Dietrich Bonhoeffer - the Last Eight Days

“John McCabe’s remarkable and strangely fascinating book has carefully reconstructed Bonhoeffer’s final journey … he offers a tapestry of people, their backstories and their connections with one another and with Bonhoeffer, as well as insights into the places that this unusual group of prisoners passed through … but it is the story of its creation as much as the burying of some urban myths that makes this endeavour impressive. McCabe discovered Bonhoeffer when he was an ordinand. In setting out to reconstruct the events of Bonhoeffer’s final week, he made many connections across Europe … This is an unusual book, full of detail alongside a bigger picture … a fascinating new approach to a narrative that is perhaps more complex and less tidy than posthumous iconography would have us believe”— Natalie K Watson, Church Times

“What makes this book extraordinary in the first place is that thanks to his diligent and wide-ranging research, McCabe has collated much more information than previously accessible about Bonhoeffer's companions on the journey, and with whom he was literally cheek by jowl. Not only do the two British fellow prisoners, Payne Best and Hugh Falconer, whose accounts of Bonhoeffer and his final service at Schonberg have been known for some time, come to the fore. Fascinating new details emerge”— Journal of Anglican Studies

"The very best and very worst of humanity jostle for position in this gripping narrative of the closing days of the second world war. John McCabe’s meticulously researched account draws on remarkably varied sources that he exploits with forensic skill. The outcome is a readable and profoundly moving book that deserves attention well beyond the ranks of those interested in Dietrich Bonhoeffer." ~Stephen Plant, Dean, Trinity Hall, Cambridge

"McCabe gives us a fascinating account, well-researched and with much material new to most readers, of Bonhoeffer’s final pilgrimage to his martyrdom at Flossenbürg. Also, many other figures, usually overlooked, involved in the drama of these doom-laden days in April 1945 get deserved attention. While typical versions of Bonhoeffer’s last days and hours have relied on the overly sanitized accounts of dubious witnesses, McCabe leaves us in no doubt of the brutality of what awaited him and the other conspirators executed on 9 April, making the significance of his faithfulness unto death all the more telling." ~Keith Clements, former General Secretary, Conference of European Churches

"In short and fast-paced chapters, this riveting new book brings us close to the characters that populated Bonhoeffer’s last week. John McCabe paints these figures in the round and with new and unprecedented historical accuracy, taking readers deep inside the swirling chaos that attended the war’s end. A range of oversimplifications and myths have grown up around the death of this modern saint, whose faith stands out even more clearly when his grueling and tragic reality is brought into such clear focus." ~Brian Brock, Professor of Moral and Practical Theology, University of Aberdeen