|
Quotation from the Rev. Martin Niemöller |
|
|
German Translation |
English translation: |
|
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.
|
When the Nazis arrested the
Communists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist.
|
| 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 produced the theological basis for the Confessing Church, of about 3,000 pastors, which despite its persecution became an enduring symbol of German resistance to Hitler. 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: “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] 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 fri 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.
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. |
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pastor and Theologian
His works in print (paperback) include the following:
Some of his later writings insist that many Christians do not take seriously enough the existence and power of evil. Because of this and other statements of his, some theological advocates of "secularist Christianity" in the 1960's attempted to claim him as their own. In my judgment, a study of his writings (even his later writings) as a whole does not support this claim. However, it is true that he never had a chance to edit his prison letters and papers, or put them into context, and accordingly it is not surprising that they contain some statements that baffle the reader. The following hymn was written by him in the concentration camp, shortly before his death. By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered, and confidently waiting come what may, we know that God is with us night and morning, and never fails to greet us each new day. Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented, still evil days bring burdens hard to bear; Oh, give our frightened souls the sure salvation for which, O Lord, You taught us to prepare. And when this cup You give is filled to brimming with bitter suffering, hard to understand, we take it thankfully and without trembling, out of so good and so beloved a hand. Yet when again in this same world You give us the joy we had, the brightness of Your Sun, we shall remember all the days we lived through, and our whole life shall then be Yours alone. This hymn appears in the 1982 Episcopal Hymnal (695). The translator is F. Pratt Green (1903- ) listed in hymnal indexes sometimes under Green and sometimes under Pratt Green. The translation copyright is Hope Publishing Company 1974. The hymn appears as 637 in the current Finnish Hymnal, translated by Anna-Maija Raittila, and beginning "Hyvyyden voiman ihmeelliseen suojaan". Church Leaders Remember Dietrich Bonhoeffer (ENI) Fifty years after the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the age of 39 on April 9, 1945, at the hands of one of Hitler's special commandos in the concentration camp of Flossenbuerg, church leaders have paid tribute to the German Lutheran theologian who joined the political opposition to Hitler. At a recent memorial service in Flossenbuerg, Klaus Engelhardt, the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), described how Bonhoeffer refused to be placed on the prayer list of the Confessing Church after his imprisonment in 1943. "Bonhoeffer believed that only those who were imprisoned because of their proclamation or actions in the service of the church belonged on the prayer list, but not those imprisoned as political conspirators," he said. Engelhardt asserted that the church today should think again about how it supports those who exercise their resistance to injustice through political means. "Is our Protestant church not in the position and not prepared to support or pray for those who take the path of political resistance to inhumanity or the perversion of law and order?" he asked. "They are among those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and whom Jesus praises in the beatitudes." Prayers (traditional language)
Prayer (contemporary language)
Psalm 119:89-96 |
 |
ends
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. Almsot immediately he was
re-arrested under direct orders from Hitler, he was imprisoned. From
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
struggle. In his travels to America, he addressed over two hundred
audiences, sometimes with the concluding words above that have become
famous. 
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].