The Pastor Who Tried to Kill Hitler: Bonhoeffer

00:00:10 Speaker 1: This is Ley Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. And large numbers of Americans cite faith as one of the drivers of their life.

00:00:23 Speaker 2: And this is one heck of a faith story. It’s about a.

00:00:27 Speaker 1: German citizen who left the safety of American soil in order to sacrifice his own life by opposing Adolf Hitler. Eric But Texas is the New York Times bestselling author of Bonnaeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.

00:00:43 Speaker 2: Here’s Eric with the story of Dietrich Bonhaeffer.

00:00:46 Speaker 3: Bonhoeffer, in a nutshell, was born in nineteen oh six into what must fairly be described as an absolutely spectacular family. For there are some great men that arise out of a vacuum. Not Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes out of a truly great family. His father was the most famous psychiatrist in Germany for the first half of the twentieth century, a very famous doctor and scientist. Bonhoeffer’s mother was a genius, and all the brothers and sisters—there were four boys and four girls—all geniuses, all married geniuses. His brother, called Fredrich, goes into physics, and for a Bonhoffer, going into physics means you will split the atom with Max Planck and Albert Einstein. That’s exactly what he did. Bonhoeffer’s other brother became the legal head of Luftanza. His sisters were geniuses. They married geniuses. On and on it goes. So he grows up in this family, and at age fourteen he shocks the family by announcing to them that he wants to be a theologian. They weren’t so happy about this. Most of them, the mother’s father and the mother’s grandfather, were theologians. The grandfather was quite a famous theologian, but the father, as a scientist, wasn’t so keen on this. He was more of an agnostic. But he had trained his kids rather strictly to think clearly, to think like a scientist, to follow the facts and the evidence and the logic where it leads, so that you know what you believe. That you don’t think with your emotions. You don’t express yourself in cliches. You think clearly. You express yourself clearly. At the Bonheffer dining room table, you know, if you didn’t have something to say, you would absolutely shut up. Now, the family not only put a premium on thinking clearly and on expressing oneself clearly, but also on living out what one said one believed. In other words, you could not say something and not live it. If you didn’t live it, you were a hypocrite, a liar, or phony. You have to actually live out what you say you believe. They put a premium on this, and I think this is very important for Bonhoeffer as he grows up. His mother always made that clear that they—well, both parents, I should say—expected the children to behave a certain way, to live out what they claim to believe. Very, very important going ahead. So he decides at age fourteen he’s going to be a theologian. He decided it, I should say, at age thirteen, but kept his mouth shut for a year because, you know, the Bonnheffer house, you wouldn’t just cavalierly announce things like this, because if you said at age thirteen you want to be theologian, you know they would hold you to it for at least one lifetime. So you’d be very careful about declaring anything foolishly. But he announces it at fourteen. He knew that he was going to be a great academic theologian. He knew that, and he was that; he was in fact a theological genius. He gets his doctorate in theology from Berlin University at age twenty-one. And so he gets his doctorate, and the question he’s asking and answering in his two dissertations is, “What is the Church?” He had an epiphany in Rome at Saint Peter’s where he saw a raid on the altar celebrating Mass on Palm Sunday, men of all different races, and this moved him to think about the church, the church beyond Germany, the church beyond the Lutheran Church. He was always thinking of this, and so he wrote his dissertation on this question: “What is the Church?” But he finds in answering the question on this very high theological level, “What is the Church?”, that he has a love for the church itself and decides that not only does he want to be an academic theologian, he also wants to be ordained as a Lutheran minister. But you had to be twenty-five at that time to be ordained. And so, at age twenty-two, he spends a year in Barcelona, Spain, as an assistant vicar in a German-speaking congregation. He picks up Spanish in a weekend. I think he then, at age twenty-four, decides to go to America. And now his brother, Carl Fredrich, the physicist, had been to America, but he decides at age twenty-four to go to New York to have this experience of living in New York. And I don’t get the impression that he was going there for theological reasons. The ostensible reason you always read about is that he studied at Union Theological Seminary for that year. But he wasn’t expecting to find much by way of theology at Union Theological Seminary, and it’s safe to say he was not disappointed. He really writes in his life. Let—it’s funny. I quote the letters copiously because it’s so funny to write what he writes. He’s very generous, very gracious, but nonetheless clearly sneering in what his phrase passes for theology, because he found it to be very shallow theology. He was not theologically liberal, but he was impressed by the theological liberals at Berlin University. They were fine minds, and he could learn from them, even though ultimately he ends up disagreeing with them, he could learn from them, learn to speak their language. Now he comes to New York, and the theological liberalism that he encounters is quite shallow as far as he’s concerned. He says, it’s just, you know, knee-jerk anti-fundamentalism. If whatever the fundamentalists are for, there against it. So it really is a warmed over social gospel. And so one Sunday in September of nineteen thirty, when he arrives, one of his fellow students, an African American student from Alabama named Frank Fisher, invites Bonhoeffer to go up to Harlem to visit Abyssinian Baptist Church. Bonhoeffer is thrilled to be invited, and he goes again culturally curious. He goes, and what he expect speriences in this African American church in September of nineteen thirty, to cut to the chase, changes his life forever. He is profoundly moved by seeing a congregation, a huge congregation, by the way, of people who are not strangers to suffering. These people somehow take what they’re doing here in this church seriously. They’re worshiping God. It’s palpable. The worship is not just music, but it’s clearly worship. They’re worshiping Jesus Christ with everything they have. Bonhoeffer was impressed by the preaching, fiery gospel preaching that exhorted people to live out the Gospel in their lives. So was everything together. Bonhoeffer had not really seen much of this, if any of this kind of vibrant, full-throated Christian faith. He’d experienced a lot of, I would say, fussy Lutheranism. We’ve all been to churches where they do church very well. Bonhoeffer had seen a lot of that. He had not seen anything like what he saw at Abysinyan Baptist. So it touched him so profoundly that he makes a decision to go back to this church every Sunday that he’s in New York. And I just imagine the idea of this toeheaded, bespectacled Berlin academic going up to Harlem every Sunday to worship in this extraordinary church. But it really did change him.

