ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602050029
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BERLIN
SOURCE: The New York Times
POLITICIANS, ACTIVISTS AND CLERGY seek to vindicate a figure who has become a symbol of resistance to injustice.
In the eyes of many Germans, few 20th-century heroes are braver or more inspirational than the martyred anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Yet, in the eyes of the law, he is a traitor.
Hoping to remedy this situation, a group of politicians, human-rights advocates and Lutheran clergy announced plans Sunday to seek posthumous vindication for Bonhoeffer. They also are asking Parliament to declare all convictions done by SS courts illegal.
A decade ago, Parliament condemned Nazi ``people's courts'' and voided their convictions. But that declaration did not cover SS courts.
``Germany has not succeeded in cleansing its justice system of the influence of Nazi judges,'' Stephan Hilsberg, a member of Parliament, said in announcing the campaign. ``This legacy is a heavy burden on the current judicial system.''
In choosing to focus on Bonhoeffer, who was born 90 years ago Sunday, organizers have seized a figure who has become a symbol of Christian resistance to injustice.
Although Bonhoeffer was not famous during his lifetime, publication in recent decades of his poems, essays, letters and diaries has made him a subject of growing interest. His insistence on the need for personal courage in confronting evil, as well as on the brotherhood of Christians and Jews, has struck resonant chords in postwar Germany.
As late as 1939, Bonhoeffer was safely in New York, where he had studied at Union Theological Seminary. But he refused entreaties to stay.
``In this difficult time in our national history, I must be with the Christians of Germany,'' he wrote in a letter to his friend Reinhold Niebuhr. ``German Christians are being given the awful alternative of consciously wishing for the destruction of their nation so that Christian civilization can survive or wishing for the victory of their nation and thereby the destruction of civilization. I know which alternative I must choose.''
Upon his return to Germany, Bonhoeffer helped organize a church-based resistance group and called on clergymen to oppose Adolph Hitler, whom he denounced as ``the Antichrist.'' He made contact with dissident officers, and, in 1942, traveled to Sweden to meet with a British bishop and discuss plans for a coup.
In 1943, Bonhoeffer was arrested and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the failed assassination attempt against Hitler the following year, investigators discovered his ties to the plotters. He was transferred to the Flossenbuerg concentration camp in Bavaria, brought before an SS tribunal, sentenced to death, and hanged April 9, 1945. He was 39.
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