The Christian & the Nazi

a legend from  the editor

&

poem after the confession of  Martin Niemöller

A Jew in Nazi Germany went to a Christian minister and asked him to help save his children.

And the minister told him to be nice to people and that then everything would work out best.   And the Jew followed his advice.   And the result was of course that his children were taken and exterminated.

And the minister lived happily ever after, knowing that he had always done the best job as a Christian minister.   [a legend of that day & of today’s America; more to come on this ]

Martin Niemöller was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor during the middle of the 20th century.   He was at first a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

In the late 1930s though, he began to oppose the actions and policies of the Nazis.   For this, he was arrested and, from 1938 to 1945, was imprisoned in the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen and Dachau, where he barely escaped being put to death.   He was one of the prisoners liberated from Dachau in late April 1945.

Niemöller was one of the initiators, in October 1945, of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt—a confession made by the church for not having more strongly opposed the Nazis.   In numerous speeches in the late ’40s and throughout the rest of his life, he confessed about the kinds of attitudes and the mindset that led to this behavior.   It came to be expressed in a famous poem that is memorialized in many places around the world, including at several Holocaust museums and memorials around the US and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.:

They came first 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.

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