Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who opposed Nazism from its first days, wrote some of the century's most searching books on discipleship, and was executed for his part in the resistance.
He was born in Breslau on 4 February 1906, one of eight children of a distinguished Berlin family; his father was a leading psychiatrist. He earned his doctorate in theology at Berlin at 21. A year at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1930–31), where he worshipped at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, opened his eyes to racial injustice and to a living, costly faith.
The Confessing Church
When Hitler came to power in 1933 Bonhoeffer spoke against the Führer cult and the persecution of the Jews, and joined the Confessing Church. From 1935 he led its illegal seminary at Finkenwalde, until the Gestapo closed it in 1937. From those years came The Cost of Discipleship (1937), with its warning against "cheap grace", and Life Together (1939).
Resistance and prison
In 1939 friends brought him to safety in New York, but within weeks he returned, believing he must share his people's trial. Through his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi he joined a resistance circle in military intelligence that was working to overthrow Hitler.
He was arrested on 5 April 1943. His letters from Tegel prison, published as Letters and Papers from Prison, are among the most influential Christian writings of the century. After the failed plot of July 1944 his links to the conspirators were discovered. He was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp on 9 April 1945, weeks before the war ended. His last recorded words were: "This is the end — for me the beginning of life."