A Brief History of the Third Reich by Martyn Whittock

Author:Martyn Whittock
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781849018166
Publisher: Constable & Robinson
Published: 2011-12-23T21:00:00+00:00

13

THE NAZI IMPACT ON SOCIETY: THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out.

In this way, on 6 January 1946, Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) looked back on his experience of the Third Reich. There are several versions of this famous statement but this is perhaps the best known and, evidence suggests, the original version.

Niemöller served in the German navy during the First World War and eventually rose to be the commander of the submarine U-67. In this position he won the coveted Iron Cross First Class and, at the end of the war, resigned his commission since he refused to serve under the republican government of Weimar. After studying theology he was ordained in 1924 and became a pastor in the Protestant Lutheran Church. As a keen nationalist, Niemöller was a member of the Freikorps units (see Chapter 1) even while he was studying theology. By 1931, Niemöller had become the pastor of a large church in Dahlem, which was a well-to-do suburb of Berlin.

Along with many other Germans, he looked back with nostalgia to the Germany of the Kaiser, opposed the Weimar Republic and was sympathetic to the rising Nazi movement. As an anti-communist he hoped that the Nazis, under Hitler, would promote unity and a national revival. However, this support rapidly turned to disillusionment. He opposed the so-called ‘Aryan paragraph’, which the Nazis introduced into numerous laws, because he asserted that banning Jews from membership of groups, or employment, clashed with Christian principles. However, Niemöller’s defence of Jewish converts to Christianity did not at first lead him to a thorough defence of Jews. In 1935, he repeated the belief – current amongst many Church writers since the Middle Ages – that the Jews were under the punishment of God for the crucifixion of Jesus. That (in effect) this medieval charge of ‘Christ-killers’ should be voiced by as prominent an opponent of Hitler as Niemöller is an indication of how deeply this antipathy towards Jews ran in many mainstream European churches and reminds us why many regard Niemöller as representing the flawed nature of much of the German opposition to Nazism. In short – whilst protesting at Nazi brutality – many in opposition had an alarming degree of sympathy towards some features of the Nazi worldview. This is not surprising since it was rooted in many attitudes and values of traditional German society (and these strands of thought were not limited to Germany). Revealingly, when Niemöller met Hitler, in 1932, he had been consoled by the promise that there would be no anti-Semitic pogroms, or ghettos, in Germany – only legal restrictions regarding the Jews.

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