Letters and Papers From Prison (9 page)

It was really an enormous delight that you were both below here the day before yesterday to deliver the Whitsun parcel. It’s remarkable how knowing that you were near once again brought everything very close, home and all your life. Sometimes it seems so unreal and distant. Thank you very much, and also for the parcel, which again was extremely welcome. I was particularly pleased with the yellow food; it keeps so well.

Again I’ve had a marvellous letter from Maria. The poor girl has to keep on writing without getting a direct response from me. That must be hard, but I delight in every word about her and every small detail interests me because it makes it easier to share in what she is doing. I’m so grateful to her. In my bolder dreams I sometimes picture our future home. My study on ‘The feeling of time’ is practically finished; now I’m going to let it lie for a while and see what it looks like later.

It’s Whit Monday, and I was just sitting down to a dinner of turnips and potatoes when your parcel that Renate brought as a Whitsuntide present arrived quite unexpectedly. I really cannot tell you what happiness such things give one. However certain I am of the spiritual bond between all of you and myself, the spirit always seems to want some visible token of this union of love and
remembrance, and then material things become the vehicles of spiritual realities. I think this is analogous to the need felt in all religions for the visible appearance of the Spirit in the sacrament. Special thanks to Renate for this great delight; every day I wish her much joy in her marriage and in her work. It’s splendid that they’ve got a piano; one of the specially fine moments of being free will be to make music with them again. I’m most grateful for anything that one can smoke.

Now let’s hope very much that everything will soon be finished. Love to Maria and the family.

I’m always thinking of you in love and gratitude.

Your Dietrich

From his mother

[Charlottenburg] 15 June 1943

Dear Dietrich,

…None of us can imagine how you could have got into such a position when you are so outspokenly law-abiding in your attitude. We just cannot find any solution to the riddle. So we keep returning to the comforting conviction that everything will soon have to be cleared up and that you will be with us again.

We’re going to ask for another permission to visit today; we very much want to see you again and find out how you are bearing your long imprisonment, especially because of your asthma. I hope that we shall get the permission. We are quite old people, and the pressure on father in addition to his strenuous work is rather a considerable one. How could we ever have imagined the evening of our life, after so much work in the profession and in the family, in this way…
⁴⁰

This time I will bring you grandfather Hase’s
Ideals and Errors.
I’ve asked grandmother for the book about the old Kleist-Retzow.

Now God bless you; we all send our love. You’re always in my thoughts. Your Mother

Outlines of Letters

To the Judge Advocate, Dr Roeder, between the interrogations
⁴¹

[On his own exemption]

Please allow me to take up your time once again in this way, chiefly so that I shall really have done everything possible for a speedy clarification of my case. I would like to try once again to put my views on what seems to me to be the very important question of my exemption through the
Abwehr.
Perhaps I will succeed better, writing quietly, in stating matters clearly; in the interrogation I sometimes forget to say important things. I would also like to add a few points on this question which have not been discussed so far. Before I do that, I would like to tell you that I am grateful to you for describing the situation to me so openly in the last interrogation. The interlude with General Oster’s remark for a while must have put me in a quite dreadful light as far as you were concerned, and I am glad that everything has now been sorted out. Perhaps there are other things that I do not know which still stand in the way of clarifying the proceedings over my release and burden me so much. I am the last person to want to dispute that in an activity as strange and new to me as
Abwehr
service, and as complicated, mistakes could creep in. You will therefore, your honour, understand that it is very important to clarify
whether
mistakes have really been made here, and if so,
who
has made them. It is not only a personal concern, but also involves my relatives and my profession.

In your words, there is a suspicion that my exemption was procured in order to extricate me from the Gestapo who, in September 1940, prohibited me from speaking in public and required me to report regularly. If I have understood you rightly, this would be supported by: 1. circumstances of time; 2. remarks of mine concerning Dibelius;
⁴²
3. remarks made by my brother-n-law. I would like to reply to these in turn.

First, a general comment: if I had been afraid that after the imposition
of the prohibition against speaking and the requirement to report, the Gestapo would want to take still further measures against me, and if I had wanted to avoid them, then it would not have been exemption but call-up that would have been the appropriate course. But I had no reason at all to fear further measures by the Gestapo, first because the measures already taken against me seemed rather to have been part of a wider preventative action by the Gestapo against the whole of the Confessing Church - at that time about 6 prohibitions against speaking were issued almost simultaneously in quite different parts of the Old Prussian Church with exactly the same reasons. I could not imagine that they were directed against me personally; the Gestapo have not confronted me with a single ‘disruptive’ sermon or lecture.
Secondly,
to avoid all further conflict, I had withdrawn to the mountains of Bavaria, to write a large academic work. I had also reported this to the Gestapo, as I was obliged, and really had nothing more to fear in that regard. On the church side, it had been reported to me that there was some interest in the fact that I was following my book
The Cost of Discipleship
with an account of a ‘concrete evangelical ethics’, and previously I had worked predominantly as an academic theologian; as a result, I could also satisfy the church with my activity at that time. Of course, I felt the prohibition against preaching and lecturing to be very hard, but after the rejection of my application I could not reckon with a lifting of the prohibition for the time being, and in fact that has not Happened even now. So since that time my activity in the church has been limited to the above-mentioned academic work, and I have kept strictly to the terms of the prohibition against my speaking in public. At that time I resolved to transport my whole library to Munich and to take up permanent residence there, but with the uncertainty over the duration of the war and the time of my call-up I kept putting off the very costly and difficult execution of this decision. It was my brother-in-law who offered me the possibility of using my church contacts in the
Abwehr.
Despite considerable inner hesitations, I took advantage of it because it gave me the chance of making a contribution to the war that I had sought since its outbreak, and did so in my status of theologian. I have kept saying that I would
have much preferred to work as an army chaplain, but in the meantime that has not proved possible. A view that I have reached over the years in my activity in German congregations abroad is that for a great many people the church is the last and firmest support for Germany and that for these reasons the church has a quite decisive part to play in the field and at home, even in wartime.

