Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Passions

Vocation

Lifestyle

Traits

German clergyman, theological scholar, writer and member of the resistance movement against the Nazi regime during World War II. He graduated from the University of Berlin in 1927 and subsequently lectured there and in Barcelona, where, in 1929, he became curate of a German congregation. In 1931 he attended Union Theological Seminary in New York for one year and was ordained in Berlin in November 1931. He helped organize the Pastors' Emergency League in England, and became pastor of churches in Germany and England where he met the influential theologian George Bell. Throughout his short professional career he worked toward peace and international ecumenicism. He ardently opposed National Socialism, the Nazi movement in his writings and actions,, and in 1938 he joined the Abwehr resistance group. In the spring of 1943, he was arrested for helping Jews escape via Switzerland and for his alleged participation in attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He died on 9 April 1945, hanged in a concentration camp at Flossenburg. During the last two years of his life, he wrote many letters, published posthumously by Eberhard Bethge, as "Letters and Papers from Prison." Letters to his fiancee, Maria von Wedermeyer, were published as "Love Letters from Cell92." Link to Wikipedia biography