Saints and Villains

by Denise Giardina

  “Yes,” said Visser’t Hooft. “I still have family and friends there.”

  “Therefore I must earn your trust by telling what I know.”

  Dietrich then traced the history of the plot since 1937, careful to emphasize the obstacles which existed. “I do not wish the situation to sound more hopeful than it is,” he said, “or to make those involved more heroic than we are. Caution and fear continue to overcome courage and resolve, and there is the very painful question of betraying one’s country. The Wehrmacht’s successes in the field have brought opposition to a halt for the time being. But as the war drags on, General Oster and my brother-in-law have grown more hopeful once more. We are a long way from accomplishing anything, but we want to open channels to the West so that if something should be accomplished, we shall be able to communicate with the West at once. Since the World Council of Churches is an international organization whose leaders are well-respected churchmen in their own countries, it seemed wise to approach you.”

  “I believe we can help,” Visser’t Hooft agreed. “For example, Bishop Berggrav in Norway, as you may know, has become a leading figure in the opposition to the German occupation of his country. We’ve also been able to use the neutrality of Sweden and Switzerland to great effect. And we have contacts inside the detention camps in France. Do you know the group CIMADE?”

  Dietrich shook his head.

  “George says in his letter you are a friend of Jean Lasserre. Jean is involved. CIMADE smuggles food and money to Jews in the French camps and to people in France and the Low Countries and Germany who are hiding Jews.”

  “In Germany?”

  Visser’t Hooft smiled. “Oh yes. There are a few brave and good souls, though not many.”

  Dietrich flushed. It was something like this that Elisabeth had wanted from him, and he had turned his back on her. He studied his hands, ashamed to meet Visser’t Hooft’s eyes.

  “When I sit before the fire at home with my books and my cup of hot chocolate,” Visser’t Hooft said gently, “I must remind myself that we are given different tasks, each of us. I do not go into the camps myself; it is not a risk I assume. I oversee the operation from this office and I am very good at it. That is important. It is what I do now. As to what any of us must face in the future, God knows.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” Dietrich said.

  “Anyway, you see why I have been so cautious with you. We are a life-line to many people and the work is dangerous and confidential. Nothing must interfere with it.”

  “And so,” Dietrich said, “the rest of what I have to tell you has added import.” He opened his briefcase and removed a folder, which he glanced at before handing it across the desk. “This is information so sensitive I crossed the border with it concealed in a false bottom of my valise. But now that it is here, you must share it with anyone who will listen to you.”

  Visser’t Hooft scanned the sheets typed by Christel far away in Sacrow. As he read his face grew pale, and now and then he murmured, “My God, my God.” He was reading an expanded version of the X Report which included not only atrocities in Poland but the euthanasia of the sick and infirm and mentally ill inside Germany.

  “As you see,” Dietrich said, “anyone who does not fit into some category of ethnic purity is judged unworthy of life. In Poland there were random killings at first, and mass executions by firing squad. Labor details with such hard work and little food or shelter that people drop dead. And here is something new. Jews are being transported in closed vans which are pumped full of exhaust fumes as they travel. Women and children and the elderly, those who cannot do hard labor, seem to be particular targets. The mentally and physically infirm in Germany are also being dispatched by gas and by lethal injection.”

  Visser’t Hooft continued to read and shake his head.

  “We estimate that by the end of 1941, if nothing changes, a million people will have died.” Dietrich’s voice was steady, a concerted effort not to sound hysterical. “Jews are also being removed in Austria and Czechoslovakia, along with gypsies and homosexuals. There are rumors that people now being deported from the Reich are being taken to special camps. Not just for detention. There are rumors, though so far as we know nothing has been confirmed, rumors that more efficient methods of mass murder are being tested at secret locations. If this is the case, food and money will do the Jews no good.”

  Visser’t Hooft swiveled his chair toward the window. “What’s to be done?”

