The story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is by now well-known. This book, however, is quite original, concentrating as it does on the last few days of Bonhoeffer before his execution on 9 April 1945, at the Flossenbürg death camp, barely a month before the war in Europe ended. Those eight days saw him, with others, being transported in a convoy of vehicles from Buchenwald concentration camp. Amid the Third Reich’s death-throes, Hitler ordered that any of those still alive who had been implicated in the plot culminating in the attempt on his life on 20 July 1944, were to be eliminated. Meanwhile, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and much of the administration of the Reich, had conceived the idea of assembling a number of German notables as hostages who might be traded with the allies for favourable terms of peace. On Easter Monday, Bonhoeffer found himself with fifteen others crammed into a tiny, stinking wood-burning van that trundled southwards. Was he to be counted among the eminences who might be spared as negotiating pawns, or would he still face a final reckoning with the Gestapo? The road was at times within earshot of the advancing American tanks from the west and exposed to allied air raids. After days of alternating anxiety and hope, for Bonhoeffer the question was answered in the village of Schönberg, where on Low Sunday he preached his final sermon to others in the convoy, just before being taken to Flossenbürg.

What makes this book extraordinary in the first place is that thanks to his diligent and wide-ranging researches, McCabe has collated much more information than previously accessible about Bonhoeffer’s companions on the journey, and with whom he was literally cheek by jowl. Not only do the two British fellow prisoners, Payne Best and Hugh Falconer, whose accounts of Bonhoeffer and his final service at Schönberg been known for some time, come to the fore. Fascinating new details emerge. Falconer, the son of an English Presbyterian minister, was a trained engineer and radio operator who had served in special operations in North Africa. At one stage, he actually managed to sabotage the noxious van by feeding roadside grit into its engine oil. (Bonhoeffer might indeed have been saved had not the SS then been able to requisition a better coach). Other figures are brought on stage from the margins: such as the self-serving Sigmund Rascher, a sometime SS medical torturer at Dachau now presenting himself as a decent character. Or the flirtatious woman Heidel Nowakowski who claimed to have been a British agent but suspected by others of being an informer planted by the Gestapo. Others undoubtedly qualified as resisters: Hermann Pünder, imprisoned for ‘questionable political loyalty’ and whose son was a vital source of information for McCabe; Catholic Josef Müller, Bonhoeffer’s line manager in the Abwehr wing of the resistance; and General Alexander von Falkenhausen. One long-cherished myth crumbles: the Russian Vasilii Kokorin, befriended by Bonhoeffer, whose claim to be a nephew of Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, was eventually shown to be a fabricated attempt to obtain special status as a prisoner.

Second, McCabe vividly sets the story on the wider canvas of the closing stages of the war, in Germany and beyond (transcripts of BBC and other news bulletins lend the feel of a contemporary diary). An unnecessarily large distraction diminishing the particular tragedy unfolding on the route to Flossenbürg? In fact, it heightens, right to the end, the tension between what tragically did transpire and what so nearly could have happened to preserve Bonhoeffer’s life. McCabe’s graphic accounts are very apposite, of just what a maelstrom of bloodletting, social breakdown, and chaos engulfed Germany and much else of Europe in those last days of war. Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom is not be extracted away from the apocalypse of his country’s defeat, for which he had indeed prayed.

So, at length to Flossenbürg, the late-night SS trial of Bonhoeffer and six others including Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Colonel Has Oster, and their executions the next morning. One final myth is dismissed: the sanitized account, which circulated widely for many years, of Bonhoeffer making a calm saintly exit from this world, impressively kneeling in prayer just before his death on the gallows which allegedly followed soon afterwards. More credible investigations tell of the SS never allowing such pieties, and in this case marching the prisoners naked into the execution yard under the obscene mockery of the guards (Bonhoeffer as a pastor being especially targeted); and the hangings, far from being quick dispatches, being sadistically prolonged, using a device which instead of breaking their necks ensured the longest possible process of asphyxiation

Here is a fascinating and moving three-dimensional account of Bonhoeffer and the diverse figures with whom he interacted as friend and impromptu pastor during those tragic days, and of the faith which was indeed faithful unto death.