And on and on….
“Well?” Hans had asked after the meeting.
Dietrich had little to say, for he was thoroughly depressed. On board ship from New York he had allowed himself a few daydreams. Dietrich delivering a fiery sermon which would rouse the good Christians of Berlin to throw themselves between the Gestapo and the suffering Jews. Dietrich the faithful assistant to Hans von Dohnanyi of the Abwehr, lurking in dark alleys at midnight waiting for the clandestine message which would save the world from Hitler. Dietrich standing beside the engineer of a locomotive pulling a trainload of Jews to freedom.
Of course, all that was foolishness, but it had helped him to sleep at night.
He contemplated his immediate assignment. Life in a country house. Eating fresh eggs and homegrown vegetables. Having coffee with the middle-aged wives of Prussian officers suffering at the front.
“What do you think intelligence work is?” Dohnanyi had asked. “It’s boredom, mostly. Waiting for something to happen. And something usually doesn’t happen, except that if you aren’t alert, you miss that small detail that brings down empires.”
Dohnanyi also said, as they ate roast duck at the Hotel Kempinski, confiscated from its Jewish owners and now boasting swastikas over every glittering entrance, “Safe? You think you will be safe? I assure you, brother-in-law, even in these small things you are committing treason. Though to the outside world it will look like collaboration. All your erstwhile admirers abroad, in America, in England, the ecumenical movement, will wonder. ‘What about Bonhoeffer?’ they’ll say. ‘Has he truly gone over to Hitler?’ But I assure you, your name is now irrevocably linked with ours. If Oster falls, you and I fall. We’ll see the inside of a Gestapo prison and be lucky to get out alive. That is intelligence work. Boredom on the one hand, death on the other.”
Reports of events in Poland arrived daily in the War Ministry and were carried on to the Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi homes. Then the Abwehr’s Vatican liaison, Dr. Josef Müller, had arrived in Berlin after a trip to Warsaw, Kraków, and Czestochowa. Late at night in the Sacrow house Dietrich had listened while Müller, a large man with a long head and white hair thick and wavy as cake frosting, dictated an account of his travels. He paused now and then to accept a suggestion from Dohnanyi, while Christel sat at the dining-room table hunched over a typewriter in a circle of light. Müller’s voice was flat, matter-of-fact, as he described what he had seen in Poland.
Refugees bombed in the roads as they attempted to flee. Children in the fields strafed by low-flying Luftwaffe planes, their twisted bodies found along with their companions—dead horses, cows, dogs. Churches looted. Priests, schoolteachers, gentry, attorneys, and physicians identified in villages and towns, and lined up before firing squads, an entire educated class eradicated.
And the Polish Jews, murdered out of hand or rounded up into detention camps or city ghettos.
From time to time Christel stopped to rub her forehead and run her hands through her hair, not tired so much as overcome by the words she was putting to paper. Sometimes Dietrich took her place, but he was not nearly so competent a typist and she would soon be back at it. Dietrich felt his own uselessness. He had nothing to contribute. He had not been back to the War Ministry, or visited Poland. Nor would he go to Rome, as would Dr. Müller, with a copy of the report hidden in the false bottom of a valise, to tell the Pope how his Polish flock was being treated. He only hovered, replenished the coffeepot, brought out plates of cheese and sausage, rubbed Christel’s back and shoulders while she threaded pages through the typewriter.
They had called this the X Report. A ridiculous name, pretentious without meaning a thing. And yet the lack of meaning was crucial. That was espionage, Dohnanyi would say. The X Report was more than a catalog of horrors in Poland, and copies would go not only to the Vatican. The X Report included the assurance that a coup was being planned, that Hitler would be overthrown. Oster had made contact with Churchill’s government, which agreed it would treat with a new German regime if Hitler was disposed of before he could attack the West.
“We must also say we’ll withdraw from Poland and Czechoslovakia,” Dietrich had said, “and make restitution. The British will demand that, and they’ve every right to.”
