Martin Niemöller was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian born in Lippstadt, Germany, in 1892. He was an anti-Communist and supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power at first. He became disillusioned when Hitler insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion.
About First they came … in brief
Martin Niemöller was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian born in Lippstadt, Germany, in 1892. He was an anti-Communist and supported Adolf Hitler’s rise to power at first. He became disillusioned when Hitler insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion. In 1937 he was arrested and eventually confined in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. He continued his career in Germany as a clergyman and as a leading voice of penance and reconciliation for the German people after World War II. The best-known versions of the confession in English are the edited versions in poetic form that began circulating by the 1950s. Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in the English language. The speech was translated and published in English in 1947, but was retracted when it was alleged that Niem Öller was an early supporter of the Nazis.
It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy following the Nazis’ Rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group. We are certainly not without guiltfault, and I ask myself again and again what would have happened if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility, all Protestant communities defended until their deaths, he writes. If we had said back then, it is not right when 100,000 Communists, in the order to let them die, put them in concentration camps, I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million people, because that is what it is costing us.
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