Hitler personally ordered that Dietrich Bonhoeffer be hung in the nude with thin wire at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp on April 9, 1945, just days before the end of World War II.
“I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer...kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God,” according to Eberhard Bethe, who would later become Bonhoeffer's biographer.
Bethe cited the camp doctor's written testimony, who is said to have witnessed Bonhoeffer's execution.
“I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God,” Bethe wrote of the camp doctor who saw the execution.
But other eyewitnesses dispute the camp doctor’s account. They asserted that Hermann Fischer-Hüllstrung may have wished to minimize the suffering of Bonhoeffer and the sufferings of six other condemned men who were hung seventy years ago today to reduce his own culpability in their executions, according to Thomas O.H. Kaiser's 2014 book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
It is believed that Bonhoeffer suffered longer than a few seconds. To prolong the tortuous agony of death, Nazi executioners were known to have revived political prisoners who almost die, only to asphyxiate them yet again. The execution could had lasted as long as six hours, according to a former Flossenbürg Concentration Camp prisoner.
“The physical details of Bonhoeffer's death may have been much more difficult than we earlier had imagined,” wrote Craig J. Slane's 2004 Bonhoeffer as Martyr: Social Responsibility and Modern Christian Commitment book.
Bonhoeffer’s execution occurred just two weeks before American soldiers liberated Flossenbürg Concentration Camp, three weeks before the Soviets captured Berlin, and a month before Nazi Germany surrendered to the allies, according to Robert W. Hacker's unpublished manuscript.
It is interesting to note that Bonhoeffer was influenced by the black church. He went to the United States in 1930 as a postgraduate student and teaching fellow at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. During this time Bonhoeffer attended Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church and taught Sunday School there. It is also interesting to note that the German Bonhoeffer fell in love with African-American spirituals, born from the turmoils, sorrows, challenges and inspirations of a minority people enslaved and oppressed by the majority.
After returning to Germany it was he would be oppressed by the majority. For ten years prior to his execution, Bonhoeffer spoke, wrote, taught, preached and courageously fought -- along with others in the German resistance movement -- Nazism, Hitlerism, totalitarianism and anti-Semitism. He criticized Germany's church, her religious leaders, as well as Christians who worshipped the Führer, rather than worship Jesus Christ the LORD.
The Bonhoeffer lesson learned is this: There's a danger when Christians hero worship political figures. So many German Christians in the 1930s were seduced by Hitler. It was Hitler who claimed to be a Christian. Bonhoeffer criticized them, German clergy and parishioners.
So many American Christians were -- and still are -- seduced by American political leaders, such as President Barack Obama. He says he's also a Christian, yet he is a proponent of late-term abortions, has increased the funding of abortion, believes in the equality of gays as a protected class and is a proponent of same-sex marriages. Christians are so willing to believe what leaders say rather than watch what they do.
Biblical purists – and I’m one of them -- would challenge Bonhoeffer for his ecumenical beliefs that go against scripture, and question his stance on social justice as it relates to forcibly taking from the have’s and giving to the have not’s. Yet Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an iconic Christian martyr. I afford him the respect on this – the seventieth anniversary of his brutal execution.
Let us remember the martyrs who died before Bonhoeffer and remember those who are being martyred for their faith now, from the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians beheaded in February to the 147 Christian students gunned down in Kenya last week.
Let us also pray for the millions of others who are persecuted for their faith, such as Asia Bibi, sentenced to death in Pakistan and Saeed Abedini, sentenced to eight years in prison in Iran.
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