No ordinary men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, resisters against Hitler in church and state

132 Pages·2013·1.86 MB·English

by  Elisabeth Sifton

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
NO ORDINARY MEN
Copyright © 2013 by Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern
Copyright © 2013 by NYREV, Inc.
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any
form whatsoever.
Published by The New York Review of Books, 435 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Jacket design: Evan Johnston
Cover photos: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in London, 1939 (bpk, Berlin Rotraut Forberg Art Resource,
NY)
Hans von Dohnanyi, 1940 (Art Resource, NY)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sifton, Elisabeth, author.
No ordinary men : Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi, resisters against Hitler in
church and state / by Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern.
pages cm. — (New York Review Books collections)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-59017-681-8 (alk. paper)
1. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 1906-1945. 2. Dohnanyi, Hans von, 1902-1945. 3. Anti-Nazi movement
—Germany—Biography. 4. Government, Resistance to—Germany—History—20th century. 5.
Church and state—Germany—History—20th century. 6. Theologians—Germany—Biography. 7.
Lawyers—Germany—Biography. I. Stern, Fritz Richard, 1926-author. II. Title.
BX4827.B57S57 2013
943.086092’2—dc23
2013015555
eISBN: 978-1-59017702-0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Illustrations
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Appendix
Notes
To the memory of our parents
Preface
was the twentieth century’s most popular tyranny:
HITLER’S THIRD REICH
millions of jubilant Germans cheered while tens of thousands, then
millions, and eventually much of the world suffered. His regime could
boast of economic success rapidly achieved, of German power regained
and German prestige restored—but then squandered in satanic
barbarism. The Nazis’ public pageantry always had terror in the wings,
and we must understand the cunning with which they cajoled people
into supporting their actions while at the same time intimidating them
through terror, torture, and murder; it is an object lesson in the use of
power for evil ends.
To oppose such a regime was rare and fraught with danger. To do so
in order to protect the sanctity of law and of faith was rarer still. We are
concerned in this book with the lives and actions of two admirable men
who from the start of the Third Reich did their utmost, each in his own
way, to oppose Nazi outrages, and who then conspired to overthrow the
tyrant. One, Hans von Dohnanyi, a lawyer, is scarcely known in the
United States; the other, his brother-in-law Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor,
has become very well known; there is also Christine—Dietrich’s sister
and Hans’s wife.
On April 5, 1943, the Gestapo arrested all three: the brave and gifted
lawyer who as an important member of the army’s counterintelligence
section had become a major figure in the civilian branch of the
conspiracy against Hitler; the forceful, dedicated young pastor who for a
decade had been battling Nazi racial thought and action in Germany’s
Protestant churches, which were largely bereft of principled opponents
to Hitler’s godless tyranny; and the woman who all along assisted her
husband and brother. The three were united in a bond of decency and
courage that was itself the rock on which resistance to tyranny could be
built. Christine was released within the month, but the men were never
freed. After two years in jail under terrible conditions and subjected to
humiliating interrogations, Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi were murdered, on
Hitler’s express orders, in April 1945, just weeks before the Führer’s
suicide and Germany’s surrender.
After the war, Eberhard Bethge, a friend and student of Bonhoeffer’s
who became his literary executor, published some of the letters
Bonhoeffer had written from jail, mostly letters to Bethge about the
theological and ethical thoughts he had pondered while behind bars.
When Letters and Papers from Prison appeared in 1951, it aroused great
interest, and Bethge began work on a biography, which was published in
1967. A stream of commentary, analysis, dramatic presentations, films,
and new material by and about Bonhoeffer has flowed on ever since.
Dohnanyi appears in some of these sources, as do other family members,
but Bonhoeffer is of course at the center.*
At the same time, scholars and writers have closely scrutinized the
historical record of Germany during the Nazi period: a large number of
Holocaust studies treat that subject down to every last numbing
murderous detail, while a smaller, less noticed, but respectable body of
