Author Description

Born in 1906, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was the son of a professor of psychiatry. He grew up in academic surroundings and in 1930 was appointed lecturer in systematic theology at Berlin University. In 1933 he made his first attack on Hitler's political ideas. Two years later, after a period spent in England, he was forbidden to teach and banned from Berlin by Nazi authorities. At the outbreak of war, against the advice of all his friends, he gave up the security of the U.S.A., where he was on a lecture tour, and returned to Germany to work for the Confessing Church and the political opposition to Hitler. He was arrested in April, 1943, and two years later, after imprisonment in Buchenwald, he was hanged at Flossenburg.