Martin Niemöller

Martin Niemöller’s case is more complicated than the standard Righteous narrative. He was a German Lutheran pastor and former U-boat commander of the First World War who became, in the years between 1934 and 1937, the most public Protestant opponent of the Nazi regime in Germany, the founding leader of the Confessing Church, the Bekennende Kirche, and the author of the famous postwar lines beginning First they came for the socialists. He spent eight years from 1937 to 1945 in concentration camps as Hitler’s personal prisoner. He was an opponent of the regime in the most direct sense and at the highest cost. He was also, in the period before 1934, something close to an antisemite of conventional German Protestant kind, and he had voted for Hitler in the elections of 1932 and 1933 on the standard nationalist grounds of his class and generation. The mature Niemöller of 1937 onwards was a different man from the Niemöller of 1932. The case is the case of a man who changed.

Niemöller’s quarrel with the regime began on theological grounds. The Reich Church under Ludwig Müller, whom Hitler had installed as Reichsbischof in 1933, attempted in 1934 to introduce the Aryan Paragraph into the Lutheran Church, removing pastors of Jewish descent from their pulpits and barring converts from Judaism from holding ecclesiastical office. Niemöller and a small group of pastors, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth, opposed the Aryan Paragraph on the theological grounds that the church was the body of Christ regardless of national or racial categories, and that to apply the Reich’s racial categories to the church was to subordinate the gospel to the state. The opposition produced the Barmen Declaration of May 1934, the founding text of the Confessing Church, which rejected the Reich Church’s claims to ecclesiastical authority and asserted that the church owed its allegiance to the Word of God rather than to the German state.

The Barmen Declaration was about ecclesiology and not, in the strict sense, about Jews. Niemöller in 1934 had not abandoned his older view that the German Jews were, on the whole, a problematic minority whose presence in German public life had been excessive in the Weimar years. The Barmen position protected only Jewish converts to Christianity and pastors of Jewish descent in the church. The deeper question of the regime’s persecution of unconverted Jews was not raised at Barmen. Niemöller and Bonhoeffer began to broaden the position over the next three years as the regime’s antisemitic measures escalated and as the implications for Christian ethics, on the Confessing Church’s own theological premises, became harder to evade. By 1937 Niemöller had moved, in his sermons at his Berlin parish in Dahlem, to a position of explicit theological opposition to the racial state.

The regime arrested him on 1 July 1937 after the Reich’s repeated warnings to him to cease his public sermons. He was charged with abuse of the pulpit and tried at Moabit prison in February 1938. The regime had expected a substantial prison sentence. The court, in an unusual moment of judicial independence, sentenced Niemöller to seven months, time already served, and ordered his release. Hitler personally was furious. Niemöller was rearrested by the Gestapo on the courthouse steps and sent to Sachsenhausen as the Führer’s personal prisoner. He was held at Sachsenhausen until 1941 and at Dachau from 1941 to 1945, including in the Sonderbau for honoured prisoners. He was liberated by American forces from a small SS holding camp in the South Tyrol on 4 May 1945.

The famous postwar quotation, First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist, originated in a sermon Niemöller gave in Kaiserslautern in early January 1946. The text was extemporaneous and existed in several variants. The most quoted version, with the variations on socialists, communists, trade unionists and Jews, became the most widely cited piece of moral writing on the postwar political conscience in any language. The German original, in the version closest to the 1946 sermon, is preserved at the Martin Niemöller Foundation in Wiesbaden. The English translation has been reproduced on Holocaust memorials, in school textbooks and on government buildings around the world.

Niemöller’s postwar life was the life of a Protestant pastor who had been transformed by the camp experience into one of Germany’s leading peace activists. He served as president of the Hessen-Nassau regional Lutheran Church from 1947 to 1964, as president of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968, and as a leading figure in West German nuclear disarmament campaigns and Vietnam war protests. He had moved from a conventional German nationalist position in 1932 to a position of pacifist Christian internationalism by 1960. The change took thirty years. The pivot was the camps.

Niemöller is included in this section because, although he was not a rescuer in the technical Yad Vashem sense, he was the most public German Christian dissenter of the Nazi period and the man whose postwar reflections most clearly articulated the moral implication of the catastrophe for the German Christian public. He died in Wiesbaden on 6 March 1984 at the age of ninety two.

See also

Sources

  • Martin Niemöller, Vom U-Boot zur Kanzel, Martin Warneck, 1934
  • Martin Niemöller, Reden, Predigten, Denkanstösse 1964, 1976, Frankfurt, 1977
  • James Bentley, Martin Niemöller: 1892, 1984, Free Press, 1984
  • Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis, Basic Books, 2018
  • Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, Fortress Press, 2000, on the Confessing Church and Niemöller
  • Martin-Niemöller-Stiftung, Wiesbaden, archives