literature focuses on the German resistance—a subject that was scarcely
thought to have existed when Letters and Papers from Prison first came
out. What emerges are two almost separate worlds, but the significant
links between them have gone largely unobserved, and they are
dramatically visible in the story of Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer, and their
allies. For among those opposed from the start to Hitler’s rule—appalled
by its violations of law, precedent, and decency—it was increasing
outrage about the Nazi atrocities against Jews that became a major
motive for the decision to resist Hitler and ultimately to try to remove
him. The conspirators knew unspeakable truths about what was
happening in Germany that many people not only in Germany but also
in the outside world did not know and did not want to know. And they
were ready and willing to take action against the regime.
These resisters were not necessarily friends of the Jews. It is doubtful
that many of them were. Some of them may have had residues of
Christian prejudice, or feelings that ranged from reserve to repulsion
about Jews generally and about Germany’s prosperous, highly ambitious
Jews in particular; such feelings ran strong among some Jews themselves
and many gentiles elsewhere in the West as well. However, to see the
state discriminate against Jews, to see the beginnings of enforced
pariahdom and worse—this prompted sympathetic support for Jews
among many members of the Bonhoeffer circle. They understood
instinctively that Jews were being robbed of their dignity, then of their
very existence in a barbaric outrage that ended in a catastrophe not seen
in Europe since the Thirty Years’ War. For many, the organized bestiality
was also an outrage against God, one that would be a burden of guilt for
their countrymen forever.
In any account of Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi, we should remember to
keep two general points in mind. The members of the Bonhoeffer family
—Dietrich’s father, Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer, Germany’s preeminent
psychiatrist; his mother, Paula (née von Hase), daughter and
granddaughter of aristocrats and well-known clerics; Dietrich; and his
siblings—were remarkable examples of devotion and closeness to one
another; they embodied certain virtues that they rarely mentioned but
sturdily demonstrated: decency and hard work, reasonable selflessness,
responsibility for others, and unexcelled courage. And throughout the
upheavals of 1914–1945, the Bonhoeffers responded to the horrors
convulsing Germany and Europe in a manner that was radically and
honorably different from that chosen by the vast majority of Germans.
Most members of the high professional elite to which they belonged
either succumbed to the temptation of National Socialism—perhaps
regretting some “excesses,” perhaps impressed by the Nazis’ pseudo-
religious rhetoric—or clung to the illusion that in the Third Reich one
could be “unpolitical,” playing it safe or going into “inner emigration.”
In the course of our exploration of the lives and work of these two
men, we have come to understand Dohnanyi’s centrality in their efforts,
as well as the exceptional closeness between him and his brother-in-law.
Resistance during Germany’s darkest time was a larger, deeper, and
more complicated drama than is usually depicted, and we have tried to
reconstruct at least something of it here.
In the interest of full disclosure: Elisabeth’s father, Reinhold Niebuhr,
taught Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1930–1931 and was thereafter something
of a long-distance mentor to him; he also taught Bonhoeffer’s cousin
Hans Christoph von Hase, and he and his wife, also a theologian, stayed
in touch with many members of the family for decades. As Bonhoeffer
knew, Niebuhr was devoted to and active in the international
ecumenical movement and had a special concern for the travails of
German Protestantism. Fritz’s parents and grandparents were friends and
colleagues of Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer and friends, too, of some of the
younger generation, especially Karl-Friedrich. Fritz has been since the
1960s a friend and colleague of the historian Karl-Dietrich Bracher,
whose wife, Dorothee, is a daughter of Dietrich’s sister Ursula
Bonhoeffer and the murdered Rüdiger Schleicher. Both authors are
friends of Klaus von Dohnanyi, son of Hans.
This book began with a commission from Robert Silvers to review new
books about Dietrich Bonhoeffer for The New York Review of Books. Our
decision to amplify our work came as we realized how much bigger the
story was than Bonhoeffer’s alone; we present it here knowing that it is
but a small contribution to a much larger history.
*For more on Bethge’s work, see the Appendix.