'I have made a mistake in coming to America': Bonhoeffer returns

An insightful letter to Niebuhr, and a surprising turn

This is the third entry in a series of posts attempting to question and refute the popular notion that Bonhoeffer aided or supported an assassination attempt carried out against Adolf Hitler just prior to the end of the war. If you would like to catch up, you can do so here:

1. ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’: A starting point for re-imagining Bonhoeffer's resistance of Hitler

2. ‘A Grand Liberation’: Bonhoeffer's Path to Christian Pacifism, Awakened by the Black Church in America

Deeply related to the ‘grand liberation’ Bonhoeffer named in our last entry, an awakening which happens to him in America among Black Christians in Harlem, Bonhoeffer comes to realize his departure from Germany was not the will of God for him: “I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in coming to America,” Bonhoeffer writes in a 1939 correspondence with Niebuhr. “I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share in the trials of this time with my people.”¹

He further explains to Niebuhr that his decision to come to America was only at the pleading of the Confessing Church to leave Germany before bringing grave danger upon himself and the church by what would be his inevitable refusal to take up arms if he were to be conscripted into the German military.²

And so Bonhoeffer makes the startling decision to return to Germany. But why?

What caused Dietrich, albeit safe from the fray and committed to non-violence, to return to Hitler’s Germany amid the perils of the Third Reich in the summer of 1940?

1. F. Burton Nelson, “Friends He Met in America,” Christian History 10, no. 4 (1991), EBSCOhost, https://web-p-ebscohost-com.seu.idm.oclc.org.

2. Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2016), 77.