“I understand now why the decision has weighed heavily upon you,” said the baron at length.

“Do you see why I wanted to speak with you about it?”

The baron nodded.

“I have wrestled the matter through in such depth,” Dietrich went on. “I have prayed and prayed for years about what should be our response as Christians to the Nazi evil. Still I have no answer. I was on my way to visit Gandhi to study pacifism before being asked to lead the seminary. The very thought of violence is odious to me. And yet my conscience tells me that the Nazi evil against the Jews is of such magnitude that bringing force against it may be necessary. How does a Christian pacifist reply to one such as Adolf Hitler?”

“I don’t know, Dietrich. I don’t know.”

“We cannot sit idly by.”

“As I said, you have been anything but idle.”

“Yet the darkness deepens, the night surrounds us. Mustn’t we do more?”

“My prayers have taken me down the same paths.”

“But the time has come when the paths fork. Fateful times and fateful decisions are upon us… perhaps dangerous decisions.”

“What do you mean by the forks in the road?”

“Some of my fellow churchmen made their choice years ago. They fell in with the evil, accommodated themselves to a religion dictated by the Reichstag rather than the Bible. They took their fork in the road. I took another. I spoke out, and I have not been alone. But now comes another fork in the road. Do we resist? Do we exercise passive restraint? Those of us with Jews in our families will not be allowed the luxury of an easy answer.”

“You… in your family?”

“My brother-in-law has been classified Jewish,” replied Bonhoeffer.

“What will they do?” asked Dortmann with heightened interest.

“That is another of my reasons for traveling to Göttingen. I intend, as soon as opportunity affords, to get him and my sister, Sabine, and their two daughters out of the country and to Switzerland.”

Baron von Dortmann nodded. “I see… yes, you are right. The dangers are great.”

“Aiding Jews in any way will very soon be punishable with severity.”

The baron nodded. “Such may be required of me one day also,” he said. “I have already found myself considering it. There are many Jews in this region. I have many friends, and neither could I stand idly by and watch them hauled away to prison.”

“Prison—and worse,” added Bonhoeffer.

The baron nodded once more. Both men silently reflected on the personal implications to them both in what they had been discussing.

“Would you consider joining the resistance?” asked Bonhoeffer after some time.

The baron did not answer immediately.

“You mean join with you?” he asked at length.