The German theologian Eberhard Bethge, who died on March 18th aged 90, subordinated his reputation to that of his friend and colleague Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian anti-Nazi who was hanged in April 1945, a few days before the end of Hitler's reign of terror. He became the editor of Bonhoeffer's works, his biographer and his interpreter to the world.
Born into a Lutheran parsonage in the Saxon town of Warchau, he studied theology in Konigsberg, Berlin, Vienna, Tubingen and Halle-Wittenberg. As a young man, he was a member of the Hitler Youth. But he soon became disillusioned and joined the Confessing church, the Christian movement in Germany which opposed those who accepted the support Hitler promised to subservient churches.
In 1935, he volunteered, as a mature student, to go to the seminary for theological students within the Confessing church. It was there that he first met Bonhoeffer, the seminary's director and just three years his senior. The two men began in a very primitive, empty bible school in Zeist, on the Baltic, later moving to Finkenwalde, near Stettin, and developed a close friendship. When the Gestapo closed the seminary in 1937, Eberhard Bethge became the student inspector for the scattered student groups which, until 1940, illegally continued their studies throughout Pomerania under Bonhoeffer's direction.
When Bonhoeffer was arrested in 1943, he kept in touch with his friend by smuggled letters - which Eberhard Bethge preserved. These letters changed the direction of theology in the western world, and have not been without significance in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
While his friend was in prison, Eberhard Bethge married Bonhoeffer's niece, Renate Schleicher, and a year later their first child, Dietrich, was born. Bonhoeffer had sent a sermon for their wedding, and now he sent, also from prison by hand of the jailer, a sermon for the child. It was one of Bonhoeffer's most important pieces of writing, condemning his church for fighting only for its own preservation.
Eberhard Bethge was conscripted into the German army in 1943 and was serving in Italy when the assassination attempt on Hitler was made in July 1944. He was arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Gestapo prison in Berlin, only to be freed on the arrival of the Russians in 1945, a couple of weeks after Bonhoeffer's execution.
After his release from jail, he held various positions as student pastor at Humbold University and the technical high school in Berlin. From 1953 until 1961, he was minister to the German-speaking congregation in London, a post which Bonhoeffer had held between 1933 and 1935, and, for the next 15 years, he was director of a pastoral college of the church of the Rhineland in Rengsdorf.
This was a very minor post for so distinguished a scholar, but it gave him time to complete a definitive biography of Bonhoeffer, which was published in 1967. After this, many books followed on different aspects of Bonhoeffer's thought - patriotism, martyrdom, friendship and, especially, the unfinished work he had entrusted to Eberhard Bethge on ethics.
Eberhard Bethge dedicated his life to making Bonhoeffer's influence count, preserving everything that he had written, and publishing several volumes of collected writings.
Once the world was awakened to the significance of Bonhoeffer's work, Eberhard Bethge was in constant demand to lecture and to write, interpreting the theology they had discussed. This was not academic, but relevant to the reconstruction of Germany after its shattering wartime defeat.
Eberhard Bethge and his wife, Renate, had one son and two daughters.
Eberhard Bethge: born 1909; died March, 2000.