00:07:16 Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Eric Mataxis tell the story of Dietrich Bonhaeffer. America has changed Bonhaeffer. How does Bonhaeffer go back and change Germany? That story continues here on Our American Stories. Lihabibe here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we returned to Our American Stories and to Eric Mattaxa’s sharing his story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and it comes from his New York Times bestselling book Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, and Spy.

00:08:24 Speaker 2: An extraordinary read.

00:08:25 Speaker 1: I urge you to pick it up, go to Amazon or the usual suspects.

00:08:29 Speaker 2: Let’s return to Eric.

00:08:32 Speaker 3: He got involved in the lives of the congregation. He ended up teaching Sunday school there, and he traveled with a number of these prominent African Americans down to Howard University. And I know Thurgood Marshall would have been a student at Howard at the time, and he traveled to the nation’s capital and was very involved in the idea of this nascent Civil Rights movement. So he goes back to Germany, and his friends noticed he’s somehow different. He seems to take Christianity somehow more seriously. He gets the Gospel spectacularly well. But somehow his heart was touched in this experience of this African American church. Somehow he had seen true faith in a way that was new to him, and over the course of those months it changes him. And his friends can see this, that he is in fact different. When he’s teaching from behind the lectern at Berlin University or when he’s preaching from the pulpit, he’s saying things that you wouldn’t ordinarily hear. For example, from behind the lectern, he talking about the Bible is the word of God through which a living God wishes to speak to his children, an amazing thing to hear in Berlin. At Berlin University during this period, you wouldn’t. But he was brilliant enough he could sort of get away with it. He asked one of his students at one time, “Do you love Jesus?” It was clear that that Bonhoeffer had had an experience with God somehow, and he was communicating this to his students. Now, we have to say that Germany during this period had also changed. When Bonhoeffer left for New York, the Nazis for the ninth largest political party in the Reichs. When he returns, to the second largest political party in the Reichschtog. And Bonhoeffer can see this; he can smell this; he can sense that Germany is turning toward Nazism, and we can understand why. If we’re fair-minded, we can understand that probably we would have done the same thing. The Nazis are not exactly advertising themselves as evil incarnate. Political figures don’t do that, right? And so you’ve got somebody who is extremely canny politician was not about to tell the German people that he despised Christianity as a weak faith, which is exactly what Hitler said and what his top lieutenants believe, but pretend to be a churchgoer, and so on and so forth. But Bonhoeffer can see through this, and he sees Germany turning toward National Socialism, and he begins now to speak out against it publicly. He says, for example, “In Germany Christians can only have one savior, and that is Jesus Christ.” Very pointed thing to say when most Germans are looking with a messianic fervor to Hitler. In nineteen thirty-three, of course, Hitler becomes Chancellor. Two days later, Bonhefer goes on the radio and gives a famous speech in which he dissects the bad idea, extremely popular idea, of the Furer principle. Furer, of course, is German for leader, and there was this idea in Germany between the wars, especially, that what we need is strong leadership. They’d had that under the Kaiser. They lost it at the end of World War I when the Kaiser abdicated, and most Germans thought, “We need that again.” We had that once and we were great. We lost that. Now we’re crushed, we’re miserable, we’re rudderless. We have the Weimar Republic. We have this kind of democracy that we don’t know what to think of it. We’ve never had it before. It’s not working for us, and we’d like a strong leader. Well, we know they got a strong leader. If you’d ask them what kind of leader you’re looking for, they would say a leader who leads. That’s what they were looking for. They got one of those. They weren’t really terribly specific about it. And of course, Hitler comes right into this vacuum. And Bonhoeffer, again, he sees this, and on the radio two days after Hitler becomes the, Bonhefer dissects this idea for the nation on the radio, and he talks about God’s idea of leadership, the idea that true leadership, true authority, is by definition submitted to a higher authority. And we know that Hitler was submitted to no one. The German idea of leader, the furr, was—well, it was a tautology. It’s a snake swallowing its own tail. He’s submitted to no one. Where does he get his leadership from? No one. Somehow it’s just his, and he takes it as almost as a demonic aspect to it. Well, Bonhefer sees this. He dissects this idea on the radio. He also