Dietrich Bonhoeffer

In April 1945, Hitler, already confined to his bunker in Berlin, ordered that Bonhoeffer should not be allowed to survive the collapse of the Nazi regime. Today, his statue stands among the 20th-century martyrs above the entrance to Westminster Abbey.

Bonhoeffer wrote: "The thing that keeps coming back to me is, what is Christianity, and, indeed, who is Christ for us today?" He asked this question in the context of what he called "a world come of age". He was acutely conscious of the displacement of God from the culture of Europe: "One may ask whether ever before in human history there have been people with so little ground under their feet."