On 1.   I do not dispute that the fact that my exemption for the
Abwehr
followed a few months after the prohibition against speaking was a great inner relief to me. I saw it as a welcome opportunity to rehabilitate myself in the face of the state authorities, which was very opportune, in view of the damaging charge that had been made against me and that I considered to be quite unjustified. The awareness that I was being used by a military department was, therefore, of great personal significance to me. I made a great personal sacrifice for this possibility of rehabilitation and for my activity in the service of the nation, namely surrendering all my ecumenical contacts for military purposes. I also believe that this thought of rehabilitation also played some part with my brother-in-law. He knows me well enough personally to be aware that the political charge bore no relation to my whole inner attitude; he also knows how much suffering it caused me. Though, as he has said recently, our good personal relationship was quite emphatically based on the view that service questions and personal questions had to be kept quite separate; that sometimes verged on the pedantic.

The fact that, as you said, my age group was called up in Schlawe
⁴³
in autumn 1940 was and is unknown to me; presumably it happened after my stay there in September 1940; I think it quite improbable that my brother-in-law and General Oster had known about it. But it surprises me in that I know that a colleague in my age group from the Schlawe district, who was a sergeant and liable for call-up, continued to work in his community until 1941. It may be that the chief of the conscription department there had considerable understanding of the task of the church at home and postponed the call-up of this colleague further at the request of the superintendent. Perhaps I might also add that if I had really been concerned simply to be exempted for church work, this
could certainly have been arranged at that time in Schlawe at the request of the superintendent.
⁴⁴
In January 1941, however, I received exemption not for church work, but expressly for service in the
Abwehr,
and if external technical hitches had not kept happening at the last moment, I would have been almost uninterruptedly on
Abwehr
journeys and would hardly have had any more time for my academic church work. I could not personally think of any reason for objections to my exemption for the
Abwehr,
as it was expressly confirmed to me that Admiral Canaris had wished and commanded this. When I occasionally asked whether my record with the Gestapo might not cause difficulties for the
Abwehr,
I was told [crossed out: we work with enemies, Communists, Jews, why not also with the Confessing Church] that these things were nothing to do with military purposes, and besides, the
Abwehr
worked with all kinds of people who were useful to them. This set my mind fully at rest.

On 2.   Over the last years it has always been difficult for me to give any information about my present activity when meeting colleagues, and for that very reason I have largely avoided them, as my family and my colleagues can themselves testify. Where people have known and asked me about my relationship with my brother-in-law, e.g. General Superintendent Dibelius, Superintendent Diestel, I have always said to them - as arranged with my brother-in-law - that I was in the service of the OKW
⁴⁵
in Munich and abroad. These were church matters, as the OKW was interested in ecumenical questions. Even Dibelius could not
know
that I was in the service of the military
Abwehr,
but could only guess it; I have deliberately never told him. Even before him I had to preserve the fiction that my work was predominantly concerned with the church, because - quite apart from the need for absolute secrecy - of the other pastors. This sort of thing could be talked about among them and do me personal damage. I therefore thought it important that my exemption should be looked upon in this way in church circles. That this put me and the military department concerned in a rather remarkable light could not be helped. Dibelius will therefore have meant his words in that sense.

On 3.   Of course, I do not know what kind of remarks my
brother-in-law may have made about me to third parties. But I do know that e.g. he did not want Schm[idhuber]
⁴⁶
to learn anything about the military assignments that I received directly from the Admiral; he did not think very much of Schm’s discretion. This went so far that his first reaction to the news that my name had come under suspicion in church circles in Switzerland was that Schm. had probably been indiscreet. But I think it quite possible that in Schm.’s case, Doh[nanyi] played his cards close to his chest. I myself have certainly often expressed my delight about the possibility given to me to foster ecumenical relations. It is in the end the same thing as when a student or a chemist is sent abroad, can do work that interests him there and at the same time has to fulfil particular military tasks.

Finally, a couple of personal remarks on the matter:

It certainly cannot have the force of proof for you - but perhaps you will believe me personally, and this is the hope in which I speak, that it is hard for me to see how earlier conflicts with the Gestapo, which, as I profoundly believe, have arisen from a purely church attitude, have now led to the point when I can be thought capable of such a severe failing in the obvious duties of a German towards his people and nation. I still cannot believe that this charge has really been made against me. If this had been my attitude, would I have found my fiancée in an old officers’ family, all of whose fathers and sons have served as officers since the beginning of the war, some with the highest distinction, and have made the greatest sacrifices? My fiancée has lost both her father and her brother at the front. If that were the case, would I have cancelled all the engagements that I had made in America and have returned immediately upon the outbreak of war to Germany, where I had to expect to be called up straight away? Would I have offered myself as an army chaplain immediately after the outbreak of war? If anyone wants to learn something of my conception of the duty of Christian obedience towards the authorities, he should read my exposition of Romans 13 in my book
The Cost of Discipleship.
The appeal to subjection to the will and the demands of authority for the sake of Christian conscience has probably seldom been expressed more strongly than there. That is my
personal attitude to these questions. I cannot judge how far such personal arguments have any legal significance, but I cannot imagine that one can simply pass over them.