“Yes,” Dohnanyi agreed, “but we only talk about that with the civilians in the resistance. We can’t say it to the generals yet, including Brauchitsch. Except for the atrocities, they’re very proud of the Polish campaign, God help them.”
“How do they make an exception of the atrocities?”
“When human beings do well at their work, they can overlook quite a lot.” Dohnanyi sighed. “It’s an argument for later, when Hitler is gone.”
“Suppose, when that is accomplished, Goering or Himmler or someone simply steps in?”
“Civil war,” Hans said in a flat voice. “The army against the SS. But believe me, that would be no contest. The army wins the battles. The SS are not a fighting force, they’re a damned murdering mob. Anyway, I hope it won’t come to that. When we take out Hitler, we’ll take out Himmler and the others at the same time. Oster knows how to do it.”
Oster had made his plans—which divisions would take over which facilities, which would arrest Hitler and the others and stand them before a firing squad. Dohnanyi was in charge of civilian unrest. He had managed to make contact with trade union leaders inside Dachau and build a modest network that reached outside the camp. He thought he might be able to pull off a general strike to coincide with the army takeover.
One thing had remained. Oster went to East Prussia, where he spent an afternoon with Generalfeldmarschall Walther von Brauchitsch. In tweed jackets and corduroys, the two of them accompanied by water spaniels rather than aides de camp, carrying rifles. Duck hunting.
Oster flew back to Berlin that night and was met at Tempelhof airfield by Hans von Dohnanyi. His face was drawn with worry, and he said not a word. Dohnanyi had known at once.
“Are we dead men?” he asked when they were alone in the car.
“That depends,” Oster said, “on whether Brauchitsch talks. Walther and I have known each other since we were boys. I appealed to his honor. He’s from the old school, you know.”
“Oh yes,” Dohnanyi said. “So.”
“So.” A light rain had begun to fall, and Oster stared at the windshield wipers, clicking steady as a metronome, while Dohnanyi drove. “So he has changed his mind. He said, ‘My God, man, you should not have brought this to me. This is nothing less than treason.’ I told him if it was treason, I was the only one to blame. And I reminded him I had come to him in the strictest confidence. Did he hear that? We shall know soon enough.”
Dohnanyi drove for a time without speaking. Then he asked, “Why did Brauchitsch change his mind?”
“That’s the worst part. It’s because he’s been helping draw up the plans to invade Scandinavia and the West. I’ve seen the plans as well. And he believes, as I believe, that they will succeed.”
They had spent several anxious days until it became clear that Brauchitsch had told no one of Oster’s activities. All that could be done now was to warn the British and Dutch and Belgians that the Wehrmacht would turn its attention away from a coup and toward them. The dates of the invasion were confirmed, and Oster sent couriers to London and Amsterdam and Brussels and Oslo. Be prepared on November 12, 1939, the message said. This information comes from the underground opposition in Germany. We are highly placed, we are not loyal to Hitler. Please trust us.
The day came and went, without an invasion. Hitler had changed his mind. Again after the New Year an attack was planned, and Oster sent word to the West. Again Hitler delayed. When through clandestine channels a third message from Berlin announced the invasion on May 10, 1940, it was ignored. The western governments had decided the earlier dates were deliberately planted by the SD and the Abwehr to keep them off guard. It was highly doubtful, Churchill’s cabinet agreed in Whitehall, that anyone placed highly enough in Germany to
have access to the actual date of an invasion would blatantly betray his country by passing it on, especially in light of the earlier misinformation. Reports of a coup and leaks of German military secrets, it was agreed, should henceforth be treated with a great deal of skepticism.
But this time Hitler did not waver. Belgium and Holland were quickly overrun and the British army nearly trapped at Dunkirk. Then Paris fell.
