Eberhard Bethge

Eberhard Bethge (August 28, 1909 – March 18, 2000) was a student of the theologian and anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Bethge was born in Warchau, Landkreis Jerichow II, Province of Saxony, the Kingdom of Prussia, near Magdeburg, on August 29, 1909. He attended several universities, as is customary for theology students in Germany, before attending the underground Finkenwalde Seminary in Pomerania where Bonhoeffer taught in the name of Germany's Confessing Church (part of the anti-Nazi resistance). Bethge became Bonhoeffer's close friend and confidant. With the help of pietist congregations within the old-Prussian Ecclesiastical Province of Pomerania the seminary could be relocated twice after Nazi-imposed closures.

Although a member of the Resistance, Bethge was drafted to serve in the German army during World War II. He was later arrested, along with dozens of other resisters, after the failed attempt to kill Adolf Hitler on July 20, 1944, but he was rescued by Soviet troops shortly before his scheduled trial.

After the war, he spent several years as pastor for the same German-speaking congregation in Sydenham, London, England, that Bonhoeffer had served from 1933 to 1935. From 1961 to his retirement in 1975, Bethge was the Director of the 'Pastoral College' of one of the Protestant regional churches in Germany, the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, charged with continuing ministerial education – a task which no doubt had an element of continuity with his and Bonhoeffer's work in the seminary in Pomerania in the 1930s.

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