Martin Niemöller

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (January 14, 1892 Lippstadt, Germany – March 6, 1984 Wiesbaden, Germany) was a prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. Since the 1980s, he has been best known as the author of the poem First they came for the Communists. He is also known as an anti-Semite, a German nationalist, and a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and later as the founder of the Confessing Church, which opposed the nazification of German Protestant churches. For his opposition to the Nazi's state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution and survived imprisonment. During that time he abandoned his earlier national conservative views. By 1954 he had become a left-wing Christian pacifist. heavily opposed to nationalism, anti-Semitism and racism of all kinds. He took active part in protests against the Vietnam War and famously accused soldiers of being murderers. He was honored by Israel as a Righteous Among the Nations.

Background

He was born in Lippstadt and was a U-boat commander in World War I, winning the Iron Cross First Class. After the war, he spent some time in the Freikorps. He studied theology and was ordained in 1931, becoming pastor of St. Anne's Church in Dahlem, an affluent suburb of Berlin.

In 1933, Niemöller founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organization of pastors to "combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background." By the autumn of 1934, Niemöller joined other Lutheran and Protestant churchmen like Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in founding the Confessing Church, a Protestant group that opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches.

Arrested on July 1, 1937, Niemöller was brought to a "Special Court" on March 2, 1938 to be tried for activities against the State. He was fined 2,000 Mark and received a prison terms of 7 months. As his detention period exceeded the jail term, he was released by the Court after the trial. However, immediately after leaving the Court, he was rearrested by Himmler's Gestapo. He was interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He was released by the allies in 1945. After his release in 1945, he was president of the Evangelical church in Hesse and Nassau from 1947 to 1961. He was one of the instigators in the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, signed by leading figures in the German church. The document acknowledged that the church had not done enough to resist the Nazis. In 1961, he became president of the World Council of Churches.

Attitude toward the Jews

When it came to the Jews, Niemöller continued to express his antisemitic views. According to Holocaust scholar Robert Michael, beliefs such as those held by Niemöller made even Nazi victims into Holocaust collaborators: "Martin Niemoeller in his radically antisemitic August 1935 sermon noted that the Jews would not be released from their suffering until they converted, Jewish suffering being "proof" that Jesus was God. The essential reason the Jews were cursed was because they "brought the Christ of God to the Cross ... These kinds of statements are a result of traditional antisemitism, and beliefs such as these corrupted average people as well as the elite and made them all not just victims of Nazis but active or passive collaborators in the Holocaust." According to Dr. Michael, Martin Niemoeller agreed with the Nazi's position on the Jewish question. "Both Nazis and their Protestant opponents were antisemitic." "This kind of evil harmony between Nazis and anti-Nazis would be fatal for the Jews."

"Niemoller had exposed himself as an opportunist who had no quarrel with Hitler politically and only begun to oppose the Nazis when Hitler threatened to attack the churches." "Further evidence of his moral duplicity was found in his statement that anti-Semitism had come to an end in Germany and would not recur."

Alleged whitewashing

According to a recent study, “Aspects of his biography had been played down when America had needed a clean German hero.”

“In contrast to the leftist and communist resistance, his status as a Protestant minister fighting for freedom on a Christian platform and his principled disobedience to an unjust regime made him highly useful to governmental propaganda agencies, which turned him into a martyr for the cause of democracy.”

“He was presented by the American press as the spokesman for a different Germany and the hope for a better future.”

“Niemoller had become an ‘American hero.’”

However, “his star began to sink rapidly when his other pronouncements and his past … caught up with him.” For example, “he agreed with his Lutheran brethren about the inadvisability of introducing democracy in Germany.”

Professor Werner Cohn, states: One of the most striking exemplars of the pervasive anti-Semitism of the non-Nazi right wing is a man whose record is nowadays often whitewashed. Pastor Martin Niemöller, later himself to be persecuted by the Nazis, never made a secret of his strong, racial anti-Semitism. In his Sätze zur Arierfrage in der Kirche ('Theses on the Aryan Question in the Church') of November 1933, he opposed the introduction of the "Aryan paragraph" in the Protestant church on doctrinal grounds, but takes care, nevertheless, to opine that Jews had done great harm to Germany; he also indicates that the baptized Christians of Jewish origins are personally distasteful to him. As late as 1935, Niemöller goes out of his way to preach hatred against the Jews: "What is the reason for [their] obvious punishment, which has lasted for thousands of years? Dear brethren, the reason is easily given: the Jews brought the Christ of God to the cross!"

The author, Professor Werner Cohn, states: "I lived as a Jew under the Nazis in the very years that he [Martin Niemöller] told his Dahlem congregation that we Jews were race aliens, and also that we deserved what we got, having murdered Christ. I lived not too far from his church, and his name was mentioned in my home.”

Quotation

He is best known for a single poem – "First they came..." – a warning about the consequences of not resisting tyranny at the first instances of its rising. The exact order of groups and wording are subject to dispute, and many versions exist. One commonly accepted variant is as follows:

Original

Translation

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist. Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat. Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich nicht protestiert; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter. Als sie die Juden holten, habe ich nicht protestiert; ich war ja kein Jude. Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

In September 1939, ten months after Kristallnacht, Niemöller volunteered, "to fight for Adolph Hitler’s Germany".

External links

• Who Was Martin Niemoller?
• Martin Niemöller's famous quotation: "First they came for the Communists" What did Niemoeller really say? Which groups did he name? In what order? Harold Marcuse, UC Santa Barbara (2005)
• Niemöller's famous quotation as posted by Holocaust Survivors' Network
• A biography of Niemöller
• The text (and an English translation) of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt
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