Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a religious leader in Germany who was also very active in the resistance movement against the Nazis. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran leader, who was part of the plot that the Military Intelligence Office was hatching to assassinate Hitler. However, the assassination failed and Bonhoeffer was arrested and then hanged.
Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany on February 4, 1946. Breslau is modern-day Wrawclaw located in Poland. His family was upper middle class; his father was a psychiatrist in Berlin, while his mother was a homemaker who homeschooled the children.
At an early age, Bonhoeffer showed interest in becoming a minister, and his parents supported him. He attended college at Tubingen and then went on to receive a doctorate in Theology from the University of Berlin. After that, he was ordained as a minister. However, he wanted to study further and spent a year in New York City at the Union Theological Seminary.
In 1931, he returned to Germany. He became a lecturer in Theology in Berlin and wrote many books. He was against Nazism, and he set up the Confessing Church along with Martin Niemoller, Karl Barth and other people with similar views.
Between 1933 and 1935, he went to London where he was a pastor for two German speaking Protestant churches. Thereafter, he returned to Germany to become the head of the seminary of Confessing Church. However, this was illegal and was closed down in 1937. In addition, the Gestapo banned Bonhoeffer from preaching, teaching and speaking in public. During this time, he was closely associated with people who were against Hitler and considered as his opponents.
During World War II, Bonhoeffer was key leader for the Confessing Church, which was against the anti-semitic policies of Hitler. He called for other churches to unite and resist the treatment being meted out to Jews. Although Confessing Church was not big, it was still the major opposition by a Christian church to the policies of the Nazis in Germany.
In 1939, Bonhoeffer joined high ranking military officers from the Military Intelligence Office who were planning to overthrow the Nazis by killing Hitler. However, he was arrested in 1943 after the authorities managed to trace the money that was used to help Jews escape to him. He was imprisoned for a year and half in Berlin.
On July 20, 1944, the plot to assassinate Hitler failed, and the authorities managed to discover that Bonhoeffer had connections with the perpetrators of the plot. It was then Bonhoeffer was moved from one prison to another until he ended up in Flossenburg concentration camp. Here he was hanged just three weeks before the city was liberated by the allies. Besides Bonhoeffer, his brother Klaus, brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rudiger Schleicher were executed for their parts in the plot.
In 1990s, the German government absolved Bonhoeffer of any crime. However, even today, there is a lot of debate as to why Bonhoeffer moved from Christian pacifism to planning the assassination of Hitler.
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