Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Cost

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a series in three parts. Part 1: The Choice · Part 2: The Seminary · Part 3: The Cost

The moment

By 1939 war was close and Bonhoeffer was a marked man. Friends arranged a position for him in the United States, and that summer he sailed to New York. He was safe.

He stayed only a few weeks. He wrote to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr that he would have no right to take part in rebuilding Christian life in Germany after the war if he did not share the trials of that time with his people. He went home.

What he did

He accepted limits and kept working. In 1938 the Gestapo had banned him from Berlin. In 1940 he was barred from public speaking.

He joined the resistance. In October 1940 his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi helped place him in the Military Intelligence office, which had become a center of resistance to Hitler. Under that cover he traveled abroad in 1941 and 1942 to tell church contacts in other countries about the resistance and its plans.

He reported what was happening to the Jews. When the first deportations from Berlin began in October 1941, he and a colleague wrote a memorandum describing them and sent the report to contacts abroad and to trusted officers. He was also involved, at the edges, in a plan that helped a small group of Jews leave Germany.

He paid for it. He was arrested in April 1943. From prison he wrote the letters and papers that were published after the war. When the plot of July 20, 1944 failed and his connections were uncovered, he was moved to a Gestapo prison, then to Buchenwald, then to Flossenbürg. He was hanged there on April 9, 1945, weeks before the war in Europe ended. He was thirty-nine.

What leaders can take from this part

Trust is earned by sharing the cost. He believed he could not help lead his people afterward if he had been absent during their worst years. Leaders who are missing in the hard season lose their voice in the next one.

He chose responsibility over safety. The decision to return was made freely, with full knowledge of the risk.

His choices remain debated. Bonhoeffer was a pastor who became part of a conspiracy against the head of his own government. Christians have disagreed ever since about whether he was right. He did not claim to be innocent. He believed that refusing to act would also have made him guilty.

The work outlived him. He left no institution. He left students, a handful of books, and letters from a cell. Those have shaped Christian leaders for eighty years.

More leaders in history →