The American Spectator

Michael Dooley| 12.16.08 @ 9:03AM

My own father was in that battle that winter of 1944. He and his detachment were in a forward position scouting out the countryside when they suddenly found themselves in the midst of the start of the German counter-offensive. Quickly, they were miles behind the German lines and cut off from contact hope of rescue. They decided against surrender for fear of what the Germans would do to them. So they hid during the day and hiked west by night. Several times they only a few feet from discovery. After the better part of a week, they finally made it back to allied lines.

Later in the battle, my father was wounded and crippled for the rest of his life. He rarely ever spoke of the war or his experiences in it. Some would call him a hero and my brother and I were excited he had actually been in the thick of history; but if Dad felt any satisfaction in it he never let on.

A few years ago, Ken Burns was asked if WWII was our last “good” war. He quickly corrected his interviewer saying WWII was our worst war. Dad would have agreed.

Mary| 12.16.08 @ 12:58PM

American Soldiers who liberated Italy are the reason my parents -with two kids in tow- could emigrate.

To say thank you is much too hackneyed.

This isn't the anniversary of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's
death, but I thought posting something that Lutheran and International Correspondent Uwe Siemon-Netto wrote, intimately applicable and worthwhile:

**According to St. Louis mathematician Charles Ford, a leading American Bonhoeffer scholar, "'Bonhoeffer returned from America because he did not want to miss his encounter with Christ, who was waiting to form in his life."

Bonhoeffer knew the cross was waiting for him, and he accepted it in true discipleship of Christ, here, in the secular realm. He was hanged April 9, 1945 in Flossenbuerg concentration camp, only days before it was liberated by American forces. He died nobly, or so the camp's physician reported later:

"I saw pastor Bonhoeffer, before taking off his prison garb, kneeling on the floor, praying fervently to his God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution he again said a short prayer, and then climbed the steps to the gallows brave and composed."

This sounds like an almost blissful ending. It seems, though, that the doctor made up this tale in order to avoid punishment later in a war crimes trial. B. Jorgen L.F. Mogensen, a Danish diplomat imprisoned in Flossenbuerg, denied the existence of a scaffold or gallows in that camp. Mogensen is certain that Bonhoeffer died the same ghastly death his two Abwehr superiors, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris and Maj. Gen. Hans Oster, suffered.

They were slowly strangled to death by a rope dangling from an iron hook that had been sunk into a wall. When they lost consciousness they were revived so that the procedure could be repeated over and over again. The man who revived them was evidently none other than the camp doctor who later made up the story about Bonhoeffer's elegant end, Mogensen insisted.

Bonhoeffer's bitter end was in a sense his personal exclamation mark behind his own, Lutheran theology of the cross. So it is time for his radical, atheist, postmodern and other weird admirers step back and hand him over to us. Welcome back, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you are home now - finally, 100 years after your birth and nearly 61 after your death!**