Matthew D Hockenos - Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak outbecause I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak outbecause I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak outbecause I was not a Jew.

Then they came for meand there was no one left to speak for me.

O N A WINTRY N OVEMBER DAY IN 1945, A SIMPLY DRESSED, WHITE-HAIRED woman huddled beside a gaunt, somber man as they read a plaque affixed to a tree. The middle-aged German couple, man and wife, had suffered greatly during the war, and although the man looked particularly haggard, it was his wife who was close to fainting. The plaque itself was plain-looking: a white-painted board with black letters and numbers. The inscription, however, was anything but ordinary: Here in the years 19331945, 238,756 people were cremated. Overwhelmed, the woman leaned into her husband for support. She was visibly shaken,

Martin Niemller said that, upon reading the inscription, a cold shudder ran down my spine. But for him, unlike for Else, his wife, it was not only the number of people murdered that was upsetting. He was even more taken aback by the dates: 19331945. Dachau had opened in March 1933, when the Nazis began incarcerating their enemies, just one month after Hitler came to power. Niemller had been a free man at that time, a prominent pastor of an influential parish, and he remained at liberty until his arrest in 1937. Imprisoned in a Berlin jail and a concentration camp from 1937 to 1941, Niemller and other famous camp inmates were transferred by the Nazis to Dachau in 1941. My alibi accounted for the years 193745, he told a German audience a few months after he and his wife visited Dachau. But God was not asking me where I had been from 1937 to 1945 but from 1933 to 1945 and for those [earlier] years I did not have an answer.

There is little doubt that the sentiments expressed in Niemllers famous confession emerged from this revelatory moment at Dachau. Throughout 1946, he repeated the confession frequently to his German compatriots, modeling for them how to admit to and repent ones complacency toward and complicity in the Nazi era and the Holocaust.

The popularity of what is known as the Niemller confession spread in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the rise of the human rights movement. Today it is frequently invoked by a multitude of activists and others. Though it reflected Pastor Niemllers particular circumstances in Nazi and post-Nazi Germany, groups and organizations ranging from Black Lives Matter to the Tea Party have appropriated the quotation for their causes. Secondary school teachers employ it to instruct American youth on the virtues of diversity and good citizenship. College students adorn their dorm-room walls with posters bearing the German pastors words. Politicians and pundits on the left invoke it in response to crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and minorities, while the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Holocaust Memorial in Boston prominently display the confession.

Despite the wide use of Niemllers confession, its authors life story remains largely unknown. Previous biographies (two in German and three in English, to date) have done little to probe the depths of this complicated man, preferring instead to present him in a mostly heroic light. Would his admirers in the American public embrace the confession so enthusiastically if they knew of Niemllers support for Adolf Hitler during his rise to power from the 1920s into the early 30s? The Nazis stigmatization and persecution of minorities did not initially trouble Niemller. He said nothing when the Gestapo arrested Communists, Socialists, and Jewsand not because he was timid. As we will see, he was anything but. He was silent because he shared the belief that these groups were anti-Christian and disloyal to Germany.

Then They Came for Me is a revisionist biography that weaves together Niemllers personal story with the great dramas of the twentieth century that drove his moral and political evolution. It seeks neither to vilify him nor to add to the existing hagiographies, but rather to understand him and his confession and to reveal what his transformation from Nazi sympathizer to committed pacifist tells us about how and under what circumstances such reversals are possible.