forever treasure the convivial hours spent with Judith Wechsler, David Abraham, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Andrew Norman, Camilo Vergara, Francisco Goldman, and the irrepressible Peter Wortsman. The Academy’s remarkable staff unfailingly attended to every detail of my family’s well-being and patiently answered my random, frequent questions. I trust I have not failed to note the hospitality of other staff members when I thank in particular Simone Donecker, Cornelia Peiper, R. J. Megill, Christina Wölpert, Alissa Burmeister, Peter Salamon, Malte Mau, Yolande Korb, Reinold Kegel, Stefan Czoske, Gabariela Schlickum, Andrew White, and the tenacious Gary Smith, the academy’s executive director.
Gratitude is further due to the many friends who sustained my work in indirect but deeply felt ways: Mark Gornik, Jon Foreman, David Dark, Sarah Masen, Mark Edmundson, Mary Catherine Wimer, Locke Ogens, Richard Lee, Susan Holman, Ralph Luker, Daniel Berg, Carlene Bauer, Don Shriver, Diane McWhorter, Mick Watson, Stanley Hauerwas, Denise Giardina, Amy Laura Hall, Shea Tuttle, Kristina Garcia Wade, and Maran and Roy Hange. Numerous colleagues shared ideas and answered questions on topics related to German thought and history and to Bonhoeffer’s extensive travels, among whom I wish to thank Alon Confino, Gene Rogers, Claudia Koonz, Paul Daffyd Jones, Michael Bray, Chuck Mathewes, Vigen Guroian, Heather Warren, Tal Howard, Chad Welmon, William McDonald, Jalane Schmidt, Asher Biemann, John Portman, and Ralph Luker.