Projection du film “Agent spécial Bonhoeffer”

The 2000 film on the last years of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, pastor, theologian and Nazi resistance fighter, will be shown at the Airborne Museum on Saturday May 3 at 7pm, in partnership with the Maison de la Paix.

The young theology student Dietrich Bonhoeffer traveled extensively during the 20s and early 30s, visiting Rome, Berlin, Barcelona and New York. The rise of Nazism, competing with his affirmation within the Protestant church, prompted him to take a public stand against Hitler’s repressive policies, notably the persecution of the Jews, and the Aryan paragraph. In 1935, he joined the Confessing Church, a Protestant movement opposed to Nazism. That same year, after having his teaching rights withdrawn, he founded a semi-clandestine seminary, in complete opposition to the position of the German Lutheran Church, which was largely aligned with the Reich. The dissolution of this organization by the Gestapo in 1937 forced him even further underground. Between 1939 and 1940, he built up a network of influence within the German army, enabling him to evade restrictions on movement and arrest, and passed on to the British certain evidence of the extermination of the Jews. On behalf of a group of conspirators made up of generals, politicians and religious figures, he also made a request to the Allies for help in eliminating Hitler, which they did not grant for lack of credibility.

In 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion – without any tangible proof – of conspiracy, and imprisoned in a Gestapo facility, before being moved through his connections to a less severe prison in Berlin, where he wrote a number of texts relating to the resistance. The attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944 and the discovery of the conspiracy, of which Bonhoeffer was a part, saw him deported to Buchenwald. And despite the imminent defeat, Hitler did not forget him, so much so that on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer and two of his co-conjurers, Admiral Canaris and General Oster, were court-martialed, sentenced and hanged in the Flossenbürg camp.

The film “Special Agent Bonhoeffer” looks back at the last years of the churchman and resistance fighter, his commitment, but also the theological, ethical and moral questions he was confronted with as a result of this commitment. Master lecturer, philosopher and theologian Frédéric Rognon, invited by the Maison de la Paix, will give a foreword to the film and guide the question-and-answer session that follows.

Free admission with PAF. Donations will go to the Maison de la Paix.

Reservations are recommended due to limited space.

• communication@airborne-museum.org
• 02 33 41 78 03

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