How does peace come about? Through a system of political treaties? Through the investment of international capital in different countries? Through the big banks, through money? Or through universal peaceful rearmament in order to guarantee peace? Through none of these, for the single reason that in all of them peace is confused with safety. There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. It can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to mistrust, and this mistrust in turn brings forth war. ...

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fano Conference, Denmark 1934

Bonhoeffer and the German Resistance
The Protestant Response to Nazism
By David Meyler
March 2010

The story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer shows in microcosm many of the hopes and frustrations of the German resistance against the Nazi regime. The Avalanche Press article "With Burning Sorrow" for the game Third Reich examined the reaction of the Catholic Church toward Hitler’s regime. This article will look at the attitude of the German Protestant churches.

Shortly after Hitler gained power in 1933, most of the Protestant churches in Germany were organized into a new Reich Church. The Reich Church closely followed and supported the state’s racist policies.

"We have learned a bit too late in the day that action springs not from thought but from a readiness for responsibility."

He had great hopes that the 1934 Conference held in Fano, Denmark, would be the start of this movement. Instead, over the next few months it became clear  that Fano, far from being a first step, had represented the peak of the church resistance. He was also frustrated by the general lack of support for his pacifist methods.

Bonhoeffer had not always been a pacifist. Before 1930, he had thought it a Christian’s duty to defend his homeland, and saw nothing incompatible with military service and Christian beliefs.

In 1930, at the age of 24, Bonhoeffer went to New York to attend the Union Theological Seminary. There he met Jean Lasserre, a fellow seminarian from France. Bonhoeffer was initially uncertain how this former “enemy” would react to him, but the two developed a lifelong friendship, and it was Lasserre who convinced Bonhoeffer that the commandment “You shall not kill” could and should be taken quite literally.

The young German also formed a lifelong friendship with Frank Fisher, an African-American theology student from Alabama. Fisher was somewhat bemused at Bonhoeffer’s shock at the level of racism in the United States. His contact with the Protestant African community in New York had a clear influence on his attitude to racism.

Upon return to Germany in 1932, Bonhoeffer became an adamant student of the pacifist resistance methods of Mahatma Gandhi. This Hindu leader from a colonized nation was achieving more, thought Bonhoeffer, than the Western Christians who seemed to do little more than fret at the ever-more threatening headlines in their morning newspapers. Several times, Bonhoeffer arranged to travel to India to meet with Gandhi, but events always intervened to frustrate his plans.

Upon return to Germany, in 1935, Bonhoeffer established the underground seminary for the anti-Nazi Confessing Church at Finkenwalde in Pomerania. In 1937, the Gestapo shut the seminary down and arrested 27 former students. In February 1938, he made his first contact with conspirators in connection with the political resistance against Hitler.

“Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make the choice in security.”

After another stay in New York, Bonhoeffer returned to Germany for good, aside from a number of shorter trips, in July 1939. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Bonhoeffer and many of his former students now faced the possibility of being called up for military service. He called on the Confessing Church to take a strong stance against the war, but the church’s leadership wanted to focus only on theological issues. Bonhoeffer felt the church was becoming increasingly irrelevant.

“The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation shall continue to live.”

Through his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, who worked for the Abwehr (the Wehrmacht’s Office of Military Intelligence) and was a member of the Canaris resistance cell, Bonhoeffer finally agreed to join the Abwehr that September to work as an intelligence agent. (Admiral Canaris, who headed the Abwehr, worked with the anti-Hitler resistance before the beginning of the war.) Although he was being pulled away from his pacifist beliefs into a more active form of resistance, as an Abwehr member, he was exempt from military service and had better protection from the Gestapo while continuing with his resistance work.

He was involved in Operation 7, a clandestine effort by the Abwehr to evacuate Jews to Switzerland. Although Operation 7 would increasingly attract Gestapo attention — and would eventually lead to the destruction of Canaris and his resistance movement — in the meantime, a small number of Jews were brought to safety.

In May 1942, Bonhoeffer traveled to Sweden to meet with George Bell, Anglican Bishop of Chichester and another old friend. Bell used the information supplied by Bonhoeffer to try to persuade the British government to send signals that it would be ready to negotiate with the German opposition should the Hitler regime fall. Bonhoeffer helped pen a draft document on how the resistance would proceed following the proposed coup which would kill Hitler and depose the Nazis.

The British government, meanwhile, wanted to see a significant commitment by the resistance first, but the resistance did not want to make a move until it had firm support from Britain. Attempts to co-ordinate with Italian resistance in 1943 met with mixed results.

Meanwhile, there had been a few examples of civil resistance in occupied Europe of the kind Bonhoeffer hoped the Protestant churches could lead in Germany. In February 1941, there had been a two-day general strike in the Netherlands, spreading from Amsterdam, in protest against the first deportation of Jews from the city. It was ruthlessly suppressed. In 1942, the Lutheran Church of Norway went on strike to protest the attempted reform by the German Reich Church. The senior Bishop Eivind Berggrav was arrested. In August 1943, there was a general strike in Denmark against the government’s policy of co-operation with the German occupiers. Following the strike, the German occupation authorities took direct control of the nation.

In March 1943, the Canaris group attempted its first assassination of Hitler. A bomb was planted on Hitler’s airplane on a return flight from Smolensk after a visit to the Russian Front. The bomb never went off, but neither was it detected. Planning for another assassination went into effect.

Two weeks as later, a decorated war hero, Major Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff volunteered to carry out a suicide mission. Hitler was scheduled to visit an armory with Gersdorff in attendance. When Gersdorff was beside the Fuhrer he planned to detonate two explosive devices kept in his pockets. For an unexplained reason, Hitler cut his visit short and never went to the armory.

A week after this, April 5, Bonhoeffer, his sister Christine and Dohnanyi were arrested by the Gestapo and take to Tegel Prision in Berlin, for their connection to Operation 7. Their deeper involvement in the resistance was not yet known.

On July 20, 1944, came yet another, and perhaps most well known, of the failed assassination attempts against Hitler. From this time onward, Bonhoeffer’s fate was sealed, as was that of the other conspirators, or indeed anyone who came under the suspicion of being hostile to the regime.

"As a Christian I am called to treat my enemy as a brother and to meet hostility with love."

In February 1945, he was moved to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. In April, the diary of Admiral Canaris was found, and Hitler ordered the extermination of the Canaris group which included Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9, 1945, at Flossenburg. He was 39 years old. Dohnanyi was killed at the Sachsenhausen Camp. Also murdered in this action were Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus, and another brother-in-law, Rüdiger Schleicher.

In the end, German resistance to Hitler never became a significant force. In part, this was due to sheer bad luck — if any one of a number of assassination attempts against Hitler had succeeded it would have radically altered the course of events. In part, the early German military victories over Poland and France, and early success in Russia made the growth of a resistance movement difficult. The regime simply had too much popular support. By the time the Nazis were clearly losing the war, it was too late to effectively mobilize opposition. The Western Powers were hesitant to support any resistance movement, wary in general, and suspicious in particular as to why it was so late in coming.

In terms of the game Third Reich, the effects of the German resistance are largely covered by the Hitler Killed event. As a variant, require that the chit be picked twice to have an effect. If it is picked on or before Spring 1943, Bonhoeffer has been successful in causing civil unrest in Germany — Germany loses 10 BRP immediately. Return it to the container; if drawn again the effects are as described in the game. If the chit is picked for the first time on or after summer 1943 (the resistance conspirators are arrested), there is no effect and the chit is not returned to the container.

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