[Dialogue] Happy Birthday, Dietrich

[KroegerD@aol.com]

Published on Saturday, February  4, 2006 by the Madison _Capital Times_ 
(http://www.madison.com/)  (Wisconsin)  
Bonhoeffer's Message: No  Compromise With Evil 
by Steve Argo
Seekers of peace and social justice should take note of today's 100th  
birthday celebration of the life of German theologian and Nazi resister  Dietrich 
Bonhoeffer.  
As much as anyone - and as early as anyone - Bonhoeffer spoke out  against 
the wickedness of Adolf Hitler's regime and took some of the most  significant 
actions to thwart it. It was Bonhoeffer and a small circle of  Lutheran 
ministers who first condemned the virulent anti-Semitism and  reawakened militarism 
in Germany. It was Bonhoeffer who most loudly  denounced his country's suicidal 
summons for war. It was Bonhoeffer who  attacked the timidity of German 
churches when they shrank away from the  most severe moral crisis in a thousand 
years.  
His life deserves wider recognition.  
It was only two days into Hitler's reign that Bonhoeffer delivered a  radio 
address critical of the Nazi party. He warned Germans for buying  into a 
dangerous cult that would lead to the eradication of their  freedoms. He labeled the 
strutting, newly installed chancellor a Verfuhrer  - "misleader."  
Disturbed at the way Jews were being hauled off to the ghettos,  Bonhoeffer 
called upon fellow ministers to speak up. The churches  responded with sermons 
and empty platitudes. Rather than standing  alongside the disowned and 
dispossessed, the churches rolled over. He  admonished his brethren that they had a 
biblical command to "see the great  events of the world from the perspective of 
the outcasts, the suspects,  the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, 
the reviled - in short, from  the perspective of those who suffer."  
Then came Kristallnacht - "night of the broken glass."  
After thousands of Jewish homes, churches and synagogues were burned  and 
ransacked by Nazi thugs, the response of most German citizens was a  deafening 
silence. Bonhoeffer was livid. "If the synagogues are set on  fire today," he 
warned, "it will be the churches that will be burned  tomorrow."  
Dejected and confused, he sailed to the United States for a yearlong  
teaching sabbatical in June 1939. The ostensible reason was to let the  political 
storms in Europe die down and then return the following year.  The more 
compelling reason was that by this time - only weeks before the  Nazi invasion of 
Poland - Bonhoeffer was a marked man. His friends in  America had repeatedly warned 
him that to remain in Germany was folly.  Either he would be drafted or 
jailed or shot. Come again to America and  stay for a while, they said. War is 
imminent in Europe. It's safe over  here.  
Then, only two weeks later, Bonhoeffer dramatically changed course. "I  have 
made a terrible mistake in coming to America," he confessed to his  host, 
Reinhold Niebuhr. "I must live through this difficult period of our  history with 
the people of Germany... (We) face the terrible alternative  of either willing 
the defeat of our nation in order that civilization may  survive, or willing 
the victory of our nation and thereby destroying  civilization. I know which 
of these alternatives I must choose - but I  cannot make that choice in 
security... . I must go back."  
His boat departed for Europe on July 8, 1939.  
Three weeks later the war began.  
Between 1940 and 1943 Bonhoeffer was active in the movement to topple  
Hitler, by coup if possible or assassination if necessary. Defending his  actions to 
his sister-in-law, Emmi Bonhoeffer, he explained, "If I see a  madman driving 
a car into a group of innocent bystanders, then I can't  simply wait for the 
catastrophe and then comfort the wounded and bury the  dead. I must try to 
wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the  driver."  
These efforts met with complete failure.  
In April 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested and sent to prison.  
After the failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, he was taken  to 
Buchenwald and then to the Bavarian prison at Flossenburg. A British  inmate, 
Captain Payne Best, recalled that Bonhoeffer "always seemed to  diffuse an 
atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every small event of life,  and deep gratitude 
for the mere fact that he was alive."  
On the morning of April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and several of his  
fellow conspirators were executed. He had just turned 39.  
Steve Argo teaches history at Baraboo High School and is a member of  the 
First Congregational United Church of Christ in Baraboo. 
© 2006 The Capital Times  
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