Bonhoeffer
Edith Cook
Miss Edith
(Dr. Edith Cook)
Published January 16, 2025. Editor’s Headline; “Watching Hitler.”
When the Platte Valley Christian Center in Saratoga announced its showing of the film “Bonhoeffer,” I dusted off my Bonhoeffer biography and, in anticipation of attending the film, read from it to my soon-to-be husband, Ron Garver. From Pastor Gene of the Center, I learned that the film dramatized Bonhoeffer’s life. So, I knew the 500-plus pages of Eric Metaxas’s bestselling book of 2010 would be more detailed and informative than the film, which both of us attended in good time.
The book once belonged to Travel Club friends in Salt Lake City, where I began to read it one evening. The next morning, when I mentioned to my hosts that I found it fascinating, they urged me to take it home with me. I did so and emailed that I would return it next time I stayed with them, but the couple email-instructed me to keep it, saying they had already ordered another copy for their home. I’ve been reading portions of the book off and on.
As I read aloud from the biography, Ron and I discovered similarities in Hitler’s beginnings that echoed Trump’s. Like Trump, Hitler was duly elected by the people despite a criminal record—he did time for a coup he attempted in Munich. The voters didn’t care or didn’t mind. German attempts at democracy—the Weimar Republic—had failed. The reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles left the country in economic shambles. The people yearned for a savior, someone to make the misery go away. Hitler ‘s rise to power seemed the answer.
Bonhoeffer and his twin sister Sabine were the next-to-youngest of eight children in a well-to-do German family. Some family members had served with distinction in political and military life, including a great-grandfather who served under Kaiser Wilhelm. Dietrich’s dad was a psychiatrist and physician, but the boy was determined to study Protestant theology. He graduated in 1927 with a doctorate and began to teach at seminaries and universities. He was also a prolific writer whose output, his biographer remarked, was enough to fill 34 volumes.
One of his older sisters had married a Jew, and so, early on Dietrich became aware of the terrible hardships imposed on German Jewry; moreover, he recognized the church’s complicity in them. In time, while living a spartan life in a monastic residence, Bonhoeffer also developed an appreciation for Catholicism.
Beginning in 1933—the year of Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship—a new “Nazi Religion” infused German churches. It demanded that all pastors sign an oath of allegiance to the Führer, to National Socialism, and to the German state, the “Reich.” Soon, churches were forbidden to display the Bible on their altars, which they were obliged to substitute with Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” A while later the pastors were instructed to remove the crosses their churches displayed; instead, they had to exhibit the swastika.
In tandem were harsh laws that targeted Jews, including those who had converted to Christianity. They could no longer practice medicine, law, teaching, or act on their professorships. Even before National Socialism, laws were in place preventing Jews from owning homes, farms, or any other real estate.
Elsewhere, the traditional military salute was replaced by the Nazi salute and the shouting of “Heil Hitler.”
Hitler defied the Treaty of Versailles by reviving the German army, to the secret glee of many Germans. Even before he had a fully-functioning army, navy, and air force, Hitler annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia.
In 1939, he invaded Poland, alerting his generals that they would “see things they disliked” and ordered them to concern themselves only with the affairs of their own positions. But when the army generals recognized the extent of SS atrocities, they were appalled. They began to sense the dark sadism behind Hitler’s little mustache. Hitler bore an outsize hatred against Poles and Jews, and after his invasion of Poland, directed SS mass executions of Polish Jews, and Polish religious, political, and aristocratic leaders, wanting to make the Poles “the slaves of Germany.” Although at home Hitler’s popularity was at an all-time high after France capitulated within mere days of Hitler’s invasion, the generals began plotting his assassination—and Dietrich Bonhoeffer joined them. Meanwhile, England was slow in making good on its treaty with Poland, which required the British to come to the aid of the Poles if their country was invaded.
The SS (Schutzstaffel), founded by Hitler in April 1925, became the elite guard of the Nazi regime, a black-uniformed corps of self-described “political soldiers” of the Nazi Party. The atrocities the SS committed were met with virtual immunity, for the corps had Hitler’s ear and his protection.
Bonhoeffer’s horror of the Nazified Lutheran Church now called the “Reichskirche,” caused him to initiate a Protestant church that adhered to Christian principles, called the Confessions Church in line with the confessions demanded of members who resisted the National Socialists. He considered “my Jewish brethren” part of God’s diverse congregations.
One of Dietrich’s early informants was his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, who occupied a respected position in the Reich’s ministry. From there, he regularly informed his wife’s brother of Nazi mischief. Thus, Dietrich knew long before the general public of Hitler’s T-4 euthanasia program, which began with the invasion of Poland but was made retroactive to 1936. The program targeted any German “unfit to serve the Reich,” that is to say, anyone with mental or physical “incurable defects.” Every physician and midwife needed to fill out forms of any patient’s illness and genetics, plus the time spent in institutions. Supposedly, these details were needed for statistical measures, to move some individuals when medical facilities were needed for war-injured soldiers. In the next few years, when five thousand children were killed, their parents received their ashes with explanations that the children had died of pneumonia. Meanwhile the adults, as part of the Polish campaign, were put on busses and taken to places where they were murdered, at first by injection; later, via carbon monoxide gas. The killings and cremations were the first Nazi attempts at mass killings that would culminate in the death camps, were hundreds of thousands, and then millions of innocents were murdered.
With Bonhoeffer’s help, Dohnanyi gathered evidence in a Chronicles of Shame, for which the two obtained actual film footage of Nazi atrocities in Poland, via conversations and meetings with appalled military leaders preparing for assassination of the Führer. Informing British officials that the conspirators were not part of the Nazi movement was part of the planning. It wasn’t enough to kill Hitler, for some other Nazis were likely to step in and continue the madness.
While the people thought the wartime was over—Hitler had got what he wanted, Poland—the generals learned from their Führer of his plans to overrun Belgium and Holland, then France and England. More than ever, they realized they must put an end to this madman, and time was of the essence. Over the next few years, more than 42 assassination attempts would be planned or initiated. Some of these, the Führer escaped by the skin of his teeth—with singed pant legs or busted eardrums—but none ever killed him.
Bonhoeffer stepped up his criticism of the regime’s crimes in outspoken sermons and written epistles that, before long, came to the attention of the powers that be. After years of imprisonment, the Nazis executed him in April 1945 by hanging, alongside “traitorous” generals and individuals like Dohnanyi. This, a mere two weeks before Hitler committed suicide and the “Thousand-Year Reich” collapsed into a sea of misery for the Germans, the army of refuges Nazi wars had driven from their homelands, and the European and Soviet countries left in ashes by the warfare.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have been a man for our times, had he lived in our space. As it is, his courage must remind us to stand tall and call upon our resources to cope with the days ahead.
Patti Sherlock
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Miss Edith
www.edithcook.com
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Susan Marich
Yes standing by and doing little or nothing is a destructive course
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C.M. PASCAL
Sent: Sunday, January 26, 2025 5:18 AM
To: edith-cook <edith...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [edith-cook] Bonhoeffer
Susie
On Jan 26, 2025, at 4:19 AM, Edith Cook <e104...@gmail.com> wrote: