“Dietrich, I tell you to come, and bring your small flock along. You will be safe here. You know that is what Lebenshaus means. We will pray together. Then you can decide what he wants you to do next….”

A pause.

“Retreat, solitude… and safety—if I do not have such to offer my brothers and friends, what good is my life? For what other purpose has our Lord placed me here?”

Another pause.

“Yes… yes, I am certain, my brother. Come… yes, quickly… tonight if you can. You will be safe here.”

He hung up the phone and sighed deeply, then looked into his wife’s eyes. The look that passed between them carried more ominous meaning than either dared voice.

“I am afraid it has begun, my darling,” said the baron. “The Gestapo stormed Finkenwalde this morning. The seminary has been closed. Dietrich fears for his young students. You heard most of what I said.”

“They are coming?” asked Marion.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“I do not know.”

“I will tell Heidi and Sabina to begin preparing the guest rooms, and Carola to make more bread and to begin baking some cakes.”

She turned to leave. The baron stopped her.

“Marion,” he said. The very sound of his voice sent a tingle of foreboding up Frau von Dortmann’s spine.

She turned. His face bore a look of dignity and decisiveness she had never seen in all their years of marriage.

“Leave the guest rooms on the first floor as they are. Tell Sabina and Heidi to begin airing out and taking linen to the rooms behind the armory.”

32 Bonhoeffer at Lebenshaus

32

Bonhoeffer at Lebenshaus

A grey dusk had settled over the land when four automobiles crept up the winding drive and stopped in single file around the silent stone sentinel who guarded the entrance to Ein Landhaus Für Leben Und Zurückgezogenheit.

Sixteen young men slowly climbed out on both sides of the cars and stood waiting, while a seventeenth, a few years older, in his early thirties, short of stature, with wide oval face, plain round spectacles and thinning hair, crunched his way across the gravel to the front door. He never had a chance to knock.

The door opened.

He and his companions were expected.

The baron beckoned them inside. The visitor signaled behind him, and the sixteen followed him, still without a word, toward the great stone house. Not until they were well inside the drawing room did any of the anxious newcomers utter a sound.

“You made it without incident?” asked Baron von Dortmann.

Bonhoeffer nodded. “It was not my impression they wanted to follow us or arrest us,” he said, “only disband the seminary, which they certainly succeeded in accomplishing.”

“What happened exactly?”