Dietrich Bonhoeffer martyr

A Lutheran pastor, Bonhoeffer was a member of the resistance against dictator Adolph Hitler and was executed by the Nazis in 1945, during the final months of World War II.

In rebellion against the Nazi-controlled state church, some 2,000 Lutheran pastors organized the Pastors' Emergency League in 1934, which later became the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer was head of the independent church's seminary at Finkenwalde. It was one of five seminaries closed by the Nazis in 1937.

A member of the resistance, he communicated with the British government and also worked on his book, Ethics, from 1940 until his arrest in 1943. As Simon & Schuster points out in a description of the book on its Web site, "The Christian does not live in a vacuum, says the author, but in a world of government, politics, labor and marriage. Hence, Christian ethics cannot exist in a vacuum; what the Christian needs, claims Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is concrete instruction in a concrete situation. Although the author died before completing his work, this book is recognized as a major contribution to Christian ethics."

"During a time of grave darkness in Nazi Germany, Bonhoeffer shined the light of Christ all the way to a hangman's noose. Nearly every clergy has studied him and used him in sermons and theological discourse. It is time we recognize his accomplishments and martyrdom of the highest calling."

In particular, a group called the Deutsche Christen ("German Christians") became the voice of Nazi ideology within the Evangelical Church, even advocating the removal of the Old Testament from the Bible. In the summer of 1933, citing the state Aryan laws that barred all "non-Aryans" from the civil service, the Deutsche Christen proposed a church "Aryan paragraph" to prevent "non-Aryans" from becoming ministers or religious teachers.

Bonhoeffer bitterly opposed the Aryan paragraph, arguing that its ratification surrendered Christian precepts to political ideology. If "non-Aryans" were banned from the ministry, he argued, then their colleagues should resign in solidarity, even if this meant the establishment of a new church — a "confessing" church that would remain free of Nazi influence. This was a minority view; most German bishops wanted to avoid antagonizing the Nazi regime and to keep their regional churches together.

As a young pastor, Bonhoeffer helped organize the Confessing Church, Germany’s only true organized challenge to the Nazi state. He went to New York on a teaching fellowship and taught Sunday school in the famed Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. When he returned to Germany in 1932, he took with him a new awareness of racial prejudice. This experience helped him identify the plight of the Jews in Germany and he became one of the first to ask the Christian churches to defend the Jews in their moment of peril. In the end, Bonhoeffer paid with his life for his beliefs. Three weeks before the end of World War II, on April 9, 1945, the 39-year-old minister was executed at the Flossenbürg
Concentration Camp by hanging.

The village of Flossenbürg dated from the Middle Ages and was located in the Oberpfalz Mountains of Bavaria, 40 miles east of Nuremburg, near the Czech frontier and situated close to a number of rock quarries. The first granite quarry was established there in 1875 and soon became the center of the village economy.In the late 1930's the owner of the quarry -- also mayor of the village and a loyal Nazi -- persuaded Heinrich Himmler to establish a major camp at the site.

KL Flossenbürg was established in May 1938, and began as a relatively small facility originally intended for criminals, "asocial" persons, and Jews, but it grew to include political prisoners and foreign prisoners of war.
Between 1938, when the camp was established, and April 1945, more than 96,000 prisoners passed through Flossenbürg. About 30,000 eventually died there.

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