Dietrich traveled to Memel, to Königsberg, delivering dull lectures on scripture to gatherings of elderly church people, lectures that must be devoid of political content so as not to draw attention to himself. Spent much of 1940 at Pätzig, the von Wedemeyer estate, beginning work on his new book. Waiting for a word from the Abwehr that he was needed. A call which did not come, because the German generals were deliriously happy, the German people were deliriously happy, and no one except a few fools wanted to talk about overthrowing the government.
POMERANIA. SUMMER AND AUTUMN 1940. The Junker estate of Pätzig was bereft of men. Herr von Wedemeyer was now an officer serving in Poland, and son Max, only eighteen, was stationed in France, had marched jauntily into Paris and posed for a snapshot in front of the Eiffel Tower. Frau von Wedemeyer displayed the photograph on the mantel in her breakfast room, a place where she could often be found seated by the window in the warm summer sun, sewing and mending for the estate and for her men in the Wehrmacht.
Sometimes she was joined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would take a break from writing in his room and come downstairs for a cup of coffee. Dietrich could not bear to look at the photograph of Max, his former confirmation student. A sweet young man as Dietrich recalled, kind and generous, now handsome in his uniform with a proud face, arms folded and legs apart, a colossus astride the world. Frau von Wedemeyer, on the other hand, often looked up from her sewing to study her son’s image, as though such close observation would keep him safe.
Once Dietrich said, “You have no photo of your husband.”
“No,” she said, “he keeps forgetting to send one. Besides, I have our family photographs, and I don’t need him in uniform. Poland is safe now.”
Safety in Poland, Dietrich thought, depended upon your perspective. “The Jews,” he said cautiously, “are coming in for some rough treatment there.”
“Yes,” Frau von Wedemeyer said with a wave of her hand. “Father wrote something about it. The SS are misbehaving. They have no discipline, he says. But the generals have complained to Hitler and so it will be dealt with.”
Frau von Wedemeyer was a stern woman with a face whose features often seemed as frozen and studied as if she posed for a portrait. In the past she and Dietrich had not warmed to each other. He seemed an odd bird to her, for he did not ride or hunt, indeed had never sat a horse or discharged a firearm, and what else were men good for? He sensed her antipathy, and on his part had thought her especially hard on her daughter Maria, a cheerful child who seemed to wilt in her mother’s presence. But with husband and eldest son in the army and the other children away at boarding school, Frau von Wedemeyer was lonely. When it was suggested to her by a von Kleist cousin in the War Ministry that Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer needed a place to live while pursuing his writing and ministry in Pomerania and East Prussia, she had readily invited him to Pätzig.
They settled into an odd domesticity. She was suspicious of his idleness—he was the only man of his social class and age in the entire district who was not in uniform. There had been some hint of a medical disability, and indeed she judged he would make a most awkward soldier. But surely he might serve in some capacity, a chaplaincy or a desk job. He himself seemed embarrassed by his lack of involvement in the war effort, grew markedly uncomfortable when the subject arose, and if she made remarks which were too pointed—she could not resist now and then—his ears turned pink and he would not hold her gaze.
But the presence of a man in the house, especially a man who could converse intelligently and escort her on her walks through the woods and play the piano in the evenings, was a comfort. For several months, they got on well enough.
As time passed, though, Dietrich grew more and more moody. When he returned from the trip to Memel shortly after the fall of Paris, she greeted him exuberantly, overjoyed that the fighting was at last over and her Max was safe.
“I’ve just had a letter,” she said as they walked from the railway station. “He is billeted at Versailles, can you imagine, and he’s already been into the city several times. Of course, the museums are closed as the paintings have all been hid for safekeeping. Still, Paris is Paris, he says, and he’s always longed to see it.”
“Surely he won’t enjoy seeing it in such circumstances,” Dietrich answered shortly.
