Commentary
In 1936, the University of Berlin revoked the teaching certificate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young Christian theologian who would eventually be hanged by the Nazis for joining a secret resistance movement against Adolf Hitler.
The move came after Bonhoeffer was denounced as a “pacifist and enemy of the state” by Theodor Heckel, a leader in the German church, after Bonhoeffer took an unannounced trip with a small congregation of theologians to Sweden.
The charges against Bonhoeffer were true, of course. He was a pacifist and deeply opposed the Nazi state—its nationalism, its anti-Semitism, its militarism, and its coercion over society, including the church….