Bonhoeffer was a “role model of true humanity in the spirit of Jesus Christ”  and a “martyr of the whole of Christianity,” the former Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, told KNA on the 75th anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s death.

The German Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged in the Flossenbürg concentration camp for his staunch resistance to Nazi dictatorship on 9 April 1945 just three weeks before the Nazi regime collapsed.

Bonhoeffer had played an important ecumenical role during the “anti-Christian persecution” of the Church under National Socialism, Müller recalled, when Catholic and Protestant lay believers and priests had got together to bear witness to the truth and to defend human dignity.

Bonhoeffer had also left an important message for Europe, the cardinal said. He had protested against “inhuman ideologies, national egoism, imperialist plans and the undermining of the judicial system”, Müller recalled.

It had taken a long time before both the Church and society had recognised Bonhoeffer as a Christian martyr. For years after the Second World War society had preferred to “neutralise” him solely as a political victim of the NS-regime.