Is Shep a real sheepdog from Bonhoeffer’s life?

Yes, Shep is based on a real sheepdog named Mr. Wolf. When Bonhoeffer served as a pastor in Spain, one of the boys in his church brought a message to him. Bonhoeffer noticed that the boy looked unusually sad, so he asked if anything was wrong. The following is Bonhoeffer’s account of the story. A summary of this story was originally in Molly’s longer version of The Teacher Who Became a Spy but was too sad when added to the other sad things that happened in Bonhoeffer’s life. When Molly was young, she also wondered what would happen to her beloved animals when they died. She hopes this encourages you.

At 11:00am there was a knock at my door and a ten-year-old boy came into my room. I noticed that something was amiss with the boy, who is usually cheerfulness personified. And soon it came out: He broke down into tears, completely beside himself, and I could hear only the words, “Herr Wolf ist tot” [Mr. Wolf is dead], and then he cried and cried. As it turns out, Herr Wolf is a young German shepherd dog that was sick for eight days and had just died a half-hour ago. So the boy, inconsolable, sat down on my knee and could hardly regain his composure; he told me how the dog died and how everything is lost now. What could I say? So he talked to me about it for quite a while. Then suddenly his wrenching crying became very quiet and he said, “But I know he’s not dead at all.” “What do you mean?” “His spirit is now in heaven, where it is happy. Once in class a boy asked the religion teacher what heaven was like, and she said she had not been there yet; but tell me now, will I see Herr Wolf again?”

So there I stood and was supposed to answer him yes or no. If I said, “no, we don’t know” that would have meant “no” . . . . . So I quickly made up my mind and said to him. “Look, God created human beings and also animals, and I’m sure he loves animals. And I believe that with God it is such that all who loved each other on earth—genuinely loved each other—will remain together with God, for to love is part of God. Just how that happens, though, we admittedly don’t know.”

You should have seen the happy face on this boy; he completely stopped crying. . . he was ecstatic. I repeated to him a couple of times that we don’t really know how this happens. He, however, knew, and knew it quite definitely in thought. . . . And there I stood— I who was supposed to “know the answer”— feeling quite small next to him; and I cannot forget the confident expression he had on his face when he left. (Bonhoeffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas. p.87)