Martin Niemöller

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Martin Niemöller

Martin Niemoller on a post stamp, painted by Gerd Aretz in 1992
Born January 14, 1892 in Lippstadt, Germany
Died March 6, 1984 (aged 92) in Wiesbaden, Germany
Church Evangelical Church in Germany
Confessing Church
Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau
Writings First they came...
Congregations served St. Anne's in Dahlem, Germany
Offices held President, Evangelical Church in Hesse and Nassau (1945-1961)
President, World Council of Churches (1961-1968)
Title Ordained Pastor

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (January 14, 1892 – March 6, 1984) was a prominent German anti-Nazi theologian[1] and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the poem First they came....

Although he was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler,[2] he became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the nazification of German Protestant churches. Despite his own antisemitic attitudes,[3] he vehemently opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph.[4] 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.[5][6] He narrowly escaped execution and survived imprisonment.[7] After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help the victims of the Nazis.[4] He turned away from his earlier antisemitic and nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt.[4] Since the 1950s, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, [7] and vice-chair of War Resisters' International from 1966 to 1972. [8] He met with Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and was a committed campaigner for nuclear disarmament.[7]

Contents

[edit] Youth and World War I participation

Martin Niemöller was born in Lippstadt on 14. January 1892 to the Lutheran pastor Heinrich Niemöller and his wife Paula née Müller and grew up in a very conservative parents' house.[4] In 1900 the family moved to Elberfeld where he also finished school with abitur exam in 1910. Following he targeted to a career as army officer at the Imperial Navy of the German Empire.

As of 1915 he belonged to the U-boat fleet in World War I: At first on the submarine "Thüringen", later in October of the same year as officer at the submarine mother ship "Vulkan", followed by a training on the submarine U-3. In February 1916 he became second officer at U-73 which was assigned to the Mediterranean Sea in April 1916.[9] There the submarine fought at the Saloniki front, patrolled at the Strait of Otranto and planted from December 1916 on mines in front of Port Said and was involved in commerce raiding. Flying a French flag as deception, the U-73 sailed past British warships, and torpedoed two Allied troopships and a British man-of-war.

In January 1917 Niemöller was coxswain at U-39, later he returned back to Kiel and in August 1917 he became first officer at U-151, which attacked at Gibraltar, in the Bay of Biscay and other places numerous ships. During this time the U-151 crew set a record by sinking 55,000 tons of Allied ships in 115 days at sea. In May 1918 he became commander of the UC-67. Under his command the UC-67 achieved a temporary closing of the French port of Marseilles by sinking ships in the area, by torpedoes and by the laying of mines.[9]

For his achievements, Niemöller was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. When the war drew to a close, he decided that he would become a preacher, a story he later recounted in his book Vom U-Boot zur Kanzel (From U-boat to Pulpit). At war's end, Niemöller resigned his commission as he refused the new democratic government of the German Empire after the resignation of the German Emperor William II.

[edit] Weimar Republic and education as pastor

On July 20, 1919 he married Else née Bremer (born July 20, 1890 - died August 7, 1961). The same year he began working at a farm in Wersen near Osnabrück but gave up becoming a farmer as he couldn't afford the money for his own farm and subsequently pursued his earlier idea becoming a Lutheran pastor and thus studied protestant theology in Münster from 1919 to 1923. His motivation was his ambition to give a disordered society meaning and order through the Gospel and church bodies.

During the Ruhraufstand in 1920 he was battalion commander of the "III. Bataillon der Akademischen Wehr Münster" belonging to the paramilitary Freikorps.[7]

Niemöller was ordained on June 29, 1924,[9] and was appointed curate of Münster's Church of the Redeemer. After serving as the superintendent of the Lutheran Inner Mission in Westphalia, Niemöller became pastor (in 1931) of the Jesus Christus Kirche (St. Anne's Church) in Dahlem, an affluent suburb of Berlin.[10]

[edit] Role in Nazi Germany

Niemöller's behaviour in this time is assessed critically and remains a continual subject of controversy. 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."[11]

Historians quote from one of Niemöller's sermons in 1935: "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!" [12] According to Holocaust scholar Robert Michael, Niemöller agreed with the Nazis' position on the Jewish question.[3] Michael notes:

"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."[13]

However, despite his remarks, Niemöller decidedly opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph. In 1936, he signed a petition of a group of Protestant churchmen which sharply criticized Nazi policies and declared the Aryan Paragraph incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity.[4] The Nazi regime reacted with mass arrests and charges against almost 800 pastors and ecclesiastical lawyers.[14] In 1933, Niemöller had founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organization of pastors to "combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background."[10] 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.[10] The famous author and Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann published Niemöller's sermons in the United States and praised his bravery.[4]

However, Niemöller's motives are disputed. According to the historian Raimund Lammersdorf, "Niemöller 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."[15] Niemöller's ambivalent and often contradictory behaviour during the time of Nazi Germany makes him one of the most controversial of all Protestant enemies of the Nazis and contrasts sharply with the much more broad-minded attitudes of other Confessing Church activists such as Hermann Maas. The pastor and liberal politician Maas - contrary to Niemöller - belonged to those who unequivocally opposed every form of antisemitism and was later accorded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.[16] Ironically, Maas has been mostly forgotten while Niemöller remains the one who is remembered as a symbol of resistance against Hitler by many.

