Dietrich Bonhoeffer
April 9, 1945: The Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is hanged for treason at the Flossenberg concentration camp in Bavaria. The anti-Nazi activist was 39.
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, former head of German military intelligence, is also executed there on the day. He was 58. Both had been part of plots to kill Hitler.
Wilhelm Canaris
Born on February 4, 1906 in Breslau, Prussia, Bonhoeffer became a doctor of theology, and a key member of "The Confessing Church," a movement within German Protestantism that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all of the Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German Evangelical Church. In particular, he opposed not just the Holocaust's persecution of Jews, but also the Nazi euthanasia program, Aktion T4, which targeted the mentally ill and people with disabilities.
He was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943, and imprisoned at Tegel Prison for a year and a half, before being transferred to to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Bavaria, near the Czech border. Although he knew of plots to kill Chancellor Adolf Hitler, he was imprisoned over a year before the 20 July Plot, and could not possibly have been involved in it. Nevertheless, he was charged with involvement in it, and sentenced to death.
Canaris was born on January 1, 1887 in Dortmund, and his family believed they were related to Konstantinos Kanaris, an Admiral who was a hero of the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s. This turned out to be incorrect, but Canaris still kept a photograph of Kanaris (who lived until 1877) in his office. This misunderstanding of family was a major decision in Canaris' decision to join the Imperial Navy, and he commanded a U-boat in World War I.
Unlike Bonhoeffer, who seems never to have supported the movement, three things led Canaris to support the Nazi Party: They represented a return to state-centered authoritarian government, led by a charismatic leader; they were opposed to Communism, which appealed to Canaris, having been of the leaders of the postwar right-wing Freikorps movement; and they were determined to throw off the shackles of World War I's greatly punitive Treaty of Versailles.
In 1935, Canaris was appointed the chief of the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr. But by 1943, he began to suspect that World War II was not going to go Germany's way. As so often happens, when it all goes wrong for a revolution, the revolutionaries tend to turn on each other. He reached out to British intelligence officials, seeking to negotiate for a post-Hitler position for Germany. He also intervened to save hundreds of Jews from certain death.
He and SS leader Heinrich Himmler became at odds, and Himmler fired him in February 1944. He was succeeded by Georg Hansen, who admitted his role in the 20 July Plot, but also accused Canaris of being its "spiritual instigator." He was arrested on July 23.
No direct evidence of his involvement in the plot was discovered, but his close association with many of the plotters and certain documents written by him that were considered subversive led to the gradual assumption of his guilt. Two of the men under suspicion as conspirators who were known in Canaris' circle shot themselves, which didn't help him.
On April 8, 1945, at Flossenbürg, Canaris wrote a last letter, to his counterpart in Danish intelligence: "Nose broken at last interrogation. My time is up. Was not a traitor. Did my duty as a German. If you survive remember me to my wife." (Bonhoeffer was engaged at the time of his arrest, but never married.)
Both Bonhoeffer, 39 years old, and Canaris, 58, were hanged on April 9. On April 23, troops from the U.S. Army's 90th Infantry Division first entered Flossenbürg concentration camp. Had they lived another 3 weeks...
Due to the changing borders after the war, Bonhoeffer's birthplace of Breslau is now Wrocław, the 3rd-largest city in Poland after Warsaw and Kraków.
On a 2002 episode of The West Wing, facing the truth that the Defense Minister of an apparent Middle East ally had authorized a foiled plot against the United States, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Percival Fitzwallace (played by John Amos), and the White House Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry (John Spencer), debate whether it would be moral to have that Minister assassinated. Fitzwallace apparently confuses Bonhoeffer with the mastermind of the plan, Claus Stauffenberg, saying if the plot had been successful, the Germans would have built statues of an assassin, and would have had to explain that to their children.
In fact, there is a statue of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in front of St. Peter's Church in Hamburg.
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April 9, 1945 was a Monday. Sportswriter Peter Gammons was born.
There were no scores on this historic day: Baseball was in Spring Training, football was out of season, the NBA hadn't been founded yet, and the Stanley Cup Finals were between Games 2 and 3. The Toronto Maple Leafs went on to beat the Detroit Red Wings in 7 games.
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