An Honourable Defeat by Anton Gill

consistently opposed to Nazism. Even when they could no longer present a united front, even when they were in a tiny minority, they continued their individual protest. Niemöller recognised that this stance was not enough. Immediately after the war, he convened a meeting at Stuttgart to formulate a Declaration of Guilt by the Church for not having opposed Hitler sooner and more strenuously; but he was being unrealistically harsh.
    His own arrest was not far off, and he could no longer rely on his fame and popularity to protect him from it. On the morning of I July 1937 he had a meeting at his house in Dahlem with a group of colleagues. [26] Barely had the meeting begun than one of their number saw a column of black Mercedes cars approach and draw up — unmistakably the Gestapo. The whole group, including Frau Niemöller, was placed under house arrest and had to endure an eight-hour-long search of the building, and especially of Niemöller’s study. At the end of it, all save Niemöller himself were free to go. He was not tried until the following year, and then committed to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen as the ‘personal prisoner of the Führer’. He was later transferred to Dachau, and was liberated by American forces in 1945. Niemöller lived to a great age, dying in 1984 after a distinguished postwar career in the course of which he was no less outspoken than he had been against Hitler.
    On the evening of her husband’s arrest, alone in the house, Frau Niemöller heard singing outside her window. The women’s choir of St Ann’s had heard of their pastor’s arrest and had come to comfort his wife. Two days later, The Times in London published a letter by the Bishop of Chichester, a friend of the Confessing Church, in which he sounded one of the earliest unequivocal warnings from abroad about the Nazis: ‘This is a critical hour. This is not a question just of the fate of a single vicar; it is a question concerning the whole attitude of the German state to Christianity.’
    In early August, a service of intercession for Niemöller took place, and, when the police tried to stop it, a spontaneous demonstration occurred which resulted in 250 arrests. One of those taken was the pastor Franz Hildebrandt. He was now in great danger, in view of his Jewish ancestry; but by dint of the enormous exertions of a friend and colleague who had also been present with Hildebrandt at Niemöller’s arrest, he was able to secure his release and escape to England. That friend was Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
    Bonhoeffer and his twin sister Sabine were born in 1906. They were two of eight children in a remarkable family. The father, Karl Bonhoeffer, was chief psychiatrist at Berlin’s main hospital, the Charité. He was later involved in the 1938 plot against Hitler to the extent of preparing a paper which demonstrated that the dictator was clinically insane. The mother, Paula, was the sister of General Paul von Hase, who was closely involved in the 20 July 1944 Plot. Sabine later married Gerhard Leibholz, a Jewish lawyer, and was thus obliged to leave Germany with him, spending the war in London. An older sister, Ursula, married another lawyer, Rüdiger Schleicher, who was also involved in the Resistance and killed by the SS in April 1945. Another older sister, Christine, married Hans von Dohnanyi, an important member of the Resistance who worked for the Abwehr. Dietrich’s older brother Klaus, a senior lawyer with Lufthansa who also worked for the Resistance, married Emmi Delbrück, whose brother Justus was on Oster’s staff and equally involved in the Resistance. The Bonhoeffer children were, moreover, distant cousins of Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, another leading figure in the Resistance.
    But it is Dietrich’s story which must be told here. [27] A tall, blond young man, whose fine hair showed early signs of thinning, his chubby face and round, gold-rimmed spectacles belied a serious, rather lonely nature and a formidable