The Nazis hung him (on this date in 1945)
/Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazi in 1943 for his work with the resistance. He had been warned not to speak publicly. He did so anyway and was hanged April 9, 1945. Ethics is a gathering of his notes for an intended work on the subject, hidden in a garden before they could be seized by the police. Here is one paragraph contrasting the Ethics of Kant to Christ:
Christ did not, like a moralist, love a theory of good, but He loved the real man. He was not, like a philosopher, interested in the 'universally valid,' but rather in that which is of help to the real and concrete human being. What worried him was not, like Kant, whether the 'maxim of an action can become a principle of general legislation', but whether my action is at this moment helping my neighbor become a man before God. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
Stephen Goforth