Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor imprisoned in 1943 for his political and Christian opposition to the Nazi regime, was executed two years later. On the day that the sentence was carried out he conducted a service for the other prisoners. One of those prisoners, an English officer who survived, wrote these words:
Bonhoeffer always seemed to me to spread an atmosphere of
happiness and joy over the least incident, and profound gratitude
for the mere fact that he was alive… He was one of the very
few persons I have ever met for whom God was real and always
near… On Sunday, April 8, 1945, Pastor Bonhoeffer conducted a
little service of worship and spoke to us in a way that went to
the heart of all of us. He found just the right words to express
the spirit of our imprisonment, and the thoughts and resolutions
it had brought us. He had hardly ended his last prayer when the
door opened and two civilians entered. They said, “Prisoner
Bonhoeffer, come with us.” That had only one meaning for all
prisoners — the gallows. We said good-bye to him. He took me
aside: “This is the end; but for me it is the beginning of life.”
The next day he was hanged in Flossenburg.