He spent much of his time in concentration camps counseling others, when it was allowed. And he did not exhibit any self-pity in the years he was imprisoned, according to all who came into contact with him. However, he did insist that his children “speak only when they had something to say…and did not tolerate…self-pity or selfishness or boastful pride.” Bonhoeffer learned these lessons well. His twin sister, Sabine, wrote that her father “took it for granted that we would try to do what was right” but was kind and fair in his judgments when they did not live up to that expectation.
He had grown up in a remarkable household where intellect and ethics were of equal importance. Perhaps this stemmed from the pattern laid down in his childhood. To speak for those who had that right taken from them was part of Bonhoeffer’s raison d’etre. He was 39 when Hitler had him executed on April 9, 1945. This was a radical idea even in 1933 but one which Bonhoeffer proclaimed during all of his brief life. When a conflict among church leaders arose concerning whether or not to make peace with the Nazis by adopting the Aryan Paragraph in the new German Christian religious doctrine which declared that even baptized Jews had to have their own churches and could not expect to be part of the German church, Bonhoeffer responded by writing an essay, “The Church and the Jewish Question,” in which he stated that “where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God, here is the proof whether a church is still the church or not.” He firmly believed that to help Jews or any victimized people was the responsibility of the Christian church. Bonhoeffer’s philosophy was based on overcoming evil and the directive “do good to all men.” It was not a passive philosophy.
And Bonhoeffer, who was a man of God, was part of a plot to assassinate the man whose existence was anathema to any truly ethical human being. Hitler, of course, murdered anyone who wasn’t loyal to the philosophical idea that Hitler was an ubermensch. The two men led lives that were dramatically different but they shared one trait - to do away with those who opposed their resprective philosophy. Eric Metaxas has written a fascinating biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian, while simultaneously depicting the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich during the years 1922 – 1945.
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