Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Resistance (review)

In the foreword to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship (New York, 1958, 1995), George Bell, bishop of Chichester, wrote that “Dietrich himself was a martyr many times before he died” (p. 11). Against the “idolatry” of Hitler and his supporters, contended Bell, Bonhoeffer had stood as “one of the first as well as one of the bravest witnesses” (p. 11). In arguing largely against this long-prevailing Bonhoeffer hagiography, Sabine Dramm offers sobering balance.

Dramm is especially successful in explaining how Bonhoeffer’s family and collegial contacts brought him into the orbit of those within the German military opposed to Hitler and his criminal regime, including Hans von Dohnanyi (Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law) and Major General Hans Oster. In spite of his reputation as an opponent of Hitler and in spite of the fact that that he faced police restrictions on his rights of residence, speaking, and publishing, Bonhoeffer was able to use these contacts (remarkably) to gain a position under the German Military Intelligence Foreign Office starting in late 1939. While serving in this clandestine center of resistance, Bonhoeffer was protected from frontline military duty (against which his Christian conscience objected). He also served as a bridge between the resistance and the Christian Churches abroad, particularly in Great Britain. As a purported secret agent, Bonhoeffer made several journeys to neutral Switzerland, where he met, among others, Karl Barth. Here, he hoped to serve notice that a viable resistance movement did exist in Germany and was prepared to act if only it were given reassurance of cooperation from the Allied powers. (Barth remained skeptical.) Temporarily free of the censor while in Switzerland, Bonhoeffer also took the opportunity to reestablish his correspondence with Bell (p. 79). Bonhoeffer subsequently met with Bell personally in the Swedish town of Sigtuna in May 1942, where he informed Bell that a coalition of civil servants, trade union officials, and army officers was prepared to launch a coup against Hitler and end the war. Quixotically, most of Bonhoeffer’s fellow conspirators hoped that particularly the Western Allies would treat Germany leniently in the event that Hitler and his criminal regime were removed. In fact, Bell’s influence with the British government was negligible. Unknown to Bonhoeffer or his fellow conspirators, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already instructed all British officials to treat any overtures from the German opposition with absolute silence. Starting in 1942, the Allies were on the same page—regardless of any regime-changing internal developments, Germany must surrender and submit unconditionally.

As Dramm rightly argues, observers who see in Bonhoeffer and the “resistance” (a term the resistors themselves did not use) a bridge between the Weimar Republic and post–1945 German democracy do so at their own risk. Bonhoeffer’s vision for a Germany without Hitler was in fact tinged with authoritarian-leaning elitism. This was true for most of his colleagues. To concede that Bonhoeffer and his conspirators had an inconsequential impact on the outcome of the war, however, is not to argue for their insignificance. For his part, Bonhoeffer used his contacts in Switzerland in late 1942 to arrange for the emigration of fourteen Jewish men and women who faced deportation and the death camps. Although he could not speak for the otherwise generally compliant Christian churches in Germany more broadly, Bonhoeffer, as a thoroughly respected Lutheran theologian, could offer “intellectual pastoral care” (p. 240) to German public officials who struggled to come to terms with their Christian ethics that otherwise rejected violence as a legitimate means of resistance, even against a murderous tyrant.