Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. (2024) on Netflix
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, refuses the Nazi party's changes to the churches. He joins a plot to kill Hitler to stop the genocide of millions of Jews.
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- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.2/104,860 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes66%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1914, eight-year-old Dietrich Bonhoeffer plays hide-and-seek with Walter, his older brother, in Breslau. Walter tells the family he is joining the army. He is killed in 1918 during the war, and the family holds his funeral. Years later Dietrich studies theology in America. Frank, an African-American seminarian, invites him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where Adam Clayton Powell Sr. preaches social justice, and Dietrich grows alert to the wrongs suffered by minorities. Back in Germany, his family watches the Nazi Party gather power inside the churches. He opposes the party's changes as sacrilegious and opens an underground seminary in Finkenwalde to train pastors of the Confessing Church. He is drawn into a plot to kill Hitler, weighing his preaching of peace against the effort to save millions of Jews.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. (2024)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Actors in the film, including Jonas Dassler, August Diehl and David Jonsson, joined an International Bonhoeffer Society statement condemning its appropriation by Christian nationalists, and the signatories criticized the misuse of Bonhoeffer's life and legacy by right-wing extremists.
- In the German weekly Die Zeit, Bonhoeffer experts including presidents of the International Bonhoeffer Society accused the movie of abusing Bonhoeffer's life to promote Christian nationalism, and said its slogan "How far will you go to stand up for what's right?" was not a question Bonhoeffer asked.
SPOILER
The film changes where Bonhoeffer was hanged: it shows him hanged outside an abandoned school and clothed, while in reality he was hanged naked at the Flossenbürg concentration camp.- The film invents Bonhoeffer leading a jazz band in a Harlem nightclub and being physically assaulted in a racially charged incident; he did attend the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York and was influenced by African American spirituals, but there is no evidence he played in jazz clubs.
- The film shows Martin Niemöller as privately but not publicly opposed to Nazism from the start; in reality he initially supported Adolf Hitler's rise to power and in the early 1930s sympathized with many Nazi ideas.