  “On our side, we must get rid of Hitler. On yours, pressure on member nations to accept refugees. Especially Switzerland and the United States.”

  Visser’t Hooft laughed bitterly. “You know these Swiss I live among turn Jews away at the border every day. They don’t want to anger dear Herr Hitler, and, if truth be told, they’re as anti-Semitic as the average German. As for the Americans, Henry Leiper shares some of his mail and press clippings with me. It seems the World Council of Churches is a godless Communist front duped by Zionist propaganda that is trying to draw the United States into a war. Those are the catchphrases of the American right wing. Leiper says he’s had to hire security guards for the office in New York because they’ve been firebombed.”

  “Still we try,” Dietrich said.

  Visser’t Hooft rubbed his chin and stared out the window. A light snow had begun to fall. “Of course.”

  “And we pray,” Dietrich said.

  “Pray. And for what, Bonhoeffer, do you pray?”

  “I pray for the defeat of my country. It is the only way to atone for our sins.”

  “Do your fellow conspirators share your views?”

  Dietrich hesitated. “No,” he admitted. “Most of them are patriots. They blame the freedoms of the Weimar Republic for Hitler. They hope that the war will end soon but that the Reich will remain intact, will even continue to include Austria and the Sudetenland and Poland. As a buffer against the Soviets, they will claim, and because before the Great War much of Poland belonged to the Prussian Empire. No. Most of my fellow conspirators dislike my views.”

  Visser’t Hooft shook his head. “Indeed, you are the loneliest man I know.”

  Operation 7

  September 1941–May 1942

  DIETRICH BONHOEFFER RETURNED to Geneva at the end of August 1941 with little new to report. He, like everyone else, had absorbed the shock of Germany’s June invasion of the Soviet Union and seen in it a conclusion one way or the other. The military successes there and in North Africa would make it difficult to stir up the generals to revolt. But Oster was cautiously optimistic. He believed not even Hitler with his perverse luck could hope to defeat the Soviet army in winter, and a stalemate, with the British continuing to hold firm, would make for a restless Wehrmacht. Dietrich tried not to think about how many would die in the meantime. He willed himself to be hopeful. So he told Willem Visser’t Hooft. Visser’t Hooft had little news except that it was more and more difficult to gain access to the labor camps in France. Dietrich returned to Germany, once again discouraged at how little he could accomplish.

  He boarded the train in Geneva on a September morning when Lac Léman glinted in the sunlight that abruptly broke through the dense alpine mist. Dietrich wished his departure had come a day later, for he would have enjoyed a walk by the lakeshore. In fact, he wished he did not have to return at all, wished he could go back to Visser’t Hooft and beg him for a position in Geneva. He thought this all the way to the station, thought it as he climbed on board his car and wandered the corridor to the compartment he had reserved. As long as he thought about it, he felt he would not do it, and when the train left the platform he found to his relief that he was still on board.

  He changed trains at Basel, and soon after faced the border crossing at Weil. All went smoothly enough: he possessed the proper papers identifying him as an important military official, and he was carrying no incriminating documents, having left everything of a sensitive nature behind with Visser’t Hooft. There was still the most uncomfortable
sensation of hearing the distant clanging of an iron door at his back when the train lurched and slowly began to move across the frontier into the Reich. He shut his eyes in the hope of escaping into sleep, and was successful for a time. He woke as the train pulled into Karlsruhe and watched dreamily while passengers moved past the window. Beyond a group of soldiers carrying duffel bags, a thin dark-haired woman wearily pushed a broom along the platform. On the front of her tattered sweater she wore a large yellow star.

  Startled, Dietrich turned to the middle-aged woman who had shared his compartment since Freiburg. “What is that badge?” he asked.

  “You don’t know?” the woman said suspiciously.

  “I’ve just returned from a week-long business trip to Switzerland,” he said.

  “A new decree from the Führer just two days ago,” the woman said in a more friendly tone of voice. “All the Jews must wear a yellow star. So we know who they are and can keep an eye on them. Who knows what tricks they might pull otherwise? It does make it easier, doesn’t it?”

