The Plot to Kill Hitler Read online

  DEDICATION

  To my nephews, Jack, Wisler, Champ, and Mychal

  EPIGRAPH

  He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

  —Martin Luther King, Jr.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue

  Chapter One: A Big, Rambunctious Family

  Chapter Two: War Breaks Out

  Chapter Three: Bonhoeffer Seals His Destiny

  Chapter Four: Leaving Home for the First Time

  Chapter Five: The Trip That Changed Everything

  Chapter Six: The Men Who Would Change Bonhoeffer’s Fate

  Chapter Seven: A New Idea of What a Church Could Be

  Chapter Eight: From Faith to Action

  Chapter Nine: Grappling with the Existence of God

  Chapter Ten: A Decisive Experience: Visiting the United States

  Chapter Eleven: Heil, Hitler!

  Chapter Twelve: Speaking Out against the Führer

  Chapter Thirteen: The Aryan Paragraph

  Chapter Fourteen: Committing Treason

  Chapter Fifteen: Bonfire of Hatred

  Chapter Sixteen: A Nazi Church

  Chapter Seventeen: A Different Kind of Resistance

  Chapter Eighteen: Night of the Long Knives

  Chapter Nineteen: A Breakaway Church

  Chapter Twenty: A Conspiracy Begins

  Chapter Twenty-One: The War Hits Home

  Chapter Twenty-Two: A Dark Night of the Soul

  Chapter Twenty-Three: From Clergyman to Courier

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Undercover

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Sounding the Alarm

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Love in Wartime

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Noose Grows Tighter

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Assassination Attempts

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Caught

  Chapter Thirty: Another Attempt on Hitler’s Life

  Chapter Thirty-One: Evidence of Treason

  Chapter Thirty-Two: The End of the War

  Chapter Thirty-Three: Eternity at Last

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Timeline

  Endnotes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Books by Patricia McCormick

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  THE FAMILY

  DR. KARL BONHOEFFER

  Dietrich’s father was one of the most prominent psychiatrists in Germany.

  PAULA BONHOEFFER

  Dietrich’s mother was trained as a teacher and was one of the few women of her generation to earn a college degree. The Bonhoeffers lost two sons and two sons-in-law because of their involvement in the plot against Hitler.

  KARL-FRIEDRICH BONHOEFFER

  Seven years older than his brother Dietrich, he was a brilliant physicist and would go on to help Albert Einstein split the atom.

  WALTER BONHOEFFER

  Six years older than his brother Dietrich, he was an aspiring botanist. He died of injuries in World War I.

  KLAUS BONHOEFFER

  Five years older than his brother Dietrich, he was one of the original members of the conspiracy. As an attorney for a German airline, he used his ability to travel to build support for the coup. He was killed by a firing squad just days before the fall of Berlin.

  URSULA BONHOEFFER

  Four years older than her brother Dietrich, she married Rüdiger Schleicher, an attorney who was one of the original members of the conspiracy. He was killed by a firing squad just days before the fall of Berlin.

  CHRISTEL BONHOEFFER

  Three years older than her brother Dietrich, she married Hans von Dohnanyi, the architect of the conspiracy. Dohnanyi compiled proof of Nazi atrocities, a file he called the Chronicle of Shame. Christel was arrested along with her husband but released; she brought coded messages to him in prison so the conspiracy could continue. Dohnanyi was hanged at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

  SABINE BONHOEFFER

  Dietrich’s twin, she married Gerhard Leibholz, a baptized Christian who came from a Jewish family. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi helped them flee to Switzerland before they could be sent to a concentration camp.

  SUZANNE BONHOEFFER

  Three years younger than her brother Dietrich, she married the philosopher Walter Dress, a friend of her brother’s.

  MARIA VON WEDEMEYER

  Dietrich’s fiancée. After the war, she came to the United States and studied mathematics at Bryn Mawr College.

