By Dawn Barkhuizen
If ever there was a time for believers to pay attention to the life of the Nazi dissident and German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer it is today. And if ever a movie was a clarion call to the Church to awaken from its slumber regarding the political trajectory of our nations, including that of South Africa, it is the new movie – Bonhoeffer. Pastor. Spy. Assassin – released on the international circuit last week by Angel Studios.
So, why exactly is Bonhoeffer such a big deal, and why should his life have such resonance for Christians at this moment?
The young Lutheran clergyman is recognised for many things, but key among them is the courageous and principled stand that he took against genocidal Nazi antisemitism. It was a stand that cost Bonhoeffer his life at just 39-years-old. But of equal importance to his defence of Jews was his defence of the Church against Hitler. As the Fuhrer, Hitler attempted to capture Germany’s mainstream Protestant churches and set himself up as the head.
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For Bonhoeffer, his stand against Jewish persecution and his stand for religious freedom were inseparable and had the same source – the Bible and his life with Christ.
Compelled to act
Confronted by hard evidence that Jews, gypsies and homosexuals were being herded into concentration camps and gassed or shot to death, Bonhoeffer felt compelled to act. Eric Metaxas, the Christian commentator and writer of the acclaimed biography, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (2011), suggests that Bonhoeffer’s strong opposition to the injustice of antisemitism was motivated by his understanding of Scripture which tells us that all men are equal before God. A second reason for Bonhoeffer’s activism was that he not only cherished the Gospel but believed in living out its principles.
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It is also worth noting that Bonhoeffer’s stand against the injustice of antisemitism did not begin with the Jews. It was first evident in his response to the racism that he witnessed while attending Union Theological Seminary in New York from 1930 to 1931. During that year Bonhoeffer also joined Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and it was while among the church’s African-American congregants that he experienced a spiritual awakening so profound that his faith was radically transformed. No longer were his beliefs an intellectual exercise, but by his own account he became a real Christian for the first time. And it was these same congregants with whom Bonhoeffer had experienced such sweet communion that he witnessed suffering the sharp end of race discrimination. Bonhoeffer was both grieved and opposed to such inequality.
Little did he know then that he was about to face the same evil in far greater proportions in his home country.
He returned to Germany just as Hitler’s national socialism was on the rise. Bonhoeffer was quick to spot its dangers. Two days after Hitler took office as the leader of Germany in 1933, Bonhoeffer gave a radio speech warning of the dangers of the personality cult that was developing around the Nazi leader.
Nazification of Church
And indeed, the Fuhrer had big plans. For one thing he intended setting himself up as the head of the mainstream Protestant churches in place of Christ. These churches had around 45-million members. His plan involved establishing a Reich (state) Church under which all the Protestant churches were required to amalgamate with church leaders required to swear allegiance to Hitler. The Reich Church was to serve as a tool for the dissemination of Nazi propaganda. Viewed in the context of history this attempt to fuse Christianity with Nazism amounted to an effort to suppress the life and liberty that had been ushered in by the Protestant reformation that had been born in Germany centuries earlier, in 1517, with Martin Luther at the helm.
The Catholic church was also not exempt from Nazi interference despite Hitler signing a “Concordat” with the Pope in which he promised to stay out of Catholic affairs. Hitler did not keep to his side of the agreement. The Catholics were ordered to stop using the crucifix as an emblem in their buildings, to stop publishing Catholic newspapers and to stop all forms of Catholic education for the youth. Meanwhile German parents were forced to send their children to state schools that taught a Nazi curriculum.
Bonhoeffer protested. He was among the Protestant church leaders who formed a breakaway church. And it was on behalf of this group that he ran an underground theological seminary. For this his books were put on a banned list. Then he – a formidable academic – lost his license to teach at the university.
Confronted by evidence of the state-sponsored systemic murder of Germany’s Jews, Bonhoeffer acted. He helped to smuggle thousands of Jews into neutral Switzerland. And he urged the German Church not to sit on the sidelines and simply “bandage the victims of the wheel”, but to “jam a spoke in the wheel”.
The Nazis would not brook any opposition.They arrested 800 pastors from the non-conforming Protestant group and sent them to concentration camps, while 400 Catholic priests were taken to Dachau outside Munich.
