No Ordinary Men

The Third Reich was the twentieth century’s most popular tyranny. After Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, most of Germany’s civil servants and professional elite collaborated with the Nazis or else tried to remain unpolitical, to retreat into inner emigration. Those who resisted were intimidated and silenced, often through terror and murder. To oppose the regime was rare and dangerous; to do so to protect the sanctity of law and faith was rarer still.

ut nonetheless some did. Claus von Stauffenberg, who was at the center of the conspiracy that attempted to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, is only the best-known member of the German resistance. No Ordinary Men is the story of two of the Nazi regime’s most courageous and admirable opponents- the pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his close friend and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi. Bonhoeffer opposed Nazi racial thought and fought the Nazis’ efforts to control the German Protestant churches. Dohnanyi, a lawyer working in the Wehrmacht’s counterintelligence section, kept records of Nazi crimes to be used as evidence once the regime fell, helped victims, tried to sabotage Nazi policies, and conspired to assassi