8. Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer Right to Conspire to Kill and Adolf Hitler.

Dearly Beloved,

Some questions pursue one like a faithful dog. One of mine is “Was Dietrich Bonhoeffer right to conspire to kill Hitler?” Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) a Lutheran theologian, was a follower of the Barmen Declaration of the Confessing Church, which declared that Christians should not follow the rules and laws set out by the German Nazi government as it moved to coordinated both church and state by promoting the Deutsche Evangelische Kirche.

The Nazi Party was remarkable for being in power for only 12 and a half years, yet provoked a war in which at least 70 million people died and was responsible for the Holocaust.

Bonhoeffer confronted the political reality at that time, arguing that following the example of the Crucified Christ, 'real innocence shows itself precisely in a man's entering into the fellowship of guilt, for the sake of other men.” (Ethics (Eng. Trans.) 1955 p.210).

We are now at a safe distance from the events of his time. Bonhoeffer was a courageous man who suffered grievously for his faith, so I hesitate to criticise the decisions, “to enter guilt” and specifically, to conspire to assassinate Hitler. I wish, nevertheless, to put forward the following objections to the idea of assassination.

First the prohibitions against murder are ancient and persist in all human cultures. The Old Testament includes a prohibition in the Ten Commandments and Jesus tells Peter to put up his sword when Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane saying “those who live by the sword, die by the sword” (Matthew 26;51-52). It is exemplary that Christ heals the ear of the servant of the high priest whom Peter has attacked (Luke 22;50-51).

Second, from a Christian point of view the right to end a life is God's alone. Despite that, judicious capital punishment has been widespread although it has been increasingly abandoned.

Third, there are, practical objections, too. After all, Hitler, although a deeply symbolic misanthropist, was not a lone actor. It is a great tragedy that he was part of a group and a movement which espoused racial dominance, achieved by violence and violent oppression. Undoubtedly if Hitler had been murdered another, perhaps even more violent and unpleasant leader would have emerged from the ranks of the Nazi party to replace him. After all Ante Pavelić, the puppet ruler of Croatia, was so cruel and violent he was said to have embarrassed even the German occupiers of his country. A successor might also have been a more effective propagandist for National Socialism and a more successful war leader than Hitler was.

Fourth, the Nazi party had already used the burning of the Bundestag, the seat of the German government, as an excuse to bring in a law which abolished many civil liberties. They did this by saying that the burning was the act of Communist opposition and showed that repressive and monolithic laws were needed to protect the state. If Bonhoeffer had murdered Hitler, undoubtedly that would have been used as an excuse to make yet more laws which secured the Nazi Party and justified its violence and cruelty at the expense of the freedoms of ordinary people.

Fifth, the murder of a political leaders tends to set up a tradition of murder in a polity and that risks resulting in long term instability because the murder of leaders becomes normative and that in turn favours the continuation of chaotic and repressive government.

Sixth, if Bonhoeffer and his co-conspirators had succeeded in killing Hitler, then Christians in general would certainly have been targeted by the Nazi regime and suffered retribution. Although we might be high minded about this and take the view that death was worthy of Christians in such a context, it would have put Bonhoeffer in the position of being indirectly responsible for the death and ill treatment of many of his fellow Christians. That surely would be difficult to justify on moral grounds – it is one thing to put yourself at risk but quite another to confer the same fate on others.

Bonhoeffer was arrested and spent much time in prison.. Finally he was transported to the Flossenbürg death camp  just a month before the end of the war. There he was executed for being part of the conspiracy against Hitler.

Whatever objections one may have to some of his ideas, we must not forget that he left an important ethical legacy because he defined and discussed in his letters from prison how fellow Christians should react to a violently misanthropic and anti-Christian regime.

Peace and love to you all,

Paul.


        Photo: Paul Munton
Human ambiguity expressed in notices on
 a gate in a village in S.W. France.
The notice on the left reads "Aggressive dog; Ferocious owner"
and the one on the right "Nice cat".


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