Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. The Gestapo arrested him on 5 April 1943, together with his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi. Court documents show an inquiry into Operation 7, a military intelligence effort that helped Jews escape to Switzerland, and many believe he was also tied to a plot against Hitler. He was held for about two years without trial, at Tegel prison in Berlin and then at Flossenbuerg. In April 1945 he and six other members of the military resistance were convicted of high treason in a hasty improvised proceeding and sentenced to death. The SS hanged him on the morning of 9 April 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war.

The death sentence remained legally valid into the 1990s, and he was not officially recognised as a victim of Nazi persecution. In 1996 the Nazi-era verdicts against him were overturned. In 2009 Germany's governing parties agreed a blanket measure overturning Nazi treason convictions for acts such as aiding Jews and political resistance. In 1998 a statue of him was placed among the twentieth century Christian martyrs on the west front of Westminster Abbey. His prison letters, published after the war, became one of the most read works of modern theology.