Marking the 70th Anniversary of the Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: 31st May 2015

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the most influential theologians of the 20^th Century and honoured as one of the 20^th century’s martyrs with a statue on the west front of Westminster Abbey. Twenty years ago on Good Friday, Alan Gaunt, a colleague in the United Reformed Church in Windermere,  prepared a service to mark the 50^th Anniversary of his death on April 9^th 1945, executed at Flossenburg, just weeks before Hitler’s suicide, for his active opposition to Nazism and his part in plotting Hitler’s death. This was a remarkable change for a man who was a pacifist, but he clearly understood that God’s victory means our defeat, our humiliation and that there was a choice between Christianity or Germanism. I used the service ten years ago in my previous parish in Kent on the 6oth anniversary and now this year on the 70^th.