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Martin Niemöller was born in Lippstadt, North Rhine-Westphalia, on 14 January 1892 to the Lutheran pastor Heinrich Niemöller and his wife Pauline in the house shown here. He grew up in a very conservative home.
He began a career as a naval officer and in 1915 was assigned to U-boats. His submarine fought on the Saloniki front, patrolled in the Strait of Otranto and from December 1916 onward planted mines in front of Port Said and was involved in commerce raiding. Flying a French flag as a ruse of war, the SM U-73 sailed past British warships and torpedoed two Allied troopships and a British man-of-war.
In January 1917 Niemöller was coxswain of SM U-39. Later he returned to Kiel, and in August 1917 he became first officer on SM U-151, which attacked numerous ships at Gibraltar, in the Bay of Biscay, and other places. During this time the SM 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 SM UC-67. Under his command, SM 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.
Niemöller was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. When the war ended , he decided to become a preacher, a story he told in his book Vom U-Boot zur Kanzel (From U-boat to Pulpit). At war's end, Niemöller resigned his commission, as he rejected the new democratic government of the German Empire that formed after the resignation of the German Emperor William II.
Niemöller was ordained on June 29, 1924, Niemöller was a national conservative, and openly supported the right-wing opponents of the Weimar Republic. He welcomed Hitler's accession to power in 1933, believing it would bring a national revival. However, he decidedly opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph. In 1936, he signed the petition of a group of Protestant churchmen that sharply criticized Nazi policies and declared the Aryan Paragraph incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity.
The Nazi regime reacted with mass arrests and charges against almost 800 pastors and ecclesiastical lawyers. In 1933, Niemöller founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organization of pastors to "combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background." By the autumn of 1934, Niemöller joined other Lutheran and Protestant churchmen such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in founding the Confessional Church, a Protestant group that opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches.
Niemöller only gradually abandoned his national conservative views and even made pejorative remarks about Jews of faith while protecting—in his own church—baptised Christians, persecuted as Jews by the Nazis, due to their or their forefathers' Jewish descent. In one sermon in 1935, he remarked: "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!
Arrested on 1 July 1937, Niemöller was brought to a "Special Court" on 2 March 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—presumably because Rudolf Hess found the sentence too lenient and decided to take "merciless action" against him. He was interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. In late April 1945 he was transferred to Tyrol together with about 140 other prominent inmates, where the SS left the prisoners behind. He was liberated by the Fifth U.S. Army on May 5, 1945.
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"First They Came For ... " Poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller. - THEN and NOW - . I did NOT speak up.by tarfin13,052 views
Martin's sage words is a warning to all!!
merseywhogirl 7 months ago
Thanks for this video! It's interesting to learn the background of the man who made that often-quoted comment.
Bobchai 7 months ago