Klaus Bonhoeffer

Who was Klaus Bonhoeffer?

Klaus Bonhoeffer was a German jurist and resistance fighter against the Nazi régime who was executed after the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler.

Klaus Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany, now Wrocław, Poland, to Karl Bonhoeffer, a professor of psychiatry and neurology, and his wife Paula, as their third son. His younger brother was the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As a child, he went to the Grunewald-Gymnasium in Berlin with Hans von Dohnanyi.

He studied law at Heidelberg and received a doctorate for his thesis, "Workers' Committees as an Organ of the Workers' Coöperative". He also had further training in Berlin, at the University of Geneva, and in Amsterdam. On 3 September 1930, he wed Emmi Delbrück, who was Hans Delbrück's daughter, and Justus and Max Delbrück's sister.

He worked as a lawyer and from 1935 as a legal adviser for Deutsche Luft Hansa, serving from 1937 to 1944 as chief syndic. This job took him on many business trips, even during the war.

In the years 1940-1944, he systematically forged contacts with various resistance groups working against the Nazi régime. Through his brother Dietrich, he had contacts with the church resistance, and through his brothers-in-law, Justus Delbrück, Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher, he had many contacts in the military resistance to Hitler, especially in the circle about Wilhelm Canaris in the Abwehr of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Through his wife's cousin Ernst von Harnack, he was connected to the social-democratic resistance. Klaus Bonhoeffer also led his colleague Otto John, among others, into the resistance. He used his travel opportunities to further the cause against the Nazis.