Letters From Prison: Alfred Delp

I have recently been working through various letters by political prisoners during the time of British colonialism in India and Nazi Germany in hopes of presenting a paper at an upcoming conference in 2013. Among some of the more interesting are those by the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp, who I only stumbled upon doing this research. It may not even be proper to call him a political resistor in the proper sense, since Delp’s primary concern, if we are to believe him, was the reconstruction of Germany after the war. It was a visit to Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg to speak about these matters that effectively sealed his fate. Delp was apparently unaware that Stauffenberg just shortly after his visit would attempt to assassinate Hitler.

Delp’s letters run the gamut of emotion. Fear and anxiety are met with moments of extraordinary peace and well-being.  In December 1944, during his period of incarceration, he has what could only be identified as a conversion experience, though he had been in the Jesuit order for his entire professional life. It is in this experience that realizes and feels the hand of God. The fear entwined in his earlier letters, while still palpable is no longer all-consuming. He learns how to trust and surrender.

“God has become almost tangible. Things I have always known and believed now seem so concrete; I believe them. But I also live them.”

Surrender, he finds, the type of Christian surrender that so often eludes us in our well-being, is found when and where there is nothing left to be found. Delp discovers Paul’s spiritual principle – in weakness, the strength of God is perfected in the one who has nowhere else to turn. The quest of making this real in our life, in a world that is inundated by the self, it is the “selfless turn” that makes draws us into true peace.

Despite his best efforts, Delp would not escape his fate. He was executed in February 1944. His role indeed was minimal and his execution unjustified. But he gained something much greater. During those six months of incarceration, he gained himself.  Joseph Fleischer, perhaps the most notorious SS judge ever who presided over Delp’s case, was killed only days later when a bomb hit the building where the deliberations took place and he was crushed by fallen debris. Sure it was no lightning bolt. And my mind immediately moved to the kinds of stories I used to read in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. However much one relegates these stories to fairytales of divine judgment on the Roman Catholics who executed Protestant testifiers, the comparison with Delp’s end is enough for some pause.