Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Nationality

Germany

Date of Birth

1906

Date of Death

1945

Political
Preference

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German evangelical pastor and theologian. Born in Breslau, Germany, Bonhoeffer studied theology in Germany and then went on to study under Reinhold Niebuhr in the United States in 1930. Returning to Germany a year later, Bonhoeffer was an avid ecumenist and an opponent of the Nazi regime since its rise to power in 1933. Despite Bonhoeffer’s efforts to elect non-Nazi officials, a high number of key Church positions in Germany went to the pro-Nazi faction in the church of the German Christians. When the German Christians introduced the so-called Aryan Paragraph into the church, dictating that all pastors of Jewish ancestry be removed from their posts, Bonhoeffer joined Martin Niemöller‘s Pastors’ Emergency League in protest. The Emergency League later transformed into the Confessing Church, which opposed the attempts of the Nazi government to install regime puppets on ecclesial chairs and to interfere in church affairs.

Bonhoeffer participated in the discussions of the Life and Work Movement, and, at its biannual council meeting in Fanø in 1934, was one of the first to attempt to rally the ecumenical movement at large against the German authorities’ infringement on the churches.

He was the head of an underground seminary of Confession Church members in Finkenwalde until it was closed by the Gestapo in 1937, and was in contact with both the World Council of Churches, English contacts like Bishop George Bell, and the German resistance network of the Freiburg Circle during the war. Later, he became an agent for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organisation, a position he used to courier for the German resistance movement and to help German Jews escape to Switzerland. He was arrested in 1943 and executed by hanging at Flossenburg concentration camp on 9 April 1945.