The days were taken up with community prayer, individual study and meditation, communal work and service, and Bonhoeffer’s teaching and training lectures. There was also recreation and fun and a regular musical diet of Negro spirituals, which Dietrich had fallen in love with in America in 1930 and had brought back to Germany with him. Many were the evenings when the strains of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” could be heard through the night air, still being hummed softly by the baritone voices of the men as they walked from meeting hall back to individual houses, apartments, and rooms. The low tones of these men of God, forced to live out their convictions in hiding, bore eerie resemblance to the struggle of the black slaves who had sought their own brand of freedom in another time, on a continent far from this.

It was at such times that Heinrich von Dortmann most longed to be a full part of the community. A tugging came to his heart when, with the sounds of Dietrich’s passionate and eloquent teaching still in his ears, and the soft strains of some spiritual melody still ringing through the night, he climbed into his Mercedes to begin the thirty-six-kilometer drive north back to Lebenshaus.

Yet he knew the eternal story of his friends’ lives could not be his, nor his theirs. Each had to walk according to the drumbeats the Father’s destiny had laid out for him to follow.

He had been blessed with the most wonderful wife and daughter ever a man could have, and with house and property equally capable of ministry as the seminary. It had not been his calling to serve in the clergy. Thus he would serve as God’s minister in the quiet ways afforded him and in the lives sent to him, gaining strength and the sustenance of spiritual friendship along the way by communion with his brothers at Finkenwalde.

He had first heard the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer four years earlier, in 1933. Quite by accident, Dortmann had stumbled onto the lecture broadcast over Berlin radio in which the fiery young pastor had taken the German public harshly to task for desiring a “leader” who was almost certain to become a “misleader” as long as he allowed himself to be made an idol of the masses. Hitler’s true threat was already clear to the baron, and he found his heart immediately in tune with this one who was courageous enough to address the nation so boldly. It was not surprising that the broadcast was cut off before it was finished.

He made a point of finding out more about the man, continued to follow Bonhoeffer’s movements, and read articles from his pen. He met him for the first time when he traveled to Ulm in 1934 to participate, with five thousand other pastors and German laymen, in the formation of the “Confessing Church.”