Conspiracy and Active Resistance

A few theologians, involved in either the coup or preparations for the period after Nazi rule, were also in active resistance groups.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a staunch opponent of National Socialism from the start, joined the active resistance because of his personal religious convictions. In the fall of 1940, Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi arranged for him, employed by the Confessing Church of the Old Prussian Union and banned from speaking in the Reich, to become an agent for military intelligence.

On three trips to Switzerland, trips to Norway and Sweden and one trip to Italy via Switzerland, which he took in 1941 and 1942, he apprised friends in the ecumenical movement – especially Englishman George Bell, Bishop of Chichester – of the coup plots in Germany. Bonhoeffer solicited acceptance of the resistance circle and explored ideas about the Allies’ conditions for peace.

Moreover, Bonhoeffer was involved in the Beck Circle’s discussions and had contact with the Freiburg Circle. He was arrested on April 5, 1943 and was subsequently only able to attempt to cover up the preparations for the assassination attempt as far as possible.

Friedrich Justus Perels, a jurist and friend of Bonhoeffer’s, was also involved in underground activity. Perels had been brought up in the church and joined the German Christian students’ association during his undergraduate days. A so-called “person of mixed blood of the second degree”, he was still able to complete his law degree in 1936 but was no longer able to work as an independent attorney at law.

He was involved in the Pastors’ Emergency League and placed himself at the disposal of the Confessing Church as legal counsel. In 1936, he met Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his family, through whom he gained access to resistance circles. Perels was thus in contact with the Freiburg Circle and drafted a paper for the circle around General Ludwig Beck on measures to be taken immediately after the coup with respect to the church.

Through Bonhoeffer, he additionally had contact to the resistance group in the Abwehr around Colonel Hans Oster. Following the arrest of Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi, he supported their friends, acted as their intermediary and message bearer and helped with preparations for their trial.

The discovery of the so-called Zossen files in the wake of the investigations that commenced after the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 revealed that he was an accessory and he was arrested on October 4, 1944. After weeks of severe maltreatment in prison, he was sentenced to death on February 2, 1945 – also because of his support of the Confessing Church – and killed by a shot through the base of his skull on April 22 without any official execution order.

Harald Poelchau, chaplain at Berlin-Tegel prison since 1933, was also involved in the deliberations of the members of the Kreisau Circle. Since his involvement went undiscovered by the Gestapo, he was able to comfort his friends incarcerated in the prison after the failed assassination attempt. In his work as a chaplain, Poelchau was a companion and ministered to hundreds of individuals sentenced to death during their final days.

Finally, Eugen Gerstenmaier actively worked on behalf of the resistance circle. Imbued with pietism, Gerstenmaier had earned a degree in theology and had been arrested briefly for the first time in 1934 when, as a student in Rostock, he organized a protest against Ludwig Müller who had been installed as Reich Bishop by German Christians.

After earning his doctorate in 1935, he joined the staff of Bishop Theodor Heckel in the Church Foreign Office in 1936 where he was responsible for ecumenism and congregations abroad. Although he earned his Habilitation degree, he was denied his teaching license in 1937 since he was considered to be an opponent of the regime.

When he was forcibly assigned to work part-time in the Foreign Office’s culture department in 1939, Gerstenmaier met numerous figures, including Hans Bernd von Haeften and Adam von Trott zu Solz, who judged Hitler’s policies increasingly critically.

In 1942, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke invited him to attend the Kreisau Circle’s discussions. A close acquaintanceship, even friendship, soon bound Gerstenmaier with Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg and von Moltke. Contrary to the opinion of the majority, he countenanced the option of tyrannicide in the discussions of the members of the Kreisau Circle.

Gerstenmaier established the contact between the members of the Kreisau Circle and Theophil Wurm, Bishop of the Württemberg Regional Church, his home church. Wartenburg and Moltke met with the bishop a number of times from mid-1942 onward, occasionally in Gerstenmaier’s apartment. On various trips Gerstenmaier was able to take, he apprised friends from the ecumenism movement in Sweden, Switzerland and even the Balkan region of the resistance circle’s plans.

On July 20, 1944, the day of the assassination attempt, he – armed with a pistol and pocket Bible– sought to support the conspirators in the Bendlerblock in Berlin. During the trial before the People’s Court, he presented himself as a naive and unworldly churchman and was the only one of the defendants sentenced to “merely” seven years of prison rather than death.

One wellspring of his strength to resist was the word of God found in the Prophet Jeremiah: Fear not, O Jacob my servant, says the Lord, for I am with you. I will make a full end of all the nations to which I have driven you, but of you I will not make a full end. I will chasten you in just measure, and I will by no means leave you unpunished (46:28). American troops freed him from Bayreuth Prison on April 14, 1945.