newsNew film about Dietrich Bonhoeffer – It’s a wake-up call for those denying the rapid spread of the world’s oldest hatred
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (played by John Dassler, centre) in a scene from the new film Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin which was released in the USA and Canada last week
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, it is the new movie Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin, released on the international circuit last week by Angel Studios. DAWN BARKHUIZEN reports from South Africa.
So, why exactly is Bonhoeffer such a big deal, and why should his life have such resonance for Christians at this time?
The Lutheran pastor is recognised for many things, but key among them is his courageous and principled stand 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 is 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. Bonhoeffer stood against both. This was because 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.
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 Scripture that tells us 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.
It is worth noting that Bonhoeffer’s opposition to the hatred of a specific group of people did not begin with the Jews of Germany. It was first evident in his response to the racism that he witnessed while living in New York from 1930 to 1931 when he attended Union Theological Seminary. 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 congregants with whom Bonhoeffer experienced such sweet communion that he also witnessed suffering the sharp end of race discrimination. It grieved him deeply.
Little did he know then that he was about to face a similar evil but of 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.
And indeed, the Fuhrer had big plans – including for the Church. He intended establishing a state church under which all mainstream Protestant churches were required to amalgamate. These churches had around 45-million members. As part of this Reich Church, all church leaders were required to swear allegiance to Hitler. The Reich Church was intended 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, born in Germany four centuries earlier, in 1517, with Martin Luther at the helm.
Hitler signed a Concordat with the Vatican after taking power in 1933. Many senior Roman Catholic prelates saw the German leader as their best defence against the spread of godless Communism.
Nor was the Catholic church exempt from Nazi interference. Hitler signed a “Concordat” with the Pope in which he promised to stay out of Catholic affairs, but 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. Consequently, his books were put on a banned list. Then this formidable academic lost his license to teach at the university.
But Bonhoeffer did not back down. Confronted by evidence of the state-sponsored systemic murder of Germany’s Jews, he acted. He began helping to smuggle Jews out of Germany and he beseeched 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.
The German Fuhrer who set in motion the Holocaust – perhaps the most appalling crime in human history.
Bonhoeffer managed to evade arrest until 1943 when he was caught and jailed for trying to transport fourteen Jewish people out of the country. Undaunted by Nazi prison life he ministered to those incarcerated with him. He continued in this fashion until his name came up the following year in association with a plot to assassinate Hitler. The plot was known as Operation Valkyrie. Bonhoeffer was still in jail when the plotters struck in 1944. While the plot failed, the Gestapo then proceeded to uncover its details 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.
An act against both Jew and Christian
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. So too did the Nazi church’s attempt to flush out any church members who possibly had Jewish heritage. But it is perhaps in the Third Reich’s attempt to ban outright the use of the Old Testament – which they considered to be “a Jewish book” — that we see most clearly how Christianity is inseparable from Judaism. We see that, as the Vicar of Baghdad, Canon Andrew White, puts it, Jews are the “older brother” while Christians are the “younger brother”.
State of Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the Western Entrance to Westminister Abbey in London
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 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 little disputing that the attack of October 7, 2023, by Hamas on Israeli civilians sleeping in their beds somehow lifted the lid off a gigantic reservoir of antisemitism that had been brewing below the surface of society for some time.
Why else would we now see the victims of October 7 cast as the perpetrators? Why else would the world so quickly forget the 251 people taken hostage into Gaza? Why else would anti-Jewish sentiment be permitted to manifest so loudly and proudly in so many capitals of the world? Television and social media footage attests to this — Israeli flags are 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 Dubai, Jews have become walking targets. Particularly shocking among these incidents has been the November 2024 mass attack on Jewish soccer fans leaving a 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 the year 2024 Jewish civilians were forced to hide in attics in Amsterdam just as the Jewish teenager Anne Frank did with her family from1942 to 1944 until they were detected and sent to a concentration camp.
Jewish university students have also been set upon by mobs on American campuses while the so-called cognoscenti has demonstrated its utter inability to distinguish between nationalist freedom fighters and Islamist jihadis engaged in a religious war – jihadis who aim to establish a very non-democratic Islamist caliphate run according to Sharia law. And if looking for examples of what else can go wrong when antisemitism infiltrates universities, we need look no further than German universities under Nazi rule, as pointed out by the eminent historian Sir Niall Ferguson. Not only were these once world-leading academic institutions reduced to incubators of antisemitic thought, but 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 world’s only Jewish state has also been under relentless 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 now morphed into a stage for antisemitic point-scoring.
Most Jews believe attacks on Israel are really acts of anti-Semitism – a claim denied by students in the USA, UK, the Middle East, Europe and other parts of the world
International law has also been used as a means to attack Israel. 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 in the past week Dirco again raised its voice to applaud a decision by the International Criminal Court (ICC) 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 its borders in 2015 despite an ICC warrant for his arrest now suddenly deciding to call 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 should never happen again might just be on the doorstep. At such a time it behooves those who call themselves Christians to take note of Bonhoeffer’s response to Hitler’s persecution of Europe’s Jews and to realise that when Hitler took aim at the Jews, he also took aim at the Church. For standing against these twin evils Bonhoeffer paid an ever-increasing price, but never once did he flinch. In fact, given the opportunity to flee into exile, he chose to step into the eye of the storm and to remain with the oppressed, with the tortured and with the corpses. Bonhoeffer leaves us with a testament of immense courage in the face of overwhelming evil. And he reminds us that the persecution of the older brother can, and will, profoundly affect the younger brother.
Dawn Barkhuizen is a veteran SA journalist with a strong interest in the Middle East. She is also a friend of Israel.