Martin Niemöller

German religious leader

• Born: January 14, 1892
• Birthplace: Lippstadt, Germany
• Died: March 6, 1984
• Place of death: Wiesbaden, West Germany (now in Germany)

Niemöller, a leading religious opponent of the National Socialist regime, helped to organize the Confessing Church in 1934, a body within the German Evangelical Church that formed the center of Protestant resistance in the Third Reich. After his liberation from eight years in a concentration camp, he became a prominent figure in the restored German Evangelical Church and the World Council of Churches, best known for his outspoken opposition to West German rearmament, nuclear armament, and his advocacy of pacifism.

Early Life

Martin Niemöller (NEE-mohl-ur) was the second of six children of a Lutheran pastor. He was educated in public schools, first in Lippstadt and, after age eight, in Elberfeld, where his father moved to a new parish. In the Niemöller family the practice of the Protestant religion went hand in hand with German nationalism. Following an early fascination with the sea, young Niemöller joined the imperial navy on graduation from the Elberfeld gymnasium, an academic secondary school, in 1910. Talented, ambitious, and imbued with the teaching from home that a good Christian is a good citizen and as such a good soldier, he quickly advanced in his naval career. After first being trained on a battleship, he was transferred to submarine service in 1915, during World War I. Two years later he was put in command of a submarine and led several missions against the British and the French. During his submarine service, he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. After the war, he resigned from the navy in March, 1919.

Disillusioned by Germany’s defeat and antagonistic to the democracy of the Weimar Republic, Niemöller briefly tried farming but soon concluded that the postwar inflation made the purchase of a farm impossible. He married Else Bremer, who was to be his supportive wife and the mother of seven children until her death in a car accident in 1961. Having repeatedly faced the meaning of life and death in war, drawing on his religious upbringing, and hopeful that the church could help regenerate German spiritual life, he began to study theology in 1920 with the intention of entering the ministry. At the same time, he remained captivated by right-wing political sentiments. In March, 1920, he and other nationalist students formed the Academic Defense Corps during the monarchist Kapp Putsch against the Weimar government. After the failure of the coup, Niemöller and his compatriots battled communist insurgents in the Ruhr region before resuming their studies. Throughout much of his life, Niemöller saw himself both as a good Christian and as a supreme German patriot.

While a student and then during his mandatory service as a curate, he helped supplement his family income by working as a platelayer and accountant on the German railroad. Once he got closer to finishing his studies, he was reluctant to take a parish of his own because of the difficult economic conditions in Germany. Instead, late in 1923, he became manager of the Inner Mission of Westphalia and was thus put in charge of the administration of church social welfare for an entire province. Over the next seven years, this work gave him invaluable organizational experience as well as heightened awareness of the meaning of the “social gospel.”

Life’s Work

By 1931, Niemöller was eager to accept a church of his own. He was appointed third pastor to a church in Berlin-Dahlem, one of the richest and most fashionable parishes in Germany. Within months he became senior pastor on the death of the incumbent, and two years later he found himself a national figure in Germany. The two sides of his personality continued to show: He was a committed Christian caring for the souls of his parishioners and a man of deep political convictions. He identified most closely with nationalist conservatives who loathed the Weimar Republic and, on several occasions from 1924 to 1933, even voted for the National Socialist Party. He was impressed with a part of the National Socialist program that advocated freedom for all religious denominations and the idea of “positive Christianity.” Adolf Hitler , however, on becoming chancellor in January, 1933, attempted to achieve dominance over the Evangelical Church (Lutheran and Reformed) by promoting the neopagan movement of the German Christians and the appointment of Pastor Ludwig Müller, a National Socialist follower, as reich bishop.

Disillusioned by such blatant interference in church affairs, Niemöller attacked the religious policies of the government. In September, 1933, he and others established the Pastors’ Emergency League to assist non-Aryan pastors or those married to non-Aryans, such as Christian Jews, who were threatened with dismissal, and to serve as an organizational network for the clergy, who resisted the inroads of the regime in church work. In the following year, Niemöller and his allies set to work creating a new church structure by adding lay support to the efforts of the clergy. At two synodal meetings at Barmen and Berlin-Dahlem, they organized free synods, in opposition to those dominated by the reich bishop, and thus laid the groundwork for the Confessing Church. Informed by Karl Barth’s theological declaration that drew a sharp distinction between the true church and the German Christians, the Confessing Church claimed to be the duly constituted Protestant church in Germany. It managed to maintain itself as the sole coherent opposition among Protestants to the religious policies of the Third Reich.

Niemöller’s outspoken criticism of National Socialist religious policies and fearless defense of the independence of the church focused national attention on his person and earned for him Hitler’s personal wrath. Disagreement with the regime’s religious policies and racial measures as they affected Christian Jews, albeit much less so Jews in general, did not lead Niemöller to dissent from the government’s political and foreign policies. In the fall of 1933, he sent a congratulatory telegram to Hitler, on behalf of the Pastors’ Emergency League, when Germany left the League of Nations. He also approved of German rearmament. In the following year, he authored his autobiographical Vom U-Boot zur Kanzel (1934; From U-boat to Pulpit , 1936), which revealed his singular patriotism, bringing him considerable fame in Germany and abroad. None of this, however, saved him from repeated arrest by the Gestapo and permanent imprisonment starting in July, 1937. Early in 1938, he was tried on charges of violating the law and engaging in treasonous activity. He mounted a defense stressing his patriotic service in war and peacetime, which resulted in a reduction of charges and a minimal sentence. Expecting to be released, he was immediately rearrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin as Hitler’s personal prisoner. In June, 1941, he was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. At the end of the war, he escaped execution and was freed while on transport to the Austrian Tyrol.