  THE CONSPIRACY

  ADMIRAL WILHELM CANARIS

  Chief of the German intelligence agency, he originally went to Hitler to tell him about atrocities in Poland, only to find out Hitler had ordered the killings himself. Canaris then became a key member of the conspiracy and was executed at Flossenbürg alongside Bonhoeffer.

  GENERAL HANS OSTER

  Deputy head of German intelligence, he was Dohnanyi’s superior and allowed him to hire Bonhoeffer and to collect information about war crimes. When those files were discovered, Oster was hanged at Flossenbürg alongside Bonhoeffer.

  LIEUTENANT FABIAN VON SCHLABRENDORFF

  A member of the conspiracy, he placed a bomb disguised as a bottle of cognac on Hitler’s plane. He was arrested and tortured but never revealed the names of the other conspirators. He was moved from one concentration camp to another, including Flossenbürg, where he saw Bonhoeffer’s body carried to an open fire. He avoided being executed at Flossenbürg because of a clerical error and lived until 1980.

  MAJOR RUDOLPH-CHRISTOPH VON GERSDORFF

  A member of the conspiracy, he activated a pair of bombs inside his coat while giving Hitler a tour of his headquarters; Hitler left unexpectedly and Gersdorff disabled the bombs. Because none of the conspirators ever revealed his name, even under torture, he was never caught by the Gestapo and lived until 1980.

  CLAUS SCHENK GRAF VON STAUFFENBERG

  A member of the conspiracy, he placed a bomb under the map table at Hitler’s headquarters. The bomb successfully went off, killing four people; Hitler escaped relatively unharmed. Stauffenberg was killed by firing squad that night.

  WERNER VON HAEFTEN

  The young soldier who asked Bonhoeffer if he should shoot Hitler, he drove the getaway car for Stauffenberg and was killed by firing squad.

  ARCHBISHOP GEORGE BELL

  A member of the British parliament, he served as Bonhoeffer’s secret contact in the British government. He was outspoken in his opposition to Hitler and delivered Bonhoeffer’s eulogy on a radio broadcast three months after his death. Many years later, the Anglican Church acknowledged that Bell had abused children.

  PROLOGUE

  APRIL 5, 1943

  The Gestapo would arrive any minute. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, waiting peacefully in his book-lined study, had been expecting this day for a long time. He arranged his files carefully on his desk and opened his diary to a page with fake entries to throw Hitler’s men off his trail. Then he removed a panel from the ceiling and hid a letter alongside a sheaf of papers he’d stashed there earlier.

  The purr of a diesel engine announced the arrival of a black Mercedes on the leafy Berlin street outside his house. Two of Hitler’s secret police agents got out and climbed the stairs to the third-floor study. They told the blond, boyish-looking Bonhoeffer to come with them. He calmly said good-bye to his parents, put his Bible under his arm, and left.

  Upstairs un
der the rafters was proof, in his own handwriting, that this quiet young minister was part of a conspiracy to kill Hitler.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s desk and piano

  ONE

  A BIG, RAMBUNCTIOUS FAMILY

  1906–14

  Most of the homes in Breslau, Germany, had tidy front yards, neatly tended gardens, and thick Persian rugs in the parlor. But at the Bonhoeffer home, chickens strutted across the tennis court. Lizards, snakes, and rabbits were kept in a small zoo near the kitchen. And the family’s pet nanny goat wandered freely in and out of the parlor.

  The children—four boys and four girls—went to school at home, in a makeshift classroom with desks, chalkboards, and a trunk full of wigs, hats, and costumes. The family had a governess, a nursemaid, a cook, a housemaid, and a chauffeur, but their mother, Paula Bonhoeffer, was their teacher. She was strict when it came to table manners, but otherwise she loved to say yes to her children’s ideas. So when her oldest sons—Karl-Friedrich, fourteen; Walter, thirteen; and Klaus, twelve—asked to dig up the front yard to create an underground passageway, she agreed.

  Paula Bonhoeffer with her eight children. Dietrich is in the first row, second from left, and Klaus is in the second row, far right. Photographed in Breslau by Rotraut Forberg, 1911 or 1912.