[edit] Arrest and Imprisonment

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 Reichmarks and received a prison term of seven 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.[17] He was interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945.

After his former cell mate was released from Sachsenhausen to go to America, he wrote an article about Niemöller for The National Jewish Monthly.[2] The author reports that having asked Niemöller why he ever supported the Nazi Party, Niemöller replied:

"I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it is much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me. I had an audience with him, as a representative of the Protestant Church, shortly before he became Chancellor, in 1932. Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews, assuring me as follows: 'There will be restrictions against the Jews, but there will be no ghettos, no pogroms, in Germany'." "I really believed," Niemoeller continued, "given the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany, at that time--that Jews should avoid aspiring to Government positions or seats in the Reichstag. There were many Jews, especially among the Zionists, who took a similar stand. Hitler's assurance satisfied me at the time. On the other hand, I hated the growing atheistic movement, which was fostered and promoted by the Social Democrats and the Communists. Their hostility toward the Church made me pin my hopes on Hitler for a while. "I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me."

[edit] Release and post-War activities

He was released by the Allies in 1945. Raimund Lammersdorf argues that in this time aspects of his biography were played down when America needed a clean German hero.[15] He notes:

“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...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."[15]

But Niemöller himself never denied his own guilt in the time of the Nazi regime. In 1959, he was asked about his former attitude towards the Jews by Alfred Wiener, a Jewish researcher into racism and war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. In a letter to Wiener, Niemöller answered:

"I have never concealed the fact... that I came from an anti-Semitic past and tradition... I ask only that you look at my life historically and take it as history. I believe that from 1933 I truly represented the Lutheran-Christian outlook on the Jewish question - as I revealed before the court - but that I returned home after eight years' imprisonment as a completely different person."[7]

After his release in 1945, Niemöller was president of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau from 1947 to 1961. He was one of the initiators of 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.[18]

Under the impact of a meeting with Otto Hahn (who has been called the "father of nuclear chemistry") in July 1954, Niemöller became an ardent pacifist and campaigner for nuclear disarmament. He was soon a leading figure of the post-war German peace movement and was even brought to court in 1959 because he had spoken about the military in a very unflattering way.[19] His visit to North Vietnam's communist ruler Ho Chi Minh at the height of the Vietnam War caused an uproar.[7] Niemöller also took active part in protests against the Vietnam War and the NATO Double-Track Decision.[20]

In 1961, he became president of the World Council of Churches.[10]

He died at Wiesbaden in 1984.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "Niemöller, (Friedrich Gustav Emil) Martin" The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993), 8:698.
  2. ^ a b Stein, Leo (May 1941). NIEMOELLER speaks! An Exclusive Report By One Who Lived 22 Months In Prison With The Famous German Pastor Who Defied Adolf Hitler 284-5, 301-2. The National Jewish Monthly.
  3. ^ a b Robert Michael, Theological Myth, German Antisemitism, and the Holocaust: The Case of Martin Niemoeller, Holocaust Genocide Studies.1987; 2: 105-122.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Martin Stöhr, „…habe ich geschwiegen“. Zur Frage eines Antisemitismus bei Martin Niemöller, http://www.lomdim.de/md2006/05/04.html
  5. ^ Dynamite - TIME
  6. ^ F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 975 sub loco and [1].
  7. ^ a b c d e f Spartacus Educational website by John Simkin
  8. ^ Devi Prasad, War is a Crime against Humanity: the Story of War Resisters' International, London: War Resisters' International, 2005
  9. ^ a b c Current Biography 1943, pg.555
  10. ^ a b c d "Niemöller," 8:698.
  11. ^ Correspondence about Niemöller’s Antisemitism
  12. ^ The text of this sermon, in English, is found in Martin Niemöller, First Commandment, London, 1937, pp. 243-250.
  13. ^ Robert Michael, "Christian Theological Antisemitism", H-Antisemitism, May 6, 1997.
  14. ^ Deutsches Historisches Museum, http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/nazi/innenpolitik/bekennende/index.html
  15. ^ a b c Raimund Lammersdorf, "The Question of Guilt", 1945-47: German and American Answers, Conference at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., March 25-27, 1999.
  16. ^ Yad Vashem: "Hermann Maas"
  17. ^ The rise and fall of the Third Reich - A history of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer
  18. ^ The Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt Harold Marcuse (Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara), introduction to and translation of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, accessed July 30, 2006.
  19. ^ WDR online:"Soldaten sind Mörder!"
  20. ^ Chronological timeline of Niemöller's life

[edit] External links

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