02 Dec December 1, 1944

December 1944

To Marianne Hapig and Marianne Punder (the two women bringing laundry and supplies to Delp in prison)

Good people,

May God reward you greatly for all your goodness and concern.  How can I ever make it up to you?  Actually, this is sometimes a worry to me, this concern, and knowing that I owe so many people.  Now, for the first time, God is becoming the real and most true strength and creative unrest.  Let’s stretch out our chained hands further to him and acknowledge that we are bound to him and continue to place our whole existence on him. That’s how one’s whole life can be gathered up in a word of adoration and surrender!  And confidence as well!….

Let’s stretch out our chained hands further to him

A few minutes after Mass the alarm sounded, and then the bombs fell.  One fell in front of my cell, so close that for a long time I didn’t know how things were for me.  Ut eruas a morte et alas eas in fame [“To deliver their souls from death and feed them in famine”]….Thank you!

On Sunday I’ll celebrate Mass for the concerns of you both.  It’s truly wonderful that God and his mysteries are here with me and that even bound hands can bless and consecrate with good effect.

Today the possibility arose that the trial might be postponed until Christmas or even later…. The two women I mentioned are still very much in the picture.  They seem to have access to the People’s Court.  Perhaps try to make contact through Poelchau.  It would be important for me to know whether I’m being charged with the others or whether I’ve once again been placed out of the group, and what’s behind all this.

Delp in earlier days

Could you try to get the contents of the enclosed papers to Sperr [a fellow prisoner who had said under interrogation that Delp knew about the assassination attempt] by the usual route?  But please, if possible, translate it into a legible form first.  Poelchau knows who’s looking after Sperr, and he gets things to him.

God is pulling us down from all our pedestals—at least that’s how it’s been, and is, for me.  Whatever I took on before so elegantly and self-confidently has been smashed.  HE has captured me and confronted me.  I still remember the moment in the Lehrterstrasse when I told him that from then on I wasn’t going to bother about anything, that it was now his concern.  And that if it was possible….he might let me get by without beatings and without the “Arena” [the court] and without questions.  Since then I haven’t been beaten.

And God bless you now.  This year we are more deeply aware that all of life is an Advent.

Yours gratefully,

Max

I’m trying to write a short reflection every day on the invocations in the Litany of the Sacred Heart.  Send the sheets to Luise.  She knows where everything belongs.  Thanks.

Today, Saturday, the news is that the date is coming up soon, even in the next few days.  It’s not for sure, but once again the flashlight is beaming on the tightrope.

Please tell the parish priest in Lampertheim not to talk about anything in the letters.

News just now that nothing will be happening next week unless a date is set pretty soon, which is possible of course.  So please see to the business with Sperr as quickly as possible.

Please, when you can, a pencil and some ink.  Thanks.