Martyrs: Saviors of Honor

This week at services in Bonn and West Berlin, Julius Cardinal Döpfner of Munich and other German Christian leaders mark the 20th anniversary of the July 1944 plot against Hitler, which involved so many devout Christians that it has become the symbol of the Ehrenretter, the lay and clerical martyrs who tried to save the honor of Christianity in those dark years. Two of the martyrs appear on a new series of stamps issued by the Federal Republic, but there were many more—at least 112 Catholic priests and 22 Protestant ministers —who died in German prison camps, and hundreds more were arrested for acts of protest against the Nazi regime.

"Auf Wiedersehen." In the early church, every community honored its own martyrology of local saints who had died for the faith—and similarly many towns in modern Germany have their heroes, many of them virtually unknown outside the country. Lübeck, for example, conducts interdenominational religious services every year honoring three Catholic priests, Edward Müller, Hermann Lange and Johannes Prassek, and an Evangelical pastor, Karl Friedrich Stellbrink. Arrested in 1942, the four men became good friends in prison and died together at Hamburg in November 1943.

For them, as for many of the martyrs, the old denominational hostilities crumpled before the reality of their common fate and common cause. "We are like brothers," Lange said of their relationship. And when Stellbrink stepped up to the guillotine, he told his Catholic companions: "Auf Wiedersehen im Himmel." So close was their relationship that one Catholic priest has proposed that all four be presented to Rome for canonization.

Underground Divinity. Best known of the Ehrenretter is Evangelical Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the brilliant poet-theologian who conducted an underground divinity school for the Hitler-hating "Confessing Church," and was killed at a Bavarian prison shortly before its liberation by American troops. But Bonhoeffer's vivid, prophetic writing—outlining his dream of a "religionless Christianity" that would speak afresh to the modern secular world—is probably more important to young seminarians as a consequence of martyrdom.

Something of a cult has also grown up around the memory of Father Alfred Delp, a sociologist who was arrested for joining a group of Protestant and Catholic intellectuals who met secretly at the home of Protestant Layman Helmuth von Moltke to plan for the reconstruction of post-Hitler Germany along Christian and democratic lines. Arrested after the failure of the plot against Hitler, Delp was hanged seven months later. Another saintly priest was Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg of Berlin, who was imprisoned and ultimately deported to Dachau after praying for the Jews at St. Hedwig's Cathedral.

"Moral Renewal." Honored in death, the German Christian martyrs had relatively little support from their fellow churchmen during their lives. Less than one-fourth of the country's Protestant ministers belonged to the Confessing Church; in 1945 the Evangelical hierarchy issued a formal statement of guilt, acknowledging the failure of all but a few to speak out against Hitler.