On April 9, 1945, at Flossenbürg concentration camp, the Nazis executed the talented pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer by hanging, on suspicion of his involvement with the Abwehr conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He was 39 years old. Two weeks later, the U.S. Army liberated Flossenbürg. Hitler took his own life on April 30, just three weeks after Bonhoeffer’s unjust and so untimely death.
Perhaps any Christian with the courage of Bonhoeffer would inspire even Protestants to saintly veneration. But Bonhoeffer left a body of intellectual work that academics would have engaged even if he had fled to Switzerland to teach theology in peace and protest the Nazis in safety through the Second World War. Indeed, if his life hadn’t been cut short, he would likely have written far more and at least finished his Ethics. Instead, scholars must extrapolate trajectories of theological development from books, articles, letters, and fragments that remain.