  The boys tunneled all the way to the edge of the property, a stand of pine trees the children called “the wilderness.” Meanwhile, the girls—Ursula, eleven; Christel, ten; Sabine, seven; and Suzanne, four—took over an upstairs room and turned it into a gigantic doll house. One time, they played all day—until the nursemaid rang the dinner bell.

  They quickly washed and assembled around a massive dining room table. Everyone was present and accounted for—except seven-year-old Dietrich.

  The nursemaid went out on the veranda and called his name over and over again. Eventually, his twin sister, Sabine, spotted him lying on his back, lost in a daydream in his secret garden hideout. He came in sheepish and sunburned, completely oblivious to the fact that he’d held up dinner. Again.

  Dietrich was the dreamer in the family. His father, Karl, was one of the most prominent psychiatrists in Germany, and his mother came from an aristocratic family full of intellectuals. His older brothers were bigger, stronger, smarter, and, as Dietrich saw it, better at everything. Karl-Friedrich, the oldest, was a genius at physics. (He would later help Albert Einstein split the atom.) Walter could speak several languages, and he could identify every flower and tree he saw. Klaus, who their father said was perhaps the brightest of them all, was also the wit in the family. Dietrich’s sisters were formidable, too. Ursula was a beauty, and, like her father, she studied psychiatry. Christel studied zoology. Sabine, Dietrich’s twin, was athletic. And Suzanne, the baby, seemed to be good at everything.

  Dietrich sometimes felt lost in this big, rambunctious, and talented family. He tried to do everything his big brothers did, but because they were so much older, he was often dragged into playing dolls with his sisters. And so he would wander off to the garden to be alone. He would watch the clouds scud by overhead, feel the breeze rustle the pine needles in the forest nearby, and think. He would wonder: How did God create the world? Did God love everyone? Even bad people? Did God eat lunch?

  Home of the Bonhoeffer family at 43 Marienburger Allee in Berlin, view from the garden

  But it was the sight of horses pulling a black-draped casket on its way to a nearby cemetery that set him off on a lifelong quest. From that day on, he became obsessed with a single question: What happens after we die?

  Many nights, as he lay in bed across from Sabine, with only the glow of a small cup candle on the windowsill to light the darkened room, he would ask her if she could possibly imagine something as awe-inspiring as eternity.

  “It sounds long and gruesome,” she said.

  If you believed in heaven, he argued, dying wouldn’t be hard at all.

  But for all his big talk, Dietrich was often afraid in everyday life. He was too nervous to walk home from school alone. He was terrified of learning to swim. And when a family friend dressed up as Father Christmas and surprised the Bonhoeffer children, Dietrich froze in terror, hiding behind Sabine’s skirt.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer, age nine, 1915

  Sometimes he would summon up the courage to cut through “the wilderness” to visit his beloved grandmother, Julie Tafel, who kept an antique silver box filled with chocolate waiting for him when he visited. And sometimes while the others were outside chasing butterflies, he would plink away at the piano keys. Soon he was playing Mozart sonatas. By twelve, he was composing his own songs.

  The whole family was musical; they gathered together many nights after dinner to sing hymns and folk songs. But Dietrich, it seemed, was a prodigy. Finally, it appeared he had found his talent. His parents arranged for him to take lessons from a demanding teacher and they began to think he would become a professional musician.

  But his heart was never fully in his music. And so, for much of his childhood he remained the tag-along little brother. But someday, Dietrich—the little boy who was afraid of Father Christmas—would become best known for standing up to Hitler.

  TWO

  WAR BREAKS OUT

  1914

  Dietrich and Sabine were at a carnival on a hot August day in 1914 when their governess suddenly dragged them away from the horse-drawn merry-go-round. All around them the stalls and rides were being hastily shut down. World War I had broken out in Europe.

  Like a lot of eight-year-old boys, Dietrich was fascinated with the war. When he was younger, he’d asked for pop guns and toy soldiers for Christmas. Now he pored over newspaper accounts of reports from the front. He tacked a map on a wall in the family’s new home in Berlin and kept track of every move of the German army with colored pins.