says that a true leader must be a servant leader. That’s what a leader does. Leader doesn’t lord it over his subjects. Well, Bonhefer says this, and from the beginning, two days after Hitler’s rise to power, Bonhoeffer’s on the record as seeing what’s going on and speaking out publicly against this. The first way Bonhoeffer gets involved really in what is happening is in what’s called the cushen komf, the Church Struggle. The Nazis, being good totalitarians, weren’t just taking over every part of society. They were also taking over the church because they thought that’s a legitimate part of society for us to take over to reshape in our own monstrous image. And so they were trying to do that and trying to change Christianity from the inside. Now, it was not to abolish it, of course, they want to abolish it, but they wouldn’t do that publicly. They’d rather just sort of hollow it out and fill it with their own ideology. And that’s exactly what they were doing. And Bonhoeffer was one of the leading figures who saw this happening and saw that Christians must stand up and fight this together. And he was one of the leaders in what came to be known as the Confessing Church. And they make a break. These about six thousand pastors signed the Barman Declaration a year after the Nazis came to power, and these six thousand pastors break away from the Nazified Reich’s Kirsha, the state church—a victory. But Shoeffer could see that the Nazis are gaining more and more power, and that this victory ultimately won’t mean so much because the Nazis kept getting power. They knew how to use the laws to make it tougher and tougher for the church to be the church. But it’s an extraordinary thing how using legality you can sort of outmaneuver people. The Nazis were masterful at this, at dividing this one from that one. And I have to say that Bonhoeffer somehow was able to see with his fine mind and his finally trained mind, and with, I think, on some level, a mystical, prophetic sense, be able to see way past what others were seeing at where this was going. Even into the mid-thirties, you have many solid Christians who seem to think that the Nazis are okay, maybe they’re not perfect, but we can work with them. They won’t be here forever. Bonhoeffer was never fooled, and he was frustrated in trying to wake the church up, in trying to get the church to be the church, to see what is happening, to fight against it now because it’ll be too late, which is, of course, exactly what happened. He was praying diligently, always asking the Lord to lead him, to show him what to do next. In nineteen thirty-five, the Confessing Church leaders deputized Bonhefer to lead an illegal seminary because, of course, the German Reichs kersche, they were not raising up men of God, and the Confessing Church realized, we need real seminaries where our young men will be trained properly. So Bonhoeffer continues to do this. Of course, the Gestapo finally shuts down Fink and Valda. They know what’s going on, so it’s shut down. But Bonhoeffer, being the canny man that he was, sort of takes this education underground. It becomes, I always think, like a floating craps game. The Nazis don’t know where it’s happening. In vicarage here, in a farmyard there, you know, in a farmhouse there. It’s just very funny to me that. But Bonhoeffer had no problem with fooling the Nazis, with deceiving the evil Nazis, and so this theological training continues for some time. But around nineteen thirty-eight, the Gestapo shuts that down. They forbid Bonhoeffer from doing this, and they also forbid him from speaking publicly, and then finally from publishing because the temerity to write a book on the Psalms, which are located in the Old Testament. But the reason I say that is because the Nazified Church in Germany was trying to redefine Christianity, as I said, along Nazi lines, which means that German Christianity was supposed to be purely German and therefore devoid of all Jewish elements. Good luck with that project.

00:16:39 Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Eric Mattaxis tell the story of Dietrich Bonaffer, and Bonaffer’s very short time in America changed him, but he came back to a changed Germany. The Nazi party, that’s National Socialists, by the way—I always remember that—with a National Socialist, he knew what they were up to. Particularly, he understood quickly who Hitler was and what attacks he was going to make on his beloved church in Germany. “Christians can only have one savior,” he said on the radio not long before Hitler took power.

00:17:13 Speaker 2: Jesus Christ is our Savior.

00:17:16 Speaker 1: Two days after Hitler takes power, Bonhefer goes on the air to talk about God’s idea of leadership. True leadership is submitted to a higher authority. And by the way, what Erictaxis said about Nazism was dead on. It was a tautology, a snake swallowing its own tail. And then, of course, Hitler’s move for the church itself, hollowing it out by filling the churches with their own political orthodoxy and ideology. When we come back, more of the story of this remarkab