The centenary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (4 February 1906 – 9 April 1945), Lutheran minister, university lecturer, pioneer of the ecumenical militant movement against the Nazi regime, is to be celebrated tomorrow all over Europe with events, meetings and round tables. Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau (a German town back then, now known as Wroclaw, in Poland) in 1906; in 1931, he began to teach at the faculty of theology of Berlin and was consecrated minister. In that period, he began working in the emerging ecumenical movement. With Hitler’s rise to power, by the end of January 1933, the German evangelical church to which Bonhoeffer belongs entered a difficult, delicate time. Many German protestants welcomed the coming of Nazism, and even went so far as to ask to remove the Old Testament from the Bible and propose an “Arian section”. Bonhoeffer firmly opposed to such proposal. "The question of how to live for the Gospel in a society of parameters that were by then atheist or godless, soon appeared in the young Bonhoeffer’s mind writes Cristiana Dobner, a discalced Carmelite, in a note to SIR Europa -. He pledged himself in history, faced the risk of involvement when all around him personal and social maturity was gained by discrediting and abandoning the assumption of God". His work to help a group of Jews to escape from the war in Germany caused him to be imprisoned, then he was moved to a Berlin’s prison, then to the concentration camp of Buchenwald and finally to that of Flossenbürg, where he was hanged.
