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

On February 2, 1945, Fr. Alfred Delp, SJ, a widely admired pastor, youth leader, and intellectual, was executed by the Nazis in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. During the six months before his execution, the shackled priest painfully wrote a stream of deeply moving letters, meditations, and prayers which were smuggled out to friends and family members. These writings reveal a man profoundly changed in the crucible of suffering – a once-arrogant, impatient priest transformed into a herald. In With Bound Hands, we get a glimpse of Nazi persecution against Christians as we witness the imprisonment, and ultimate death, of Nazi resister and Jesuit priest Alfred Delp's struggle to maintain his faith in the face of imminent death. During Delp’s six-month incarceration and persecution at the hands of the Nazis, he writes of his fear, sadness, and anger, and then of his transformation from an “unholy character into a saint.” This book tells the absorbing story of a Jesuit hero who found redemption as he plumbed the depths of evil.