Bonhoeffer managed to evade arrest until 1943 when he was caught for smuggling Jews out of the country and jailed. Undaunted by Nazi prison life he continued ministering to those incarcerated with him. He continued doing this until his name came up in association with a group who had been plotting to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer was still in jail when the plotters struck in 1944. While their plan, known as Operation Valkyrie, failed, the Gestapo then began to uncover the details of the plot and Bonhoeffer’s name was revealed. Consequently, at the break of dawn on April 9 1945, just one month before the Nazis surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945, and Germany was liberated from Nazi subjugation, Bonhoeffer was hanged with six other men at Flossenbürg concentration camp.
There can be no doubt that the monstrous atrocity committed by the Nazis against the Jews and other minorities, as well as against the non-conforming church, violated every biblical principle. But it is perhaps in the Nazi church’s attempt to flush out members who might have had any Jewish heritage and to ban outright the use of the Old Testament – which the Third Reich considered to be a “Jewish book” — that we see clearly how Christianity is inseparable from Judaism. That, as the Vicar of Baghdad, Canon Andrew White, puts it, Jews are the “older brother” while Christians are the “younger brother”.
This brings us back to the question posed at the outset of this article – why does Bonhoeffer’s life speak loudly to believers in this current age?
Reservoir of antisemitism unleashed
While it has hardly been a secret that antisemitism has been on the rise in various parts of the world for several decades, there can be no disputing that last year’s October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians sleeping in their beds somehow took the lid off of a gigantic reservoir of antisemitism that had been accumulating below the surface of society for some time.
Why else would the victims of October 7 now be cast as the perpetrators? Why else would the world choose to forget the 251 people taken hostage into Gaza? Why else would anti-Jewish sentiment be manifesting loudly and proudly in many capitals of the world? Television and social media footage attests to this — Israeli flags are seen being ritually burnt in public spaces, Islamist slogans advocating the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state are chanted by all and sundry, and Nazi salutes are made – not once, but severally.
Meanwhile all the way from the US to France to Scandinavia to the Middle East, Jews have become walking targets. Particularly shocking among such incidents was the recent mass attack on Jewish soccer fans leaving a soccer stadium in Amsterdam after watching Israel’s national team on the field. Fleeing Jews were hunted down by mobs connected to each other via social media. Consequently in 2024 Jews were forced to hide in attics in Amsterdam just as the Jewish teenager Anne Frank did with her family from1942 to 1944 before being exterminated in a concentration camp.
Meanwhile on American university campuses Jewish students have also been set upon by mobs as the so-called cognoscenti has demonstrated its inability to distinguish between nationalist freedom fighters and Islamist jihadis engaged in a religious war – jihadis who aim to establish a non-democratic Islamist caliphate run according to Sharia law.
And the problem with antisemitism infiltrating universities, notes the eminent historian Niall Ferguson, is that it begins to filter into society just as happened at German universities under Nazi rule.These once world-leading academic institutions were reduced to incubators for antisemitic thought. The situation became so toxic, says Fergusson, that some professors of medicine were even allowing their students to write dissertations on the most effective means of medically sterilising Jewish women.
Post October 7, the Jewish state has also been under direct attack.
Militarily from seven sides by Iran and its terror proxies. This while the same United Nations General Assembly that in 1947 proposed the formation of the Jewish homeland as a refuge for survivors of the Holocaust has morphed into a stage for antisemitic point-scoring.
Lawfare
International law has also been used as a means to attack the Jewish state. This assault has been spearheaded by the South African government’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) and a huge team of taxpayer-funded lawyers at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. One would think that the ANC government would be too busy contending with myriad crises on the home front to become the useful idiots of an Islamist agenda in the Middle East, but just this past week Dirco again raised its voice to applaud a decision by the International Criminal Court to charge the sitting president of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, with war crimes. The very same SA government that allowed Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir to glide in and out of our borders despite an ICC warrant for his arrest now calling for the upholding of the Rome Statute is rank hypocrisy – and they know it.
Given all this, nobody should be surprised that Jewish people the world over are feeling increasingly fearful that the evil that they vowed could never happen again, might just be on the doorstep. At such a time it behoves us as Christians to take note of Bonhoeffer’s response to Hitler’s persecution of Europe’s Jews and to remember that at the same time Hitler took aim at the Church. For his stand against these twin evils Bonhoeffer paid an ever-increasing price, but never once did he flinch. In fact, given the option of fleeing into exile, he chose to remain with the oppressed, with the tortured and with the corpses in the eye of the storm. Bonhoeffer leaves us a testament of immense courage in the face of overwhelming evil. He reminds us that the persecution of the older brother will also profoundly affect the younger brother.
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