  War was exciting, even romantic, for a boy who followed Germany’s victories with pride. With his brothers away at school, now it was Dietrich’s turn to drag his little sisters into games where they spied on enemy troops and stormed the ramparts—acting out the latest triumph of the German troops.

  WORLD WAR I

  World War I started with the assassination of the Archduke of Austria in Sarajevo. The Austro-Hungarians invaded Serbia, and Russia entered the fight on the side of the Serbians. Germany used the conflict to attack neutral Belgium and Luxembourg, then invaded France. The British came in on the side of the French, and a world war had begun. It would last for more than four years and result in almost nine million combatant deaths and more than seven million civilian deaths, mainly because of a protracted stalemate in France. It would mark the first time barbed wire and poison gas were used.

  When there were food shortages, Dietrich became the family scout, scouring the streets to find out which shops still had plums and exploring the nearby fields for mushrooms. He spent his allowance on a hen so the family could have fresh eggs. And when the family went on holiday, the nanny goat was loaded in the train’s luggage car, so the Bonhoeffers could have milk every day.

  But his boyish romance with war ended abruptly when his oldest brother, Karl-Friedrich, was called up for service. Now, suddenly, the war was all too real.

  The Bonhoeffer family was well-to-do and influential; they could have easily used their connections to keep their son out of the fighting. But Karl-Friedrich saw it as his patriotic duty to serve. Indeed, he enlisted in the infantry, where the need—and the danger—was greatest. He left home as soon as he turned eighteen, taking his physics textbook with him.

  When Walter left a few months later, he brought just one possession from home: his Bible. Dietrich stood by helplessly as his mother ran alongside the departing train and then stood weeping as it disappeared down the tracks.

  Day by day, he followed his brothers’ progress on his map, trying to reassure his mother with news of Germany’s victories. One bright May morning, Dietrich, Sabine, and Suzanne were playing outside when a delivery boy arrived with a telegram.

  Walter was dead. He had b
een hit by a bomb fragment and died of infection.

  Dietrich could scarcely understand. How could God have let this happen? He and Sabine watched as their big, sturdy father bent over, his head in his hands; the children stood nearby, too frightened to comfort him. Finally, Dr. Bonhoeffer rose, and, clutching the railing with shaking hands, he went upstairs to tell his wife. Paula Bonhoeffer was so devastated, she lay in a darkened room upstairs for nearly six weeks.

  After Walter’s death, letters he’d written from his sickbed arrived, asking his parents to come visit him. The last one, written just hours before his death, said he was not thinking about the pain, but instead “longing” for his family “minute by minute throughout the long days and nights.”1

  The lively Bonhoeffer home became hushed and gloomy. Karl Bonhoeffer shut himself away in his study; Paula Bonhoeffer hid upstairs reading Walter’s last letter again and again. Dietrich tried to cheer up his parents with his piano playing, but it was no use. He and his sisters tiptoed around the darkened house.

  The eerie stillness of their home was broken when another telegram delivery boy rang the bell. Karl-Friedrich had been injured. A few days later, there was more bad news: Now Klaus was to report for duty.

  His father was distraught, his mother inconsolable. They had lost one son, another was still on the front line, and a third was about to be drafted. When Klaus left to join the army, Dietrich would be the only son left at home. How could he show his parents that he was grown-up enough to help shoulder their grief, that he could take care of them?

  On the day of Walter’s funeral, Dietrich stepped up to the altar. He looked out at his heartbroken parents. Then he took a breath and sang, in a clear, unwavering voice, one of Walter’s favorite hymns. His parents were touched by their youngest son’s valiant effort to comfort them. But the Bonhoeffer family, which had seemed to lead such a charmed life, was shattered. Their father couldn’t bear to be in the room if Walter’s name was mentioned. Their mother fell into a severe depression. Dietrich was stunned. Now that death had come to his family, all his idealistic notions about eternity were thrown into doubt.