Hanged three weeks before liberation
Bonhoeffer's execution
The camp doctor at Flossenbürg who witnesses the execution describes it fifty years later.
He would recall, half a century later, watching Bonhoeffer kneel and pray with deep devotion before he was led out, so composed and so sure that God was hearing him. At the place of execution he prayed once more, then climbed the steps to the gallows brave and calm. In nearly fifty years of practicing medicine, the doctor said, he had scarcely seen anyone meet death so wholly surrendered to the will of God.
It is April 9, 1945. Allied forces will liberate the camp in a matter of weeks. The war in Europe will end on May 8, three weeks and six days after Bonhoeffer's death.
He is thirty-nine years old.
The day before his execution, Bonhoeffer leads a short worship service for his fellow prisoners. He reads Isaiah 53 — He was wounded for our transgressions — and gives a brief reflection. As he finishes, the guards come for him.
He asks one of his fellow prisoners to carry a message to his friend the Bishop of Chichester: What looks to you like the end is, for me, the place where life truly begins.
For him, only the beginning.
He says it on the way to the gallows. He means it.
“What looks to you like the end is, for me, the place where life truly begins.”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reported last words before his execution, 1945 — paraphrased
“Don't be afraid of the things which you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested; and you will have oppression for ten days. Be faithful to death, and I will give you the crown of life.”
What looks to you like the end is, for me, the place where life truly begins.
Bonhoeffer says it on the way to the gallows. Not as a performance. As a statement of fact about what he believes is happening.
The end. And the beginning.
For three weeks and six days after his death, the world he died in continued. And then it was over — the Reich, the war, the camps. Everything he gave his life resisting lasted three more weeks.
He did not know that. He went to the gallows not knowing the end was that close.
Faithfulness does not require knowing how close the end is. It requires the conviction that the end, whenever it comes, is not the end — that for those who are in Christ, the end is always the beginning of life.
Is that a conviction you hold? And does it change how you face what you are facing?