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With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany: The Life and Selected Prison Letters of Alfred Delp

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Reading books by and about those who spent time in Nazi Germany is always difficult and sometimes discouraging, yet often they end up dispelling the evil they recount by the triumph of the human spirit against it. This book should be a Holocaust classic right up there with Elie Wiesel's Night or Etty Hillsum's An Interrupted Life and Letter from Westerbork. However, our main character has more in common with Etty then Elie, for Elie was rescued in the dying days of the war, and both Etty and Alfred Delp, our hero, did not make it out.
This is the story of a young man studying to be a Jesuit Priest, a man who pushes the boundaries in his own order and ruffles some feathers outside of it as well. He is a man who has faith and is certain of the things he believes in. He is also certain that Hitler will fail and from early in the war is part of a group that is trying to create a plan for the rebuilding of Germany after the war. This group that he joined was called the Kreisau friends. In an early letter Delp wrote about the resistance: "Whoever doesn't have the courage to make history is doomed to become its object. We have to take action." P.48. Throughout the war Delp had many roles: parish priest, teacher at a boys' school, active resistance friend and community leader.
Delp was arrested for a murder plot on Hitler, a plot about which he did not actually have any knowledge. He believed to nearly the end that he would be acquitted in his trial. In December of 1944 he wrote: "Today was a good day. Even though in the end we're chained and locked up, the heart of the day is the mass. We pray and trust and are not in the least bit modest about what we expect from God." P.107. Yet as time wore on, he would despair. But his faith in God would stand firm.
This book is an amazing testimony of the power of the intellect and of steadfast faith, in very troubled times.

So often tragedy appears to be a failure or defeat in life when in fact it is a beginning of something worthwhile and beautiful. The imprisonment and execution of Alfred Delp, as revealed in his letters and the author’s commentaries in this book exemplify that truth. The reader may find it hard and even tedious to become embroiled in the desperate struggle to hold on to life by a man whose faith in eternity is never questioned. But this microcosm of the lives and suffering shared by millions under the Nazi regime is an example of the eventual futility of evil and should cause us to appreciate more deeply the freedom purchased for us today by those lives. The book is the beautiful fruit grown from the seed of one man’s death. It should be read.

With Bound Hands: A Jesuit In Nazi Germany by Mary Frances Coady presents the life and selected letters of Fr. Alfred Delp, a Jesuit priest, youth leader, intellectual, and a dedicated resister to the Nazi regime who was taken prisoner and eventually executed by the Nazis. Father Delp's smuggled writings and prayers to friends and family mark a man transformed by the crucible of suffering, and provide a sober view of the depths of human cruelty as well as the struggle to endure. With Bound Hands stands as an enduring testament against the Nazis and their crimes -- and powerful reading for Catholics today.