Klaus Bonhoeffer

Klaus Bonhoeffer (5 January 1901 – 23 April 1945) was a German jurist and resistance fighter against the Nazi régime who was executed after the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler.

Early life Klaus Bonhoeffer was born in Breslau, Germany, now Wrocław, Poland, to Karl Bonhoeffer, a professor of psychiatry and neurology, and his wife Paula (née von Hase), as the third son in the Bonhoeffer family. His younger brother was the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (4 February 1906 – 9 April 1945).

Education As a child, he went to the Friedrichswerdersche Gymnasium in Berlin. He studied law at Tübingen, Heidelberg and Berlin and received a doctorate for his thesis, "Workers' Committees as an Organ of the Workers' Coöperative" (Die Betriebsräte als Organ der Betriebsgenossenschaft). He also had further training in Berlin, at the University of Geneva, and in Amsterdam.

Marriage On 3 September 1930, he wed Emmi Delbrück, who was Hans Delbrück's daughter, and Justus and Max Delbrück's sister.

Career He worked as a lawyer and from 1935 as a legal adviser for Deutsche Luft Hansa, serving from 1937 to 1944 as chief syndic. He was dedicated to the plan to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 and overthrow the government.

According to the detention book kept at the Lehrter Straße prison in Berlin, where the Gestapo had a special section for political prisoners, Bonhoeffer was arrested on 1 October 1944 and sentenced to death by the German "People's Court" (Volksgerichtshof) on 2 February 1945.

On the night of 22–23 April 1945, as Soviet troops were already reaching Berlin's eastern outskirts, he along with Rüdiger Schleicher and other prisoners was taken by a special squad from the RSHA to the exhibition grounds near the Lehrter Straße prison and killed with a gunshot wound to the neck. The only eyewitness to these murders was Herbert Kosney, who managed to move his head at the last moment so that the shot meant for his neck missed.

His wife and children survived the war and settled in Schleswig-Holstein.

A memorial stone has been established at his family home.