Zionskirche Berlin

A bronze torso stands on the west side of the Zion church. The statue looks like a cross, if you look at it from upfront, and like a kneeling person from the side view. A second sample of the monument is located next to the Elisabeth church in Wroclaw (Breslau), Poland.The memorial „For Dietrich Bonhoeffer“ of the sculptor Karl Biedermann points to the years 1931/32, during which the important Protestant theologian worked at the Zion parish.

At this time, Bonhoeffer was vicar of the city synod and assumed the service for the parish, which was situated in the district Wedding back then. The fold had been in personal distress due to the death and disease of its two pastors. Besides teaching, he held church services with sermons and baptized.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 25 years old, highly educated, widely-traveled, took over a confirmands' class of 50 boys out of control, mostly children of unemployed fathers. To accompany the boys in their everyday life, he rented a room in nearby Oderberger street 61.

The class was confirmed on March 13, 1932. A lot of pupils wore suits of which the cloth was donated by Bonhoeffer.

It was a lasting experience for Bonhoeffer stemming from the professorial environment in Grunewald, a wealthy neighborhood in the south-west of Berlin, to have come to know the social misery in Berlin's north. „This is roughly the greatest quarter of Berlin with the most difficult social and political conditions,“ Bonhoeffer wrote to his friend in 1931. After 1933 Bonhoeffer worked in the church opposition and in 1940 he determined to actively resist the Nazi regime. In April 1943 he was put in jail. After the assassination attempt against Hitler on July 20, 1944, his imprisonment was aggravated. Shortly before the end of the war, on April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer and his friends were executed in the concentration camp Flossenbuerg.