When I left active military service in 1975 my family and I moved to Pompano Beach, Florida. We went to Florida Atlantic University. I planned to study business and my wife computer science. I had been an undergraduate history major at FSU and thought I needed a ruminative skill. I had received a Florida teaching certificate and the field was overflowing.
Within a week I transferred to the graduate school of history and decided to write my thesis on the German Widerstand, resistance to Hitler. Fifty years on, one professor stands out in my mind. Professor Derfler taught historical methods and was eschewed by the undergraduates and graduate students because of the work he required. I was warned off by other graduate students but persisted. Because I was the only student not to drop, it was now a directed individual study. In Derfler’s office each week we discussed an assigned book and the paper I had written. The first meeting, to my surprise, he opened a desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of brandy and it oiled our discussions. Derfler tried to teach me patience with academia and instilled in me a critical eye for the study of history and the moral forces that ran through it.
The movie Bonhoeffer has chronological errors and sometimes preaches too hard, but the history makes Bonhoeffer’s life and death meaningful. The Nazis did not come to power with a majority vote. A coalition of German parties put Hitler in the chancellery along with a dying Paul Hindenburg who believed he could control the corporal. Hitler told everyone what he was going to do in Mein Kampf. A national emergency decree pushed through the Reichstag gave him a dictatorship and rule by decree. The Army was required to take an oath of loyalty to him and the police were subsumed to become instruments of terror.
It is no exaggeration to say that Hitler remade the German state. He knew, as Stalin knew, that control of the bureaucracy would give him control of the day-to-day workings of the state. Career people were flushed out and loyalty was the only qualification for service. Communists, Socialists, mentally and physically disabled were rounded up — and then he came for the Jews. Scores of concentration camps sprung up and the killings began.
Bonhoeffer spoke out and was a marked man. His church had embraced the evil that was Adolph Hitler. He was almost alone. Niemöller’s famous speech came after the war. The Army bungled every attempt on Hitler’s life.
“Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. … The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
David Madden is a retired trial attorney. He was an Infantry platoon leader and LTC in the JAG Corps.
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