Thinkers Timeline

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and resister against Hitler. He was born in 1906 in Breslau, then in Germany, now Wrocław in Poland. His father was a leading psychiatrist; his mother homeschooled the children. The family was educated, musical, and largely secular. When the teenage Dietrich announced he would study theology, his family was surprised but supportive. He earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1927, aged just 21. He was a brilliant student. In 1930 he spent a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York. There he attended an African American Baptist church in Harlem, sang gospel hymns, and read the social gospel of writers like Walter Rauschenbusch. The experience changed him. He returned to Germany convinced that Christian faith required real engagement with the world, especially with the suffering and oppressed. Hitler took power in January 1933. Two days later, Bonhoeffer gave a radio talk attacking the Nazi 'leader principle'. The broadcast was cut off. Over the next decade he became one of the founding voices of the Confessing Church, which resisted the Nazification of German Protestantism. He ran an underground seminary at Finkenwalde. He helped Jews escape to Switzerland. He joined the German military resistance through the Abwehr (military intelligence), where his brother-in-law worked. He knew of plots to kill Hitler. In April 1943 he was arrested. He spent nearly two years in Tegel prison in Berlin, writing constantly. After the failed July 1944 plot to kill Hitler, his deeper involvement was discovered. On 9 April 1945, two weeks before American troops liberated the camp, he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was 39.