Waukegan Talk

Quote:I pasted some choice excerpts of the good pastor's bio from wikipedia. Turns out, he was for the Nazis before he was against them. It took imprisonment for him to reach his epiphany.

[edit] Youth and World War I participation
Martin Niemöller was born in Lippstadt, North Rhine-Westphalia, on 14 January 1892 to the Lutheran pastor Heinrich Niemöller and his wife Paula née Müller, and grew up in a very conservative home.[3] In 1900 the family moved to Elberfeld where he finished school, taking his abitur exam in 1910.

He began a career as an officer of the Imperial Navy of the German Empire, and in 1915 was assigned to U-boats. His first submarine was the "Thüringen", and in October of that year he joined the submarine mother ship "Vulkan", followed by training on the submarine U-3. In February 1916 he became second officer on U-73 which was assigned to the Mediterranean Sea in April 1916.[9] There the 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 U-73 sailed past British warships, and torpedoed two Allied troopships and a British man-of-war.

In January 1917 Niemöller was coxswain of U-39. Later he returned to Kiel, and in August 1917 he became first officer in U-151, which attacked numerous ships at Gibraltar, in the Bay of Biscay, and other places. During this time the 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 UC-67. Under his command, 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.[9]

For his achievements, Niemöller was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. When the war drew to a close, he decided to become a preacher, a story he later recounted 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.

[edit] Weimar Republic and education as pastor
On July 20, 1919 he married Else née Bremer (born July 20, 1890 - died August 7, 1961). The same year he began working at a farm in Wersen near Osnabrück but gave up becoming a farmer as he couldn't afford the money for his own farm. He subsequently pursued his earlier idea of becoming a Lutheran pastor, and studied Protestant theology at the Westphalian William's-University in Münster from 1919 to 1923. His motivation was his ambition to give a disordered society meaning and order through the Gospel and church bodies.

During the Ruhraufstand in 1920 he was battalion commander of the "III. Bataillon der Akademischen Wehr Münster" belonging to the paramilitary Freikorps.[7]

Niemöller was ordained on June 29, 1924,[9] and the united Evangelical Church of the old-Prussian Union appointed him curate of Münster's Church of the Redeemer. After serving as the superintendent of the Inner Mission in the old-Prussian ecclesiastical province of Westphalia, Niemöller in 1931 became pastor of the Jesus Christus Kirche (comprising a congregation together with St. Anne's Church) in Dahlem, an affluent suburb of Berlin.[10]

[edit] Role in Nazi Germany

Like most Protestant pastors, Niemöller openly supported the right-wing opponents of the Weimar Republic. He even 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 which sharply criticized Nazi policies and declared the Aryan Paragraph incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity.[3] Adopting the Nazi racist attitudes betrayed the Christian sacrament of baptism, according to which this act makes a person a Christian, superseding any other faith, which oneself may have been observing before and knowing nothing about any racial affinity as a prerequisite of being a Christian, let alone one's grandparents' religious affiliation being an obstacle to being Christian.

The Nazi regime reacted with mass arrests and charges against almost 800 pastors and ecclesiastical lawyers.[11] In 1933, Niemöller founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organization of pastors to "combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background."[10] By the autumn of 1934, Niemöller joined other Lutheran and Protestant churchmen such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in founding the Confessing Church, a Protestant group that opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches.[10] The author and Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann published Niemöller's sermons in the United States and praised his bravery.[3]

However, Niemöller only gradually abandoned his sympathies with National Socialism 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!"[12]

This has led to controversy about his attitude toward the Jews and to accusations of anti-Judaism. Holocaust scholar Robert Michael notes that Niemöller's statements were a result of traditional antisemitism and that Niemöller agreed with the Nazis' position on the "Jewish question" at that time.[4][13] Werner Cohn, an American sociologist, who lived as a Jew in Nazi Germany, also reports on antisemitic statements by Niemöller.[14]

Thus, Niemöller's ambivalent and often contradictory behaviour during the Nazi period makes him one of the most controversial enemies of the Nazis. Even his motives are disputed. The historian Raimund Lammersdorf considers Niemöller "an opportunist who had no quarrel with Hitler politically and only began to oppose the Nazis when Hitler threatened to attack the churches."[15] Others have disputed this view and emphasize the risks that Niemöller took while opposing the Nazis.[3] However, Niemöller's behaviour contrasts sharply with the much more broad-minded attitudes of other Confessing Church activists such as Hermann Maas. The pastor and liberal politician Maas — unlike Niemöller — belonged to those who unequivocally opposed every form of antisemitism and was later accorded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.[16]