Having become aware only after his release of the full magnitude of the crimes committed by the Hitler regime, Niemöller concluded that the renewal of the German church and its acceptance by foreign churches required unconditional penance. He became a driving force behind the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt issues in October, 1945. In the presence of ecumenical representatives, twelve leaders of the German Evangelical Church confessed that the church shared with the German people responsibility for the endless suffering caused to many peoples and countries and accused themselves of not acting more courageously to prevent it. In sermons and speeches, especially before student audiences, Niemöller explicitly asserted that his confession included responsibility for the murder of five million to six million Jews, but he rejected the political conception of collective guilt. Because of his international reputation, he was named president of foreign affairs of the German Evangelical Church in 1945. Very soon he became an active participant in the emerging World Council of Churches and was appointed its copresident in 1961. In addition, he also served as president of the Evangelical Church of Hesse and Nassau from 1947.

The concentration camp experience and contact with foreign inmates at Dachau had broadened Niemöller’s narrow German vistas. The ecumenical work that he engaged in and the regular contact with non-Germans both in occupied Germany and on his frequent travels abroad completed his development from a German nationalist into an internationalist. Taking the role of the church as a moral force in society very seriously, he felt an obligation as one of its leaders to speak out boldly on current issues of concern. In 1946, he was among the first prominent Germans to criticize the treatment of German prisoners of war in British camps. He clashed with the occupation authorities over their policies of denazification and dismantling. He actively worked for the release of Waffen Schützstaffeln Gestapo officers and several prominent Nazis when he believed that their sentence outweighed their alleged crimes. Fearing that the division of Germany might become permanent, he opposed the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. He vehemently objected to German rearmament in the early 1950’s, incurring the wrath of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who called him an enemy of the state.

While the Cold War raged, Niemöller met with the patriarch of Moscow in 1952 and soon joined the communist-dominated World Peace Council. He angered many in the West with his contacts in East Germany and his insistence that the vitality of Christianity was much greater there under communism than in materialist West Germany. His attack on racism as a threat to world peace won for him wide support, but his antinuclear stance raised much objection. Having learned from Otto Hahn that nuclear weapons could extinguish higher life on the planet, he declared himself a convinced pacifist in the mid-1950’s. His controversial if not iconoclastic pronouncements tended to lose friends for him and to diminish his organizational influence. In 1956, he was removed as head of the church’s foreign affairs office. In 1964, he retired from the presidency of the Hesse and Nassau church, and in 1968 he relinquished his leading position on the World Council of Churches. He continued his active involvement in the German and European peace and antinuclear movement in sermons, speeches, and writing until only a few years before his death in 1984.

Significance

Martin Niemöller, who never really liked theology and considered philosophy useless, was a practical man of action. Imbued with strong religious convictions, he had boundless energy and demonstrated remarkable commitment applying Christian principles to life in society. He once remarked that he developed from an ultraconservative into a revolutionary and, if he were to live to be a hundred, he might become an anarchist. He never fully internalized a Western liberal worldview and regarded West German democracy as imperfect. Much of his life his commitment was that of a Christian and a German nationalist; after World War II it became that of a Christian and an internationalist who continued to love his homeland deeply. Above all, he came to believe that Christian spirituality transcended national boundaries and could unite believers under different political systems.

Niemöller’s most notable historical achievement was the dedication to Christian ideals that he showed and the leadership role that he performed during the early years of National Socialist rule in Germany one of the most troubled times for modern Christianity. He committed his life to creating the German Protestant church’s resistance to the Hitler regime. His courage and fearless defense of Christian beliefs inspired others to carry on when he was incarcerated and gave him a reputation much beyond Germany’s borders. The moral prestige that he commanded as a Protestant resister and imprisoned martyr enabled him to play a prominent role during the aftermath of the war, when the German Evangelical Church was struggling to reconstitute itself and restore its moral prestige. He is remembered for his untiring effort to establish ecumenical ties with churches in the West and the East. His relentless promotion of international peace and antinuclear campaigns helped to shape in no insignificant way the climate of public opinion in West Germany and Europe for the concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament taken by the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1970’s and 1980’s. It was indicative of Niemöller’s international stature that he was honored for the promotion of world peace by being awarded both the Lenin Peace Prize in 1967 and the Grand Cross of Merit, West Germany’s highest recognition, in 1971.

Bibliography

Bentley, James. Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984. New York: Free Press, 1984. This definitive biography draws on archival sources and also relies heavily on information obtained from interviews with Niemöller. It is well written and covers all phases of his life and career. Its principal weakness lies in the absence of an adequate historical context for its subject.

Burleigh, Michael. Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics from the Great War to the War on Terror. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. This is the second volume in Burleigh’s chronicle of the politics of religion and the religion of politics. It includes information about Niemöller and Nazi attacks on religion.

Davidson, Clarissa Start. God’s Man: The Story of Pastor Niemöller. New York: Ives Washburn, 1959. A more captivating journalistic partial biography than Dietmar Schmidt’s book noted below. Davidson met Niemöller and his family and presents a sympathetic portrait of a man whom she much admires. Includes a bibliography.

Helmreich, Ernst Christian. The German Churches Under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1979. The most important scholarly treatment of German churches during the Third Reich. It also summarizes developments before and after the National Socialist era. Essential for putting Niemöller in the broader context of church history.

Schmidt, Dietmar. Pastor Niemöller. Translated by Lawrence Wilson. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. An informed journalistic account of Niemöller’s life and work through the late 1950’s by a close associate. It offers insights into its subject’s complex personality but does not purport to be a completely impartial biography. Contains a short bibliography.

Spotts, Frederic. The Churches and Politics in Germany. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Based on unpublished sources, this detailed study of the West German churches in the postwar period analyzes such issues as denazification, reunification, and political attitudes of church leaders. Niemöller’s role is put in the broader context of German church development.