Fifty-Seven Martyrs

DYING WE LIVE (285 pp.)--Pantheon ($4.50).

To read this book is to listen to the prayers of men about to die, who, dying, choose to salute not Caesar but God.

An estimated 6,000,000 Jews and untold numbers of gypsies and slave laborers perished in the racial and religious mass murder of Naziism. But there were other victims whose "crimes" were individual and matters of conscience. Here, 57 such victims, most of them German Christians, speak their last from Hitler's charnel houses; their words blend into a vox humana whose organ tone speaks of things older than man's inhumanity to man.

It may serve to remind the world that Bach as well as Himmler was German, and that Hitler was an enemy of Christians as much as of Jews. From the time Hitler took power in 1933 he held German honor in prison, and it is a sort of miracle that honor's voice was ever heard, and that it should speak, not as might be expected, in hatred and hysteria, but in the grave tones of Christian charity.

Heir to All. This painful, terrible book has been made from the last letters of priests, pastors, officers, officials. Most of them could have chosen to share the promised Nazi victory, but instead, each chose to be a victim.

The tone is set by Helmuth James, Count von Moltke, a great-grandnephew of the Prussian field marshal whose strategy won the Franco-Prussian war. Moltke was executed at the Plotzensee prison in January 1945 for discussing matters "that are the exclusive concern of the Fuhrer." By his name and rank he could have aspired to any position in Hitler's Reich; instead, he agreed with what his jailers told him at his own trial: "Christianity and we National Socialists have one thing in common, and one thing only: we claim the whole man." Agreeing, he died a whole man--a Christian one.

Moltke, heir to all Germany had to offer, repudiated his inheritance. "My whole life long," he wrote to his sons, "I have been fighting against [the] merciless consistency that is latent in the German and that has found its expression in the National Socialist state." To his wife, he wrote: "[They may] take my goods, my honor, my child and wife; the body they may kill; God's truth abideth still, His kingdom is forever."

So the record runs from the simple words of a Sudetenland farm boy condemned to death because he refused to join the SS to the Latin prayers of a Jesuit like Alfred Delp, who called his prison a "kindergarten of death." Delp's greatest gratitude was that once he was able to slip out of his fetters so that he could say Mass with his hands completely free. The book ranges in spirit from the last message of the member of a Communist resistance group who said: "Mankind, I have loved you. Be vigilant," to the gentle prayers of a seaman, Kim Malthe-Bruun, who, the day after he had been tortured, wrote, "Suddenly I realized how incredibly strong I am. When the soul returned once more to the body, it was as if the jubilation of the whole world had been gathered together here." A onetime mayor of Leipzig, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, implicated in the July 20, 1944 plot against Hitler's life, wrote in his death cell: "Christ . . .

did not teach love for one's fellow country man but for one's neighbor. 'Honor thy father and thy mother,' but not the head of the nation. To the latter, render what is Caesar's . . . but not the soul . . ." Under the Whips. Some, like Julius Leber, a Social-Democratic member of the Reichstag, spoke in tones of courageous epigram in which Americans can hear an echo of Nathan Hale: "I have only one head, and what better cause to risk it for than this?" Others, like Fetter Moen, an Oslo insurance man who, at 43, found him self under the steel whips of the Gestapo, said the simple truth. In pinpricks on a roll of paper, Moen wrote: "Was interrogated twice. Was whipped . . . Am terribly afraid of pain. But no fear of death."

Christoph Probst, a student and anti-Nazi, wrote to his mother: "I thank you for having given me life," and to his sister: "I never knew that dying is so easy . . I die without any feeling of hatred."

Perhaps the most moving of all the letters are those of men in responsible command positions in the German army, who did what they did with full knowledge of the consequences--not only in terms of traditional patriotism but to the safety of their families. Wrote Heinrich, Count von Lehndorff-Steinort, to his wife, on the eve of his "condemnation and execution" (he was involved in the July 20 plot):

"Most dearly beloved to me in all the world: This is probably the last letter you will receive from me on this earth. Although my thoughts have pursued an orbit around you day and night ever since our separation ... I fear that with everything I shall only pile a new burden upon your poor sorely tried heart.

" 'Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong,'--this shall lead me to the last. It is my confirmation verse . . . There are evil people everywhere, but also many good people. Do you know, I have often thought of our conversations in which you sought to encourage me to gather more spiritual than earthly goods. How right you were! Where have all earthly treasures gone? Vanished like a cloud of vapor . . . I do not fear death. I fear it only as it affects you and our beloved sweet children . . ."

In their forewords, Roman Catholic George N. Shuster calls the book "a sort of hymn," and Protestant Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says: "It is ... one of the most rewarding ironies of history that only a very great evil can prompt such martyrdom as these pages . . . illumine . . . While there is a problem for the German nation about the guilt of having allowed the Nazi tyranny to come to power among them, it is fortunately true that the German people were also responsible for the lives and deeds of heroism and martyrdom in which the horrible evil was resisted."

For a free society wherein "men are not called upon to pay for their convictions . . . with the price of their lives," here is a haunting testament from those who paid.

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