The German Church Struggle and Bonhoeffer's Resistance

The event

Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as German chancellor in January 1933, a faction within German Protestantism known as the "German Christians" sought to align German Protestant church doctrine and structure closely with Nazi ideology, including efforts to purge church membership and leadership of individuals of Jewish descent and to reinterpret Christian theology through the lens of German nationalist and racial ideology.

A minority of German Protestant pastors and theologians, alarmed by this development, organized resistance that culminated in the 1934 Synod of Barmen, which produced the Barmen Declaration, a confession of faith (substantially drafted by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth) asserting that Jesus Christ alone, not any political leader, party, or ideology, constitutes the sole source of the church's proclamation and life — an implicit but unmistakable rejection of Nazi claims on the church's loyalty. Signatories organized themselves into what became known as the Confessing Church.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German Lutheran pastor and theologian who had already publicly criticized the dangers of totalitarian leadership within days of Hitler's appointment, became a leading figure in the Confessing Church, directing an illegal underground seminary at Finkenwalde training pastors outside officially sanctioned, Nazi-aligned church structures until the Gestapo closed it in 1937.

By 1939, despite the relative safety of an offer to remain in the United States, Bonhoeffer chose to return to Germany, subsequently joining a resistance circle within German military intelligence involved in plots against Hitler's life — a step in significant tension with traditional Christian pacifist ethics that Bonhoeffer wrestled with as an extraordinary and tragic moral necessity. Arrested in 1943 and further implicated after the failed July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging at Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just weeks before the camp's liberation and Germany's surrender, becoming one of the twentieth century's most widely studied examples of costly Christian resistance to totalitarian power.

Other witnesses

• Barmen Declaration, 1934 (full text)
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
• Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography

Further reading

• Christian History Magazine 32: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theologian in Nazi Germany — free full issue