Bonhoeffer: Martyr of Faith

Within a year after Bonhoeffer and his colleagues started the Confessing Church, the Nazis were no longer content to merely humiliate Jews. Why merely humiliate when one has the power to do more?

In 1935, the Third Reich did much more. The government passed race laws that specifically targeted Jews, a step that should have surprised no one who had listened to Hitler long before he ruled Germany. He set forth his plan in the book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and in the 25-Point Program of his party.

The "Nuremberg Laws" stripped all German Jews of their citizenship, making Jews "subjects," not citizens. "Legally" enabling the Nazis to begin their atrocities against the Jews, the laws specified who was a Jew and prescribed how they would be treated in Germany. In his speech about the Nuremberg Laws, Hitler even addressed the potential need for a "final solution" to the Jewish "problem." The Holocaust had begun.

Trying to stop the ever-widening influence of Nazi tyranny, Bonhoeffer joined the Abwehr, a German military intelligence organization led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Its "agents" had access to vital war information. People working against the Third Reich, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were able to pass key information to anti-Nazi contacts.