[Peace-discuss] Martin Niemoller's "poem"
Morton K. Brussel
brussel4 at insightbb.com
Tue Oct 25 11:10:01 CDT 2005
Interesting (hi)story—which I assume is true—, and relevant today.
"Revcom.us" represents the Revolutionary Communist Party.
--mkb
Martin Niemoller and the Lessons for this Moment
by Toby O'Ryan
Revolution #020, October 30, 2005, posted at revcom.us
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't a Communist.
"Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't
a Jew.
"Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a trade unionist.
"Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I
was a Protestant.
"Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
Regular readers of this paper, and many more besides, are familiar
with this little poem. The author was Martin Niemöller, a German
pastor imprisoned by Hitler from 1937 to 1945. But how did Niemöller
"become" Niemöller?When did he make this famous remark? And what
became of him? The story of Martin Niemöller is itself fascinating
and sheds more light on the meaning of the poem--then and now.
"From U-Boat to Pulpit"
Niemöller first came to German public awareness in 1933 with his book
From U-Boat to Pulpit, outlining his journey from a U-Boat commander
in World War 1 to a pastor in a Protestant church. But his was no
tale of a warrior-turned-pacifist--Niemöller maintained pride not
only in his U-Boat career, but also his post-war activity in the
Freikorps, a group of counter-revolutionary veterans which did battle
with the revolutionary workers' movement in post World War 1 Germany.
Not for nothing, as they say, was his book praised in the Nazi press,
and it went on to become a bestseller in the early days of Nazi rule.
Indeed, Niemöller celebrated the Nazi assumption of power in the
conclusion to his book for bringing about a "national revival."
Niemöller was hardly unique in this--according to William Shirer's
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, most Protestant clergy welcomed
the "advent" of Hitler. But in 1934 Hitler attempted to forcefully
bring the many Protestant sects into one "Reich Church" and to
somewhat transform their ideology along Nazi lines. Niemöller led the
Confessing, or Confessional, Church, and he opposed this move against
its autonomy; in May 1934 the Confessional Church declared itself to
be the legitimate Protestant Church of Germany, effectively in
opposition to Hitler's bid for religious hegemony. Several years of
skirmishes alternating with uneasy truces ensued, with the level of
friction steadily escalating, but most of this friction focused on
Hitler's moves against the church. For instance, Niemöller opposed
Hitler's measures forbidding converted Jews from being ministers in
Protestant churches, and the later Nazi mandates confining such
converts to segregated worship, away from ethnically German
Protestants; but the larger measures against the Jews--and others--
went unopposed.
Even as Niemöller came increasingly into conflict with the Nazis, he
carefully kept within certain bounds. He even attempted to out-do the
Nazis in patriotism at one point, and at other times claimed to
friends that Hitler was an intelligent man, surrounded by fools and
charlatans. And when Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant theologian and
fellow minister in the Confessional Church, demanded that Christians
not just help the Jews but take direct action against their
persecution, Niemöller himself opposed Bonhoeffer. He told Bonhoeffer
that before standing up for others, the Church must first secure its
own safety.
In the end, none of this did Niemöller or the Confessing Church any
good. In May of 1936, when the Confessional Church dissented from
elements of the government's anti-Semitism and again demanded an end
to its interference in church affairs, the Nazis arrested hundreds of
pastors, murdering one of the most prominent, and confiscated church
funds. Then on July 1, 1937, Niemöller himself--the former U-Boat
commander, the bestselling author, the famous minister to a wealthy
congregation and one-time darling of the Nazi press--was arrested for
treason. He spent the next eight years in prison and, later,
concentration camps, including four years in solitary confinement.
But by 1937 Niemöller and the pastors arrested with him were
essentially alone--the vast majority of the Protestant Church had
already bent to the government's will. And even the Confessional
Church itself came around after Niemöller's imprisonment, voting in
1937 to begin closer cooperation with the state church and thanking
the government for its revitalization of German life! Niemöller, for
his part, only gained his release upon Germany's loss in the war in
1945.
"What Would Have Happened?"
In January 1946, representatives of the Confessional Church met in
Frankfurt to discuss reconstitution. Niemöller again mounted the
pulpit to give a sermon, this time of a most different character. He
spoke first of the rationalizations that he, and by implication,
others had had for not stepping forward. Yes, Hitler went after the
communists, but weren't they after all atheists and revolutionaries?
And yes, he went after the disabled and the sick, but weren't they
really a burden? And the Jews, yes, Hitler came for the Jews, and
that was deplorable, but the Jews were not Christian, were they? And
the Occupied Countries, it was a shame, but still, that was not
Germany, was it?
None of the rationalizations would do, he insisted.
"We can talk ourselves out of [our need for atonement] with the
excuse that ‘it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out',"
Niemöller said.
"We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt or
fault and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if
in the year 1933 or 1934, 14,000 Protestant pastors and all
Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their
deaths? If we had said back then, "It is not right when Hermann
Göring simply puts 100,000 communists in concentration camps in order
to let them die." I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000
Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can
also imagine we would have rescued 30 to 40 million people, because
that is what it [cost us.]"
Niemöller, with the vantage point of hindsight and with the task of
actually getting his countrymen to face their responsibility, put it
starkly. It is important for every single progressive person in the
U.S. to think about this little-known remark of Niemöller--and think
hard about it.
After the War
Oddly enough, Martin Niemöller never wrote down the exact poem for
which he became famous. He would speak all over after the war,
usually along the lines quoted above, and his poem more or less took
shape in the course of his speeches. The version given here is the
one that was officially "approved" by his widow. Unfortunately, the
"oral tradition" character of the poem has allowed all kinds of
forces to play fast and loose with it--including, to take but one
significant example, the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which eliminated the
whole first sentence about communists in its posting of the poem.
This effectively guts Niemöller's meaning and also clearly does
violence to his intent, as he almost always began with the communists
in his speeches. Besides, the whole thing makes no sense if you cut
out the communists who were, after all, the first to be put into the
camps! This outrageous rewriting of history, however, apparently
poses no problem and raises no fuss if it furthers the political
agenda of U.S. imperialism.
Niemöller himself did not stop changing. The one-time U-Boat
commander became a passionate opponent of imperialist war generally
and especially the post-World War 2 nuclear arms races. In 1965, he
visited North Vietnam while it was under U.S. bombardment, and he met
with Ho Chi Minh; the fact that Niemöller was president of the World
Council of Churches at the time, coupled with his great moral
authority, caused no small chagrin to the U.S. government. On his
90th birthday, Niemöller discussed his evolution from an arch-
reactionary to what he himself called "a revolutionary," and
ironically remarked that if he lived to be 100 he would probably
become an anarchist.
And today, Niemöller--has your time come again?
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