Bonhoeffer's Last Crossing

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a safe apartment in New York City, surrounded by colleagues who had arranged his escape from Nazi Germany. He had every reason to stay. The Gestapo had shut down his seminary. Friends had been arrested. Yet within twenty-six days, Bonhoeffer booked passage back across the Atlantic. He wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr: "I have come to the conclusion that I made a mistake in coming to America.…