  Dietrich looked back out the window. The woman had passed the soldiers, who were laughing and shouting something after her. Then the train moved and they disappeared from view.

  “No,” said Hans von Dohnanyi. “Absolutely not.”

  Dietrich paced back and forth before Dohnanyi’s desk in the study of the Sacrow house. “Something must be done,” he said.

  “Not by us. It’s far too risky.”

  “So we just stand by—”

  “Do we risk all,” Hans interrupted, “to save a few? We save those few and so thousands more are condemned to die because we are found out before we can finish this? Ah, the lucky few! Who shall they be? No. I don’t want to discuss this further.”

  “Don’t want to discuss it,” Dietrich said, “because your conscience can’t bear it?”

  “Yes, that’s it. Call it whatever you like. But I will not put the larger conspiracy at risk.”

  “The larger conspiracy! What conspiracy? A pack of vain, two-faced generals too busy invading the Soviet Union to bother with Hitler. I’m sick of it, I tell you. I want out.”

  And Dietrich stopped, jarred at the sound of his own voice.

  “If it’s what you want,” Dohnanyi said quietly, “I’ll not stop you. But what will you do?”

  “Perhaps I’ll go to Geneva and volunteer to work with CIMADE. Visser’t Hooft might send me to France.”

  “You’d be spotted as a German national in a minute. Anything Visser’t Hooft has for you will be in an office in Geneva, far safer than here.”

  Dietrich turned away and went to the window. It was a clear autumn Saturday morning and Christel and the children were raking leaves into heaps.

  Dohnanyi said, “You’ve learned quite a lot about the treatment of Jews in France and the Low Countries. Perhaps you can use what you are learning to encourage the generals.”

  “Another report? What will this one be, the Triple X Report?”

  “You won’t be reasoned with?”

  Dietrich sighed and said, “Of course I will be reasoned with. I am more reasonable than brave, aren’t I?”

  He continued to work on his Ethics, writing about a world where success is the measure and justification of all things. When a successful figure becomes especially prominent and conspicuous, the majority give way to the idolization of success. They become blind to right and wrong, truth and untruth, fair play and foul play. It is not even seen that success is healing the wounds of guilt, for the guilt itself is no longer recognized. But wondered if it was easier for a failed man to make such an indictment.

  His parents had given him a room at the top of the house in the Marienburger Allee, a pleasant attic space that held a small bed, desk, bookcases, and his clavier. The desk stood near a double window set in a casement, and he paused often at his work to look out. He had asked for the room at the front of the house rather than the back, even though the rear view was of a pleasant grove of trees. But the back windows also showed the air-raid shelter in the garden, freshly dug and piled with sandbags. Dietrich found the sight depressing. Besides, he wanted to keep an eye on the street.

  He wrote, The only appropriate conduct of men before God is the doing of His will. The Sermon on the Mount is there for the purpose of being done. Only in doing can there be submission to the will of God.

  He read these sentences over and over until he could shut his eyes and see them written across the darkness.

  Autumn passed. Rommel was sweeping across North Africa. In the Ukraine, Kiev fell to the advancing German army. Then Orel fell, halfway between Kiev and Moscow. It took a great deal of fortitude just to open a newspaper. For solace Dietrich continued to listen to the BBC, to share an imagined companionship with the beleaguered voices drifting across crackling air-waves from London. Thought of Sabine and Gerhard, and George and Hettie Bell hearing the same words, the same music. Benny Goodman. Artie Shaw. Vera Lynn.

