Martin Niemöller: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · From U-boat to Pulpit

A naval officer who could not serve a republic

1892 – 1931 · Lippstadt · The North Sea · Münster · Berlin

Martin Niemöller was born in 1892 in Westphalia, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He went into the Imperial Navy, served in submarines through the First World War and ended it in command of one. He was proud of it, and thirty years later he still was: his memoir, published in 1934, was called From U-boat to Pulpit and it sold extremely well in Nazi Germany, which is a fact worth sitting with.

After the defeat he refused to serve the new Republic. He worked briefly on the land, took part in the Freikorps activity of the immediate post-war years, and then trained for the ministry like his father. He was ordained in 1924 and became pastor of the wealthy Berlin suburb of Dahlem in 1931.

His politics in these years were entirely conventional for a Protestant pastor of his background: nationalist, anti-republican, contemptuous of the Weimar settlement, and antisemitic in the ordinary, respectable way that a great many educated German Christians were. He said later, without qualification, that he had voted for the Nazis.

None of that is a smear. It is the point of the whole life. Everything he is remembered for begins from a man who wanted what the regime was offering.

Why this matters

Niemöller's opposition is only intelligible if you begin where he began, which is as a supporter.

A U-boat commander in a pulpit who voted for the party. What would you ask him?

Ask Niemöller

• “What did you want for Germany when you came home from the submarines?”
• “Why could you not bring yourself to serve the Weimar Republic?”
• “You voted for the Nazis. What did you think you were voting for?”
• “Why did a book about your naval service sell so well after 1933?”
• “What did your congregation at Dahlem expect from their pastor?”

Chapter 2 · The Line He Would Not Cross

Not the Jews of Germany — the Jews inside his church

1933 – 1934 · Berlin · Barmen

The break came in 1933 and it came over a narrow question. The regime's supporters inside the Protestant church, the German Christians, wanted to apply the Aryan Paragraph to the clergy: pastors of Jewish descent, converts and their children, would be removed from their posts.

Niemöller organised against it. He founded the Pastors' Emergency League in the autumn of 1933, which within months had thousands of members, and out of that came the Confessing Church and the Barmen Declaration of 1934 — a statement that the church owes obedience to Christ and not to the state, drafted principally by Karl Barth.

What he was defending was the independence of the church, and specifically the church's right to decide who its own ministers were. He was not, in 1933, defending German Jews. He said so afterwards with a bluntness few people manage about themselves: the objection was to the state reaching inside the church, and the fate of Jews outside it did not move him as it should have.

That distinction is the reason the later confession exists. He had drawn a line, and he had drawn it in the wrong place, and he knew it for the remaining fifty years of his life.

Why this matters

The church struggle was mostly a fight about the church's autonomy rather than about the regime's victims, and Niemöller was the first to say so.

A line drawn in the wrong place. What would you put to him?

Ask Niemöller

• “Why was the Aryan Paragraph the thing that finally moved you?”
• “What did the Barmen Declaration actually commit its signatories to?”
• “Did you consider defending Jews outside the church in 1933?”
• “How many pastors joined you, and how many stayed with the German Christians?”
• “Was defending the church's independence enough to count as opposing the regime?”

Chapter 3 · The Führer's Personal Prisoner

Acquitted in court, and taken from the courtroom

1937 – 1945 · Berlin · Sachsenhausen · Dachau

Niemöller was arrested on 1 July 1937 after months of sermons the authorities had recorded. He was tried in 1938 for activities against the state. The court fined him and sentenced him to a period of imprisonment he had already served, which amounted to release.

He was released from the courtroom and re-arrested at the door, on Hitler's personal order, and taken into what the regime called protective custody: Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and from 1941 Dachau. He was held for seven years without further trial, in a special compound with a handful of other prominent prisoners, in conditions considerably better than those of the camps around him — a distinction he was careful about afterwards, because he had seen what the ordinary prisoners endured and he had not endured it.

He remained a nationalist for much of that time. In 1939 he wrote from the camp offering to serve in the navy again, and the offer was refused. It is one of the strangest documents of the church struggle and it is entirely characteristic: he had never stopped being a German patriot and had never assumed that opposing the regime meant opposing the war.

In the last weeks he was moved south with other special prisoners and was liberated in Italy in the spring of 1945.

Why this matters

Being acquitted and imprisoned anyway is the clearest single illustration of what a police state does with courts.

Acquitted, and arrested at the courtroom door. What would you ask him about those seven years?

