Theologian executed for assassinating Hitler: Who is Dietrich Bonhoeffer?
In 1930, he went to America, where he observed that the Puritans were indifferent to others, had an individualistic worldview, and adopted the goal of acquiring as much wealth as possible in this world. He found them shallow and frivolous.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German theologian who opposed Nazism.
Bonhoeffer opposed the regime, particularly antisemitism, from the very first days of the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. Except for 18 months (1933-1935) when he was pastor of two small German congregations in London, he was a spokesperson for Bekennende Kirche, the focus of the German Protestant resistance against the Nazi regime. He considered seeking asylum in the United States in 1939 but returned after 15 days in New York City.
Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer witnessed three different Germanys in his short life and lived under three different political and legal orders until he was accused of conspiring to assassinate Hitler and executed by the Nazis at the age of thirty-nine. He spent his childhood in Imperial (Kaiser) Germany, the foundations of which were laid by Bismarck. In 1918, this period, which ended at the end of the First World War, was followed by Germany's first experience of parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic covering the years 1919-1933. The republic was soon eroded by the onslaught of the radical right and other anti-democratic forces and eventually collapsed. Left parties and currents could not show sufficient sensitivity and resistance to protect the Republic.
The social, political, and economic turmoil at the end of the Weimar period led the German people to seek a strong leader. He found what he was looking for in the Führer. Hitler was appointed chancellor, and the Third Reich period began, which would end with gruesome carnage in the Western world, a tragic defeat for the German people.
It is said that there was a connection between Bismarck's imperial Germany and the Third Reich. In both, Germany tried to be a power that would dominate the world. In addition, the support of both orders came from the same social segments and classes. Industrialists who control the war industry, trade elites with ties to the military, educated middle classes, and academics. They saw themselves as true representatives of the German people. He had economic interests in supporting Bismarck and Hitler. What about the rest of the German people, that is, the majority? Why did they unconditionally support the Führer when they had no interest? Why did they identify with him? The German people were afflicted with the disease of sanctifying almost everything around them. The lands of Germany, its institutions, especially the state, the administrators of the institutions… All these had become objects of worship. It was sick patriotism. Bonhoeffer stated that in this situation, which he called the "pathology of patriotism", evil and stupidity were intertwined, and the two were fused. Evil and stupidity went hand in hand, dominating the soul of the German people.
Three different periods have followed each other with intervals that can be considered short from a historical point of view, and Bonhoeffer's witnessing of three very different periods in his life and two wars in between in his very short life shows that he lived in chaotic and dark times. Beyond being an observer, he also intervened in the time he lived in as much as he could. His short but intense and tense life came to a tragic end shortly before Germany's surrender in the second great war. He was executed for being among a group of dissidents who assassinated Hitler.
Bonhoeffer wrote his doctoral thesis in 1927. In his thesis titled Sanctorum Communio, which Karl Barth would use as a "miracle" many years later, he dealt with the relationship between me and someone else and accepted this relationship as the basic social category. His congregation envisioned the community on the basis of this category. He argued that a person can exist as an individual only when he recognizes the uniqueness of another and accepts his uniqueness. Recognition of the uniqueness of the other was the first and indispensable condition of an ethically based relationship between people.
While discussing the idea of community, Bonhoeffer emphasized that one can realize his own reality only in his relationship with other people, and that self-consciousness can only be formed in relation to others. This relationship led him to a very different definition of community: a community of individuals who recognize each other's uniqueness, bringing the unique together and holding them together. The congregation brought self-consciousness to every person who formed it. Bonhoeffer's notion of community expanded in the last phase of his life, gained universality, and constituted an alternative to the Volk understanding of Nazi ideology, which was built on the basis of land and blood.
The white churches and congregations in America, where he went for postdoctoral studies and seminars in 1930, disappointed Bonhoeffer. In America, Protestantism took a different form, shaped as Puritanism at its worst. Bonhoeffer observed that the Puritans were indifferent to others, and had an individualistic worldview, aiming to acquire as much wealth as possible in this world. They were shallow and frivolous, insensitive to poverty and racial inequality. They did not understand the reform movement in Continental Europe, and they stayed away from this experience. Protestantism in America was a Protestantism that did not object, did not protest. Community ties and solidarity were weak. Everyone was for himself.
Frank Fisher, a young black theology student from Alabama, whom Bonhoeffer met in New York, opened the door to a different world in Harlem. He spent almost all of his Sundays at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, the largest and most crowded black church in Harlem. There he encountered Christianity as the faith of the dispossessed, the victims in America. He was a guest in black people's homes, he got to know people; The more he got to know them, the more he realized how unfair they had been, and felt how much they had suffered. It sharpened sensitivity to economic and racial inequality and injustice. He took an interest in music that expressed the beliefs, patience, and suffering of black people and collected spiritual records. When he returned to Berlin, he played these records that he brought from America to his students. He wanted them to know the truth of Harlem, to feel the soul scars of black people.
He was arrested on April 5, 1943, and imprisoned in Berlin.
After the failed assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944, the investigation was expanded upon the discovery of documents proving Bonhoeffer's close ties to the assassins, and Bonhoeffer's execution was ordered.