History Repeats Itself
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Quotation from the Rev. Martin Niemöller |
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German Translation |
English translation: |
| Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja
kein Kommunist.
Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.
Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.
Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.
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When the Nazis arrested the Communists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist.
When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Social Democrat.
When they arrested the trade unionists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a trade unionist.
When they arrested the Jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Jew.
When they arrested me, there was no longer
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Als sie die Juden holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Jude.
anyone who could protest.Martin Niemoller was an outspoken advocate for accepting the burden of collective guilt for WW II as a means of atonement for the suffering that the German nation (through the Nazis) had caused before and during WW II.Something is missed if one doesn’t understand that the words come from a man who also declared that he “would rather burn his church to the ground, than to preach the Nazi trinity of ‘race, blood, and soil.’”Martin Niemöller had been a World War I hero as a German naval lieutenant and U-boat commander. He was ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1924.
And he supported Hitler prior to his taking power. Indeed, initially the Nazi press held him up as a model… for his service in WW I. [Newsweek, July 10, 1937, pg 32] But Niemoller broke very early with the Nazis. In 1933, he organized the Pastor’s Emergency League to protect Lutheran pastors from the police. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, author of The Cost of Discipleship, came into contact with Niemöller when he joined the “Pastor’s Emergency League.” In 1934, he was one of the leading organizers at the Barmen Synod, which From 1933 to 1937, Niemoller consistently trashed everything the Nazis stood for. At one point he declared that it was impossible to “point to the German [Luther] without pointing to the Jew [Christ] to which he pointed to.” [from Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict] He rejected the Nazi distortion of “Positive Christianity” (postulating the ‘special virtue’ of the German people), as opposed to “Negative Christianity” which held that all people regardless of race were guilty of sin and in need of repentance. An excerpt from a sermon of his printed in TIME Magazine [Feb 21, 1928, pg 25-27]: “I cannot help saying quite harshly and bluntly that the Jewish people came to grief and disgrace because of its own ‘Positive Christianity!’ It [the Jewish people] bears a curse throughout the history of the world because it was ready to approve of its Messiah just as long and as far as it thought it could gain some advantage for its own plans and its own aims for Him, His words and His deeds. It bears a curse, because it rejected Him and resisted Him to the death when it became clear that Jesus of Nazareth would not cease calling [the Jews] to repentance and faith, despite their insistence that they were free, strong and proud men and belonged to a pure-blooded, race-conscious nation! “‘Positive Christianity,’ which the Jewish people wanted, clashed with ‘Negative Christianity’ as Jesus himself represented it!… Friends, can we risk going with our nation without forgiveness of sins, without that so-called ‘Negative Christianity’ which, when all is said and done, clings in repentance and faith to Jesus as the Savior of sinners? I cannot and you cannot and our nation cannot! ‘Come let us return to the Lord!’” And in a celebrated manifesto, produced and smuggled out of the country in classic Charter-77 style, and reprinted in the foreign press just prior to the 1936 Olympics, he along with 9 other pastors wrote to Hitler:
In The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer describes the spiritual pattern that led to the mass slaughter of human beings. In the chapter entitled “The Persecution of the Christian Churches,” Shirer points to a sterilization law passed in 1933 as the event which began the persecution of Christians and Jews throughout Germany. “On July 25 [1933], … the German government promulgated a sterilization law, which particularly offended the Catholic Church. Five days later the first steps were taken to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. During the next years, thousands of Catholic priests, nuns and lay leaders were arrested, many of them on trumped up charges of ‘immorality’ or of ‘smuggling foreign currency.'” Abortion was also made legal during this time. This was the spiritual impetus which brought a revival of human sacrifices being offered to ancient pagan deities – complete with Nazi rituals – to the forefront. The Holocaust was preceded by vast pageants which Hitler used to promote neo-Paganism. Among the various sects of Protestants (most of which had adopted liberal theology and had apostatized in the late 1800s), a new “German Church” was instituted: “Dr. Reinholdt Krause, the Berlin district leader of the sect, proposed the abandonment of the Old Testament, ‘with its tales of cattle merchants and pimps’ and the revision of the New Testament with the teaching of Jesus corresponding entirely with the demands of National Socialism. Resolutions were drawn up demanding ‘One People, One Reich, One Faith,’ requiring all pastors to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler and insisting that all churches institute the Aryan paragraph and exclude converted Jews.” Pastors who resisted the neo-Pagan religion of the Nazis were jailed. Many were eventually led to the gas ovens of the concentration camps. Millions of Jews and Christians were executed. The sad state of the liberal Protestant churches led Germany to this holocaust. Although there were enough evangelical Christian leaders strategically positioned throughout Germany in the 1930s to resist Hitler; only a few stood against him. “Not many Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few thousand pastors and priests or over the quarreling of Protestant sects. And even fewer paused to reflect that under the leadership of Rosenberg, Borman and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of the men closest to Hitler, said in 1941, ‘National Socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.'” As the methods of oppression by the Nazis grew worse, the resistance movement justified previously unimagined types of disobedience. For Niemöller and the resistance, the plan to assassinate a tyrant was a matter of obedience to God. They reasoned that Hitler was anti-Christ, therefore they decided to join the underground plan to eliminate him. Niemöller remained a key figure in the resistance movement until his arrest and imprisonment. In 1937, Niemöller preached his last sermon in the Third Reich knowing that he was soon to be arrested: “We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of authorities than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.” Rev. Martin Niemoller was protected until 1937 by both the foreign press and influential friends in the up-scale Berlin suburb where he preached. Eventually, he was arrested for treason. Perhaps due to foreign pressure, he was found guilty, but initially given only a suspended sentence. Almost immediately he was re-arrested under direct orders from Hitler, he was imprisoned. From After the war, Niemoller emerged from prison to preach the words that began this post, that all of us know… He was instrumental in producing the “Stuttgart Confession of Guilt”, in which the German Protestant churches formally accepted guilt for their complicity in allowing the suffering which Hitler’s reign caused to occur. In 1961, he was elected as one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches, the ecumenical body of the Protestant faiths.
Niemoller emerged also as an adamant pacifist and advocate of reconciliation. He actively sought out contacts in Eastern Europe, and traveled to Moscow in 1952 and North Vietnam in 1967. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967, and the West German Grand Cross of Merit in 1971. Martin Niemoller died in Wiesbaden, West Germany on Mar 6, 1984, at the age of 92. [from the Encyclopedia Britannica]. Niemöller did much more than speak out, however, as did his friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As a consequence, Bonhoeffer lost his life and Niemöller lost eight years of his freedom. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall the Third Reich (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1960) p.234-239. Christian History, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” Issue 32 (Vol. X, No.4), p.20. |
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pastor and Theologian
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“Our people are trying to break the bond set by God. That is human conceit rising against God. In this connection we must warn the Führer, that the adoration frequently bestowed on him is only due to God. Some years ago the Führer objected to having his picture placed on Protestant altars. Today his thoughts are used as a basis not only for political decisions but also for morality and law. He himself is surrounded with the dignity of a priest and even of an intermediary between God and man… “We ask that liberty be given to our people to go their way in the future under the sign of the Cross of Christ, in order that our grandsons may not curse their elders on the ground that their elders left them a state on earth that closed to them the Kingdom of God.” [from TIME Magazine July 27, 1936]
then on until the end of WW II, he was held at the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Near the end of the war, he narrowly escaped execution. He emerged from his years of detention as a towering symbol of the Church’s
Born: February 4, 1906, Wrocław, Poland