Ask Niemöller

• “What did it mean that a court acquitted you and you were imprisoned anyway?”
• “Why did you offer to serve in the navy again in 1939?”
• “How different were your conditions from those of the other prisoners?”
• “Did seven years change what you believed, or only what you knew?”
• “Who else was held with you, and what did you talk about?”

Chapter 4 · The Confession, and the Sentence Nobody Can Date

Stuttgart, and the words that got away from him

1945 – 1960s · Stuttgart · Germany · The United States

In October 1945, five months after liberation, Niemöller helped draft the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, in which the German Protestant church admitted its share of responsibility. It was fiercely resented in Germany. Many Germans in 1945 considered themselves the injured party and did not want a confession made on their behalf.

He spent the following years lecturing, in Germany and abroad, about what the churches had failed to do. Out of those lectures came the passage everybody knows: the one that begins with the regime coming for one group, and then another, and ends with there being nobody left to speak for the speaker.

It is worth being exact about it, because almost nobody is. Niemöller never published it as a fixed text. He said versions of it in speeches over many years, and the groups named change from version to version — communists, socialists, trade unionists, the sick, the Jews — depending on the audience and the year. There is no original. The versions carved on memorials are later editors' choices, and some of them alter what he actually tended to say.

The historical value of the passage is not as a quotation. It is as a confession: the man saying it had voted for the party, had defended his own institution and not its victims, and was describing his own sequence of failures rather than somebody else's.

Why this matters

The most quoted sentence about the Nazi period has no authoritative text, and knowing that is part of using it honestly.

A confession that escaped its author. What would you ask him?

Ask Niemöller

• “Why was the Stuttgart Declaration so unpopular in Germany in 1945?”
• “Did you mean the famous passage as a confession about yourself?”
• “Does it matter that the words exist in so many different versions?”
• “Which group should have come first in that sequence?”
• “What did the churches actually owe the people they did not defend?”

Chapter 5 · The Long Afterwards

A nationalist who ended as a pacifist

1947 – 1984 · Hesse · Geneva · Moscow

Niemöller lived until 1984 and spent nearly forty years arguing. He became church president in Hesse and Nassau, then a president of the World Council of Churches. He campaigned against West German rearmament, against nuclear weapons, and for reconciliation with the Soviet Union and eastern Europe at a time when that made him deeply unpopular at home. He visited Moscow, he visited North Vietnam, and he was denounced for both.

The transformation is genuine and it is not the tidy one it looks. The man who had been a submarine commander and had offered to serve again in 1939 ended as an absolute pacifist, and he arrived there by way of the camps and the confession rather than by way of an argument.

He was also unsparing about his earlier self. He said publicly that he had been an antisemite, that the church struggle had been about the church rather than about the regime's victims, and that his record before 1937 was not one to be proud of. Very few public figures of that generation said any of that.

He is worth studying for the shape of the whole life rather than for any part of it. It is the best-documented case in the period of somebody who supported a regime, opposed one part of it for a limited reason, paid heavily, and then spent decades working out what he should have done instead.

Why this matters

The full arc — supporter, partial opponent, prisoner, confessor, pacifist — is more instructive than any single moment in it.

Forty years of arguing after seven in the camps. What would you ask him?

Ask Niemöller

• “How does a submarine commander end up an absolute pacifist?”
• “Why campaign for reconciliation with the Soviet Union when it cost you support?”
• “You called yourself an antisemite. Why say it in public?”
• “What should the Confessing Church have done that it did not?”
• “Is a late confession worth anything to the people it is about?”

What Niemöller changed

Niemöller's importance is not that he resisted, because his resistance was late, narrow and about his own institution. It is that he said so afterwards, in public, for forty years, and gave the twentieth century its most-quoted account of how a person watches a state come for one group after another and says nothing until it reaches them. That the account is his own record rather than an observation about others is the part most often missed.

A debate that continues

Was the Confessing Church a resistance movement or an institution defending its own privileges? Niemöller himself argued the second, and historians remain divided about how much credit the church struggle deserves.

Keep exploring — ask Niemöller

• “Does opposing one policy of a regime count as opposing the regime?”
• “How should a quotation with no authoritative text be used?”
• “What does an institution owe to people who are not its members?”

Related lives

• Sophie Scholl — Twenty-One, And She Went Anyway
• Gustav Stresemann — The Republic's Best Servant, And No Republican
• Desmond Tutu — Voice of the Rainbow Nation

Related themes

The churches under Nazi rule · Opposition and its limits · Collective guilt after 1945