"First they came…" is a famous statement attributed to pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group. The text of the quotation is usually presented roughly as follows:
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
There is some disagreement over the exact wording of the quotation and when it was created; indeed, the content of the quotation may have been presented differently by Niemöller on different occasions.[1]
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Martin Niemöller was a German pastor and theologian born in Lippstadt, Germany, in 1892. Niemöller was an anti-Communist and supported Hitler's rise to power at first. But when Hitler insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion, Niemöller became disillusioned. He became the leader of a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler. Unlike Niemöller, they gave in to the Nazis' threats. In 1937 he was arrested and eventually confined in Sachsenhausen and Dachau. His crime was "not being enthusiastic enough about the Nazi movement." Niemöller was released in 1945 by the Allies. 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. His statement, sometimes presented as a poem, is well-known, frequently quoted, and is a popular model for describing the dangers of political apathy, as it often begins with specific and targeted fear and hatred which soon escalates out of control.
The statement was published in a 1955 book by Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, based on interviews he had conducted in Germany several years earlier. The quotation was circulated by civil rights activists and educators in the United States in the late 1950s. Its exact origin is unclear, and at least one historian has suggested that the text arose after Niemöller's death.[2] Other research traces the text to several speeches given by Niemöller in 1946.[1]
Nonetheless, the wording remains controversial, both in terms of its provenance, and the substance and order of the groups that are mentioned in its many versions. While Niemöller's published 1946 speeches mention Communists, the incurably ill, Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses (depending on which speech), and people in occupied countries, the 1955 text, a paraphrase by a German professor in an interview, lists Communists, Socialists, "the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on," and ends with "the Church". Based on the explanation given by Niemöller himself in 1976, this refers to the German Protestant ('Evangelische') Church, and not to the German Catholic Church.[1] However, as claimed by Richard John Neuhaus in the November 2001 issue of his blog-like online journal 'First Things', when "asked in 1971 about the correct version of the quote, Niemöller said he was not quite sure when he had said the famous words but, if people insist upon citing them, he preferred a version that listed 'the Communists', 'the trade unionists', 'the Jews', and 'me'."[3] However, historian Harold Marcuse could not verify that interview.[1] Rather, he found a 1976 interview in which Niemöller referred to a 1974 discussion with the general bishop of the Lutheran Church of Slovakia. The 84-year-old Niemöller recalled in 1976:
There were no minutes or copy of what I said, and it may be that I formulated it differently. But the idea was anyhow: The communists, we still let that happen calmly; and the trade unions, we also let that happen; and we even let the Social Democrats happen. All of that was not our affair. The Church did not concern itself with politics at all at that time, and it shouldn't have anything do with them either. In the Confessing Church we didn't want to represent any political resistance per se, but we wanted to determine for the Church that that was not right, and that it should not become right in the Church, that's why already in '33, when we created the minister emergency federation (Pfarrernotbund), we put as the 4th point in the founding charter: If an offensive is made against ministers and they are simply ousted as ministers, because they are of Jewish lineage (Judenstämmlinge) or something like that, then we can only say as a Church: No. And that was then the 4th point in the obligation, and that was probably the first anti-antisemitic pronouncement coming from the Protestant Church.
At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, the quotation is on display in a variation that substitutes "Socialists" for "Communists." The Holocaust Museum website has a discussion of the history of the quotation.[4]
A version of the statement is also on display at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel, as well as the Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond, Virginia.