ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 16, 1996 TAG: 9608160062
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BONN, GERMANY
SOURCE: The New York Times
DIETRICH BONHOEFFER was linked to a failed plot to assassinate Hitler, whom he dubbed "the Antichrist.''
In a ruling seen by many Germans as righting one of the great wrongs of postwar history, a Berlin court has formally exonerated Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran theologian who joined the Resistance against Hitler and was executed for his activities in the closing days of World War II.
Until last week, many in Germany had assumed that the death sentence for treason, passed by an SS tribunal in the concentration camp of Flossenbuerg in Bavaria, was still technically valid because previous efforts to void convictions by Nazi ``people's courts'' did not apply to SS courts.
But in the ruling last week, the Berlin court determined that the conviction had already been overturned by a 1946 ruling in Bavaria that applied to many sentences handed down by Nazi courts.
The fact that it took 50 years for this ruling to come to light in the case of one of Germany's best-known Resistance activists raised some eyebrows. ``It would have been helpful if the Bavarian state government could have issued a statement earlier,'' said Edzard Schmidt-Jortzig, the justice minister in Bonn.
The ruling also covered four other Resistance figures, including Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, sentenced and hanged along with Bonhoeffer on April 9, 1945. It also illuminated the vagaries of the postwar German justice system, which continued to employ many judges who had served under the Nazis.
The Berlin court last week found that the five executed men had been motivated ``not by destruction, but by love of the fatherland and involvement on the side of humanity.'' Indeed, the court ruled, the five men had ``not intended to endanger the Reich, but to prevent the damage done to the country and its people by the Nazi regime.''
By contrast, a 1956 court ruling in the former West Germany said the SS judge who sentenced the five men to execution could not be punished because he had upheld ``the right of the state to maintain itself.'' Two of the five judges on the 1956 panel had served as judges in the Nazi era.
The further rehabilitation of Bonhoeffer resulted from the efforts of many church figures - including Karl-Heinz Lehmann, a theology professor who asked Berlin public prosecutors to review the case last February, declaring that the aim was ``to have resistance against Nazism declared right rather than wrong.''
The court's ruling inspired justice officials in Berlin to order a full-scale review of outstanding sentences against resistance figures sentenced by Nazi courts.
One of the most prominent is Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who tried to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. He was captured by the SS and executed the same night.
Many of Count von Stauffenberg's supporters have been pressing for years for a formal statement of exoneration. Justice officials, however, argue that, since the would-be assassins were shot without either a trial or a conviction, there is - juridically speaking - no verdict to overturn.
``There is no clear view of which convictions from the Nazi era have already been quashed,'' said Hansjuergen Karge, a Berlin prosecutor specializing in Nazi-era justice, who said he hoped the latest review would clarify the position of Count von Stauffenberg and others.
Bonhoeffer was not the only church official in the resistance whose name had not been cleared after he was killed by the Nazi government for actively opposing Hitler.
The Rev. Bernhard Lichtenberg, a Catholic priest jailed by the Nazis for inveighing from his pulpit in Berlin against the persecution of Jews, was formally exonerated earlier this year, only weeks before Pope John Paul II beatified him during a visit to Germany in June.
Bonhoeffer's stature has risen since the end of World War II, when he was relatively little-known. , and works like the posthumously published ``Letters and Papers From Prison,'' written while he was awaiting execution, are still widely available.
He had studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, but refused to stay after the outbreak of war in 1939. When he returned to Germany, he helped organize a Resistance group and denounced Hitler as ``the Antichrist.'' He got in touch with Hitler's opponents in the military and traveled outside Germany to seek foreign support for a coup.
Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943 and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the failed assassination attempt of 1944, his links to the plotters were discovered and he was moved to Flossenbuerg in Bavaria. He was executed less than a month before World War II ended in Europe with Germany's formal surrender on May 8, 1945. He was 39.
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