The Plot to Kill Hitler: Chapter 23–Epilogue

They needed someone who could travel back and forth to London inconspicuously.

How could a pacifist, a man of God, justify what he was about to do? The answer was one that had first been articulated by Martin Luther, the founder of the church Bonhoeffer had loved.

Bonhoeffer would break the Commandments he had vowed to uphold and renounce his cherished philosophy of nonviolence.

He was being sent to Switzerland, ostensibly to gather intelligence for the Abwehr. In reality, he was meeting with Protestant church leaders from France and the Netherlands and presenting them with evidence of the latest atrocities in Germany and Poland.

His foreign secretary dismissed Bonhoeffer in a letter where he wrote, “I see no reason whatsoever to encourage this pestilent priest.”

Bonhoeffer returned home, dispirited, to the streets of Berlin, where Jews were now forced to wear yellow stars pinned to their clothing.

Bonhoeffer tried to intercede for her and six others with the Swiss.

Bonhoeffer explained that Dohnanyi had gotten Friedenthal and the six others forged documents letters of safe passage to Switzerland.

Finally, Dohnanyi broke the impasse: He would transfer a large amount of currency to a Swiss bank to pay the refugees’ expenses once they arrived.

Jews who worked at the Siemens munitions plant were taken straight from the factory floor to the transit depots.

But as more and more notices went out to Jewish families, he said, they knew what was in store for them. “The despair is unprecedented.”

Instead, they said Jews would be "eliminated by natural causes"—coded language for starvation and hard labor. It would be, they decreed, the "Final Solution."

Moltke had already expressed misgivings about what he saw in the streets of Berlin.

Hans Oster was an army general in charge of counter espionage at the Abwehr; he and Wilhelm Canaris, an admiral who led the Abwehr, gave Dohnanyi the freedom to collect evidence against the Nazis and to hire Bonhoeffer as a spy.

He had even managed to visit his favorite haberdashery when he was in Geneva.

Pretty and vivacious, Maria von Wedemeyer was confident, sunny—and opinionated.

Her passion for life was contagious. And it was just what the disheartened young theologian needed. He was smitten.

Bonhoeffer tried to dissuade him.

An unplanned assassination might only make things worse, or it could turn Hitler into a martyr.

It was his faith in the righteousness of their mission that kept Bonhoeffer from total despair.

He called an especially dull Nazi official “a very...smart old world officer,” and described another officer, a well-known bore, as a “bon vivant.”

He told her the Gestapo would soon arrive and arrest him. She made him a hearty lunch.

He was also allowed to receive books: books with infinitesimally small pencil marks under a letter every ten pages or so. It was a code—prearranged before the arrest—that allowed Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi to keep their stories straight when they were being interrogated by their jailers.

They thought the transfer of German currency to Switzerland was some kind of money-laundering scheme—a greedy act, perhaps, but not a treasonous one.

Dohnanyi was interrogated relentlessly—about the monetary discrepancies, about Bonhoeffer’s travels—but as soon as he realized the Nazis were unaware of his involvement in the assassination attempts, he was able to breathe a little more easily.

But he never gave up his belief that all his actions in the resistance were morally justified. “The thing for which I should be condemned is so irreproachable that I may only be proud of it,” he wrote.

No matter how uncomfortable the conditions, Bonhoeffer had his own way of escaping: He would lie on his plank bed and dream of lying under the rose arbor at his childhood home.

Bonhoeffer was in the sick bay ministering to a fellow prisoner when he heard the Führer’s triumphant voice on the radio. He was crestfallen.

On September 20, a search party found the rest of Dohnanyi’s Chronicle of Shame. Inside the crate were documents that tied him directly to the July 20 bombing. And inside one file were three handwritten notes from Bonhoeffer, notes that implicated him as an Abwehr spy.

Maria came to see him the day after Dohnanyi was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. She had begun to suffer headaches, insomnia, and fainting spells, but on that day, Bonhoeffer would write, she was “steadfast...in a way I’ve rarely seen.”

The Gestapo threatened to go after his parents—or even Maria—if he didn’t divulge what he knew about the conspiracy.

Initially a work camp where inmates quarried gravel for Hitler’s building projects, such as the Autobahn, Flossenbürg now housed all kinds of “social aliens,” such as gypsies, gays, vagabonds, dissidents, and Jews.

Initially a work camp where inmates quarried gravel for Hitler’s building projects, such as the Autobahn, Flossenbürg now housed all kinds of “social aliens,” such as gypsies, gays, vagabonds, dissidents, and Jews.

Initially a work camp where inmates quarried gravel for Hitler’s building projects, such as the Autobahn, Flossenbürg now housed all kinds of “social aliens,” such as gypsies, gays, vagabonds, dissidents, and Jews.

A plaque greeted the new arrivals: “There is a path to freedom and its milestones are obedience, hard work, honesty, order, cleanliness, sobriety, truthfulness, a spirit of self-sacrifice and love of the Fatherland.”

The camp was rife with disease and overcrowded beyond imagining. Barracks designed to hold 250 people now held a thousand, with inmates sleeping four to a bunk.

The crematorium, where inmates were taken after they’d been worked or starved to death, had been operating so incessantly, it had temporarily broken down.

The next morning, April 9, he, Canaris, Oster, and three other men were forced to undress and led to a gallows in a small courtyard right in front of their barracks.

On July 27, they turned on the radio to hear the voice of Bishop George Bell, Bonhoeffer’s secret contact in London, giving a eulogy for a young pastor he’d met years earlier “as an emissary of the Resistance to Hitler.”

On July 27, they turned on the radio to hear the voice of Bishop George Bell, Bonhoeffer’s secret contact in London, giving a eulogy for a young pastor he’d met years earlier “as an emissary of the Resistance to Hitler.”