Sabine Dramm, author of Bonhoeffer and Camus (1998) and an introduction to Bonhoeffer's thought (2007), gives us an authoritative brief update on Bonhoeffer as an active intermediary between military and civilian resistance circles to Hitler – here specifically in the Military Intelligence Foreign Office (Abwehr) in the army high command – and their ‘search for allies abroad, 1938–1945’, the subtitle of Klemens von Klemperer's major retrospective, German resistance against Hitler (Oxford 1992). Bonhoeffer's role as a courier, which we know of since publication in 1996 of volume xvi of his collected works, lasted from mid-October 1939 until his arrest on 5 April 1943. His superiors were two close friends, colonel Hans Oster (head of Department Z), and Bonhoeffer's brother-in-law, the lawyer Hans Dohnanyi, recruited on 25 August 1939 as a ‘reporter’. This entitled him to a major's uniform. Three themes stand out in this useful summary. First, the way in which Bonhoeffer's Berlin upper-class background and links with landed aristocracy close to the Confessing Church, notably in Pomerania, like the elderly Barthian, Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, enabled him to enhance the networking (chapter ix) of both the Confessing Church, and here, in wartime, military and civilian opposition circles. Ecumenical contacts abroad were primary in his couriership: notably in Switzerland: between 24 February 1941 and 11 May 1942 he made five trips to Zurich, Basle and Geneva. Second, how scary, because life-threatening, this activity was in a climate where no one could be trusted, not even Bonhoeffer's dearest, given Goering's and Heydrich's (until his assassination on 27 May 1942) total subversion of normative constitutional arrangements. Dramm records well Bonhoeffer's hourly daily worry about what might happen next when there was often no time to lose. Might he achieve anything? A sense of his feeling his own great insufficiency stalks these printed pages. To read today the primary sources, hastily penned or typed correspondence in the Bishop Bell papers in Lambeth Palace Library, still gives a sharper grasp of Bonhoeffer's fleeting twilight world described here (see Andrew Chandler, ‘The death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’, this Journal xlv [1994], 448–59).

Finally, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in midsummer 1941 (chapter xi) made it brutally clear to Bonhoeffer four months later on 18 October with the first deportations rumoured ‘to the east’ of Berlin's Jewish citizens – more than a thousand each day – that Hitler meant what he said about what he would do to the Jews.

Sigtuna (chapters i, xiv), the picturesque Swedish ecumenical home where on 31 May 1942 a surprised Bishop Bell met Bonhoeffer, pastor Hans Schönfeld, the head of the Geneva-based research department of the World Council of Churches, and three distinguished Swedish theologians, draws together the three themes. There was simply no time to lose. In this helpful book, this reviewer could have wished for a stronger focus on the fundamental issue of military conscription (introduced in the spring of 1935) and the ensuing bitter guilt-ridden debate over possible conscientious objection to 1939 as a ‘just war’ amongst mostly young Confessing Church clergy like Bonhoeffer (chapter v): many of them were to perish on the Eastern front. What Kurt Scharf (b. 1902), editor of the Confessing Church's Circular Letters, Rundbriefe (1933–45), declared illegal from 1935, called their common ‘step by step learning’, is clearly visible on every page of this record of Bonhoeffer, the young Christian sceptic uncertain about his own future within a conspiracy to destroy Hitler without hope of support from allies abroad, given the new emerging allied policy of ‘unconditional surrender’.