  He only dared listen at night when the maid, Katherina, had gone home. Katherina seemed kind, not the sort to go to the Gestapo, but she had been with the family for only two years, and one never knew. She was a plain, dull-looking young woman with a round face and thick eyebrows. If she wondered why the youngest son was allowed to secrete himself in his room all day, reading and writing while other men his age were fighting and dying on the Russian front, she never let on. She had been told not to disturb him at his work, and enough was said to give her the impression that he was performing some service for the government. Sometimes when she cleaned his room, she glanced at the papers scattered on the desk top, from idle curiosity rather than any sort of suspicion. A dense, obscure text thick with biblical quotations. She could make nothing of it, and so came to pay it little mind.

  Then, on a cold day when Paula Bonhoeffer had gone out to visit Suse and Dietrich had just begun to think about his noon meal, his writing was interrupted by hurried footsteps climbing the stair and a sharp urgent rapping at his door.

  “Come in,” he said, startled.

  Katherina flung open the door and stepped inside, a frightened look on her face.

  “Pardon, sir,” she said, “but there’s a woman at the front door asking for you.”

  “Well, Katherina, did you show her in? Did she say what she wants?”

  “Sir—” Katherina put her thumb to her mouth and bit it nervously—“it’s a Jewess. I didn’t want to let her in, so she’s still at the door. What should I do?”

  But he was on his feet before she had finished speaking, clattering down the stairs to throw open the door.

  Elisabeth Hildebrandt stood beside the front gate as though poised to run, the yellow star vivid as a flame against her gray coat.

  “My God!” he called and waved to her. “Come in, come in!”

  She approached hesitantly, and he pulled her inside the door and slammed it shut. She stood for a moment as though unsure what to do or say, and then turned a distraught face to him.

  “I shouldn’t have come, I don’t want to get you in trouble, but I didn’t know where else to turn.”

  For answer he reached out and pulled her close. She buried her face against his chest and said, “I’m afraid to go home.”

  She had come by bicycle, since Jews were no longer allowed to use public transport. He found the bike leaning against the outer wall beside the gate, wheeled it to the back of the house, and stashed it inside the air-raid shelter after first looking around to see if he was observed. Back in the house, he went to the kitchen, where Katherina sat at the table. She stood, but he motioned her to sit and pulled up a chair beside her.

  “Katherina, I must ask a favor of you.”

  She stared at him, and he leaned closer and said in a low voice, “I must ask for your discretion. The young woman who has just arrived, the Jewess as you could plainly see, is here on a matter of some urgency.” He took his wallet from his pocket and opened it to his Abwehr ID. “Do you see what this is? I work for military intelligence.”
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  Katherina looked frightened, he was pleased to see.

  “Even Frau Bonhoeffer knows little of what I do,” he continued. “It is highly confidential. The Jewess upstairs is an informer, and she has come to tell me about troublemaking by some other Jews she has been observing. She would not normally come here to the house, but she has lost her own safe-conduct pass. I must now take her report and attempt to obtain another pass for her.”

  He sat back, wondering if any of this seemed remotely plausible, and waited for Katherina to absorb what he had told her.

  “Do you understand?” he asked.

  Katherina nodded her head and said, “Yes, Herr Bonhoeffer,” in a small voice.

  “Good. Now, I shall need to talk with the Jewess undisturbed, and then try to get rid of her before my mother returns. I don’t want to frighten or worry Frau Bonhoeffer, you understand?”

  “Of course not,” Katherina agreed.

  “If Frau Bonhoeffer returns and sees you are upset, she will wonder about it. So why don’t you go home now? I shall tell my mother you’ve been taken ill and that I excused you.”

  “What about Cook? She’ll be here this afternoon to do supper for your parents.”

  Dietrich thought quickly. “She hasn’t seen the Jewess either, so we needn’t worry her any more than my mother. Do you understand? Discretion is everything. Not even your own family must be told about this.”

  “What if the neighbors saw her?”

  “We must hope the Jewess wasn’t seen, but if she was, well, there’s nothing one can do to prevent a Jew from knocking at the door. And Katherina, if you hear any gossip in the neighborhood, you must say that she is a former student of mine at university who came to ask a favor and was turned away. It is a lie, but for the Fatherland—”