Bonhoeffer: The Last Days
“And though this world with devils filled,
Should threaten to undo us;
We will not fear, for God hath willed
His truth to triumph through us.”
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, Martin Luther
Berlin now lay in ruins; whole streets had disappeared under piles of cascading rubble. Smoke filled the air and broken water lines created vast sheets of black ice. In his prison cell at night, as he lay in the dark, Bonhoeffer would sing quietly to himself St. Matthew’s Passion, which he thought was Bach’s most beautiful work. He would inscribe from memory the musical notations of sacred songs. He prayed, he wrote poetry, and he spoke about an array of emotions. He lamented that he would die a celibate; the fears of oblivion weighed heavily on him. The worst times were those when the past felt lost forever. “I wanted my life,” he had whispered in the dark in the summer of 1944, “I demand my own life back.” In his last letter to Marie Wedemeyer he wrote, “My past life is brim-full of God’s goodness, and my sins are covered by the forgiving love of Christ crucified. I’m most thankful for the people I have met, and I only hope they will never have to grieve for me, but that they too, will always be certain of, and thankful for, God’s mercy and forgiveness.”
The war was almost over as defeat was imminent, but the Gestapo’s work continued. On the afternoon of February 7, 1945, Bonhoeffer was taken from Berlin and transported to an unknown location. On April 4, 1945, the diaries of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, were discovered in a deserted safe at the Supreme Command headquarters. Furious at what he read in them, the next day Hitler ordered the execution of all the imprisoned Abwehr conspirators. Himmler relayed the order directly to the Gestapo. By this time, Bonhoeffer had been at Buchenwald concentration camp for a few weeks. He had recently celebrated his 39th birthday. He had stopped denying any involvement in the conspiracy but was also hopeful that soon the German soldiers would run for their lives and they would be released. Buchenwald was one of the extermination camps where death was celebrated and worshipped. It was the embodiment of the Satantic worldview of the SS where weakness was preyed upon and crushed.
The prisoners were to be kept well enough to be interrogated. Soup and bread for lunch and bread, fat, and marmalade for dinner. On Easter Sunday the thunder of Allied guns could be heard in the distance. The hope of each inmate was that it would all be over soon, just hang in there. That same day they were told to get ready because they were leaving. Sixteen prisoners were crammed into a van along with their luggage. It was one of those airport vans that hotels send to pick up customers, except this one was designed for gassing prisoners. The exhaust would be piped back into the van in order to kill all passengers. This made it easy for unloading when it backed up to the crematorium ovens.
Bonhoeffer’s Last Day
On April 8, 1945, which was the first Sunday after Easter, Bonhoeffer was asked to lead a service. It was held in a bright school room which served as their cell. He prayed and read the verses from the prayer book and expounded on Isaiah 53:5, “With his stripes we are healed.” When he was finished two men came for him and he went with them. They all knew what it meant; he was to be executed. A Mr. Best wrote, “He was, without exception, the finest and most loveable man I have ever met.”
Bonhoeffer took a blunt pencil and wrote his name and address in the front, middle, and back of the volume of Plutarch - the one the family had given him. He left it behind, and it was given to his family years later. As he jumped into the van to go to Flossenburg he had his volume of Goethe with him.
Later that day all five conspirators were tried and convicted of the crime of treason.
Early on April 9th, 1945 the camp doctor, H. Fischer-Hullstrung, recorded his impression:
“On the morning of that day between five and six o’clock the prisoners, among them Admiral Canaris, General Oster, General Thomas and Drs. Sack were taken from their cells, and the verdicts of the court martial read out to them. Through the half-open door in one room of the huts I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this loveable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensured after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.” [1]
The men’s bodies were burned in a pile and thus they joined the millions of other victims of the Third Reich. There may not be any better way to explain the man, the martyr, the pastor, the scholar, and human being than the words he spoke just before his death. He had hardly finished his last prayer when the door opened and two evil looking men in civilian clothes came in and said, “Prisoner Bonhoeffer, get ready, come with us.” The words “come with us” for all prisoners had come to mean only one thing - the scaffold. Bonhoeffer at this point was reported to say, “This is the end. For me the beginning of life.” [2]
