A plaque dedicated to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who enabled Jews to escape Nazi Germany, was unveiled on Monday by the Bishop of London, the Right Rev Richard Chartres.
Born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1906, Bonhoeffer, a Protestant pastor, was famed for opposing Hitler. In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he was on a lecture tour of America and offered the chance to stay but opted to return to Germany.
Once home, he became a co-founder of the Confessing Church, a movement which emerged out of efforts to oppose bids to “Nazify” the Protestant Church in Germany. Hired as a Government intelligence agent, Bonhoeffer used his office to save Jews, and to contribute to resistance efforts and keep pastors out of the army. In 1943 he was arrested after the discovery of papers linking him to Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Hitler. In April 1945, he died in Flossenburg concentration camp.
The Bishop said there could not be “a better way to celebrate [the] 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall” than by unveiling the blue plaque to Bonhoeffer.
It is at Goulston St, Aldgate, once the site of St Paul’s German Evangelical Reformed Church, one of the two London churches where, from 1933 -35, Bonhoeffer was a pastor. Now the property belongs to London Metropolitan University.
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Bishop Chartres said: “It is good that we are meeting in a university setting since Bonhoeffer was an intellectual but one who did not make thoughts his aim. He could with honour have remained in the US as a known opponent of the Nazi regime on the outbreak of war but he said “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Germany after the war, if I do not share the trials of this time with my people.”
He added: “His legacy is still inspiring and troubling. He was acutely conscious of the displacement of God from the culture of Europe.”
Dr Eckhard Lubkemeier, the deputy German ambassador in London, attended the unveiling, along with representatives of the German churches in London.
At the outbreak of the First World War, there were 27,000 Germans in London. When St Paul’s was bombed in 1941, its congregation transferred to St George’s Lutheran Church, Algdate. Built in 1762-63, it is Grade II * listed and the oldest German Church in London.
In 1998, the last members of its congregation gave the Church to the Historic Chapels Trust, an organisation which takes care of redundant chapels and non–Anglican places of worship that are of outstanding architectural and historical interest.
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For the full text of Bishop Chartres speech, please click here .