The Last Ship Back

In June 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sat in a borrowed office at Union Theological Seminary in New York, safe from the gathering storm in Europe. Friends had arranged his escape from Nazi Germany. He had every reason to stay — a teaching position, intellectual freedom, his very life.

But something would not let him rest.

For weeks he wrestled and prayed. Then clarity came. He wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr the words that sealed his fate: "I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people."

He boarded one of the last ships back across the Atlantic. That obedience cost him everything — his freedom, and finally his life at Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945, just weeks before liberation.