No Ordinary Men by Fritz Stern

Author:Fritz Stern
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781590177020
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

He asked for an interview, signed the letter “Heil Hitler,” and received no answer. The ban was never revoked.

The Wehrmacht’s attack in the West on May 10, 1940, proved to be a brilliant success, against all the warnings of the generals. (Field Marshal Erich von Manstein had devised the Germans’ daring thrust through the Ardennes, but Hitler of course took the credit for it.) In June 1940 Paris fell—a once unimaginable revenge for the defeat of 1918. Most Germans were jubilant, and even some critics were awed. Hitler was at the height of his power and popularity. Quickly enough—and not just in France—appeasement turned into collaboration; Europe seemed done for. But a formidable foe had emerged—the new British prime minister, Winston Churchill—and over the summer the Royal Air Force, in the ferocious Battle of Britain, foiled Hitler’s intention to invade the British Isles. Hitler fell back on his next and boldest move: soon would come an attack on the Soviet Union.

During that dark summer after the fall of France, Dietrich and Hans were in closest collaboration—and not just in their efforts to stop the euthanasia program. In August Dietrich joined a meeting in the Bonhoeffers’ Berlin home with Hans, Oster, and another Abwehr conspirator. And a few months later, Hans and Oster were able to put Dietrich’s apprehensions about army service to rest: they would arrange for him to be made a civilian V-Mann (Verbindungsmann, liaison person) with the Abwehr, which would, the official explanation ran, profit from his extensive international contacts. Though never a formal member of the Abwehr, as a V-Mann Dietrich received u.k. status in early 1941—all the more important now that the Nazis were drafting as many Confessing Church pastors as they could and sending them off to the front. (At Dietrich’s request Hans later managed to get u.k. status for several of Dietrich’s closest associates.) Thus did Bonhoeffer begin his ostensible work for the military arm of the Nazi regime—months after the fall of Norway and the fall of France—when Hitler’s triumph was at its zenith and most Germans were jubilantly following their Führer. Never had Nietzsche’s warning been more apt: “A great victory is a great danger.”

To balance the contradictory obligations of being a pastor in a nation at war and doing conspiratorial work against the regime required prudence and inestimable courage, especially since Himmler’s RSHA was ever more suspicious of wandering pastors and of anyone with a connection to Canaris and his people in the Abwehr. On top of that, for the first time in more than a decade Bonhoeffer had no formal church affiliation or stipend. In truth the Confessing Church was in tatters, and he was only scraping by with minor assignments from the Old Prussian Union’s Council of Brethren. In any case preaching to congregations who were exulting about Germany’s victory over France, or discussing the Gospel with patriotic army chaplains, created hideous spiritual conflicts.

Since the Gestapo had the Abwehr under heightened scrutiny, in October Oster and Canaris sent Dietrich

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