She was stung nearly to tears, and said little the rest of the way. It was a walk of nearly three miles, and she had not brought the car because of the rationing of petrol. But she wished now she had used the fuel, for she wanted to be away from this man who strode beside her, healthy as an ox, while her darling boy risked his life in France for the Fatherland.
Through the rest of that summer and into the autumn, Dietrich kept more and more to his room. Frau von Wedemeyer saw him only at mealtimes, and sometimes he even asked for a tray to be sent upstairs. Once he went to Stettin to preach at a church, and returned in an especially morose mood. At breakfast the next morning, he asked, “Have you been to town lately? The SS is rounding up the Stettin Jews and transporting them to Poland. Why, do you think?”
She patted her mouth with her napkin. “I’m sure you must be mistaken,” she said.
“No, I’m not. I telephoned Berlin, and nothing is happening there. But in Stettin Jews are being forced from their homes and put on board trains. Not passenger trains, Frau von Wedemeyer, but cattle cars.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I saw it with my own eyes.”
She stood up suddenly. “If you’ll excuse me, Pastor Bonhoeffer.” At the door she turned and faced him. “Perhaps Polish Jews who came to Stettin as refugees are being sent back. The Reich cannot be expected to take care of everyone, you know.”
“No,” he said. “They are German Jews.”
She left the room without another word.
He had returned from the trip to Stettin with a shortwave radio. Sometimes at night when Frau Wedemeyer retired and walked softly along the corridor past his room she could hear the crackle of static and then voices speaking in a foreign tongue which she recognized as English. So Dietrich was listening to the BBC. It was an offense punishable by death according to laws enacted at the beginning of the war. At Pätzig, at night, there was no one to hear except Frau von Wedemeyer, and certainly she would not dream of reporting him. But she was angry nonetheless, and had less and less to say to him.
At night in his room, Dietrich turned out all the lights and lay on his bed, listening to the BBC. This—is London. Air-raid sirens wailed like a Greek chorus. The Luftwaffe was sending squadrons of bombers over London and Coventry and Exeter and Southampton and all those places whose names had become so familiar to Dietrich during his time in England. London’s East End was on fire, the BBC said, block after block destroyed, thousands dead. The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral dark against the flaming sky. Londoners spent nights in backgarden shelters, or crammed together in tube stations. A band of actors, according to one broadcast, went from shelter to shelter performing the play Murder in the Cathedral by the poet T. S. Eliot.
Dietrich wept. He wondered if quiet, dull Forest Hill had been bombed. Knew in his heart that St. Paul’s Whitechapel, whose organist knew only three hymns, was no more and wondered if the organist was no more. Wondered if George Bell’s club, the Athenaeum, still stood. Wondered about Chichester. Coventry Cathedral was a pile of rubble, and the city of Portsmouth, only a few miles from Chichester, had been reduced to ash.
And where was Sabine?
It was a relief to both Dietrich and Frau von Wedemeyer when the telephone call came from Hans von Dohnanyi.
“Things are
changing,” Dohnanyi said, without explaining what “things” were. “We want you closer to Switzerland. Come back to Berlin and we’ll explain your new assignment.”
He packed his bags with a full heart, Sabine ever before him, and George and Hettie Bell, and Elisabeth Hildebrandt lost somewhere in Berlin while trains idled in rail yards.
Frau von Wedemeyer made sure that a basket of sandwiches was packed for his journey, but she did not walk with him to the station.
KLOSTER ETTAL. WINTER 1940–41. When he had planned, years before, to write a study of Christian ethics, he had envisioned it as a multivolume affair, and as long ago as his stay in England he had carefully set down an outline. The Foundations of Christian Ethics. Guilt. Justification by Works. The Commandments of Christ. Eschatology. Personal Ethics. Governmental Ethics. Community Ethics. The Church. The Family. One by one his list had grown until he had known that to complete this study would be his life’s work, the crowning achievement of his theological career. It would moreover be, like his earlier book Discipleship, a statement of profound assurance, a call to spiritual arms. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
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