Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in Breslau, Germany, into an educated, prominent family. He became a Lutheran pastor and theologian, studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and was on track for the kind of distinguished academic career that prestigious German families expected. Then the Nazis came to power, and Bonhoeffer had to decide what kind of Christian he was going to be.
Most of the German church chose accommodation. They reinterpreted scripture to align with the regime, expelled Jewish converts from their congregations, and stayed quiet. Bonhoeffer helped found the Confessing Church, which refused to submit. He ran an underground seminary. He wrote theology that argued silence in the face of evil was itself evil. "Not to speak is to speak," he said. "Not to act is to act." He was banned from teaching, then from publishing, then from public speaking. He left Germany in 1939 for a safe position in New York and almost immediately turned around and went back. He could not, he wrote, participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if he had not shared the trials of his people.
He joined the Abwehr conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. A pastor, plotting murder. He wrestled with this. He did not pretend it was clean. He argued that there were moments when a Christian had to accept guilt — to get their hands dirty — rather than maintain personal purity while others suffered. The plot failed. Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 and held for two years. On April 9, 1945 — three weeks before the war in Europe ended — he was hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp. He was thirty-nine years old. His last words, sent through a fellow prisoner, were: "This is the end. For me, the beginning of life."
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."