Book Review
Then They Will Come for Us
Then They Came For Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor Who Defied the Nazis
by Matthew D. Hockenos
reviewed by J. Daryl Charles
Then They Came for Me is a simultaneously difficult and utterly fascinating book to review. A biography of one of the most captivating figures of the twentieth century, it poses difficulties for the reviewer because its subject was an exceedingly complex individual—one who went through seismic transformations in the way he viewed his native culture, political authority, religious belief, and the use of coercive force. But fascinating as well, for all of the same reasons.
What makes this volume significant is that the author brings us the first English-language biography of Niemöller in a generation. In addition, the two previous English-language biographies, along with their two German-language counterparts, tended to be far more sparing of their subject. This volume, in contrast, captures the nuances of Niemöller’s complicated life in a way that, while not denying his courage and resistance to Hitler from 1934 onward, still mirrors his commitment to German nationalism and support for Nazi political ideology. In the end, Niemöller is a conflicted hero—as, in fact, most are.
Hockenos argues that past biographies have tended to depict Niemöller as a man of principle who was led astray by National Socialism’s promises. Hockenos, however, is careful to demonstrate that, to the contrary, Niemöller knew what Hitler wished to accomplish and, in fact, supported it. Only in time did Niemöller confront his own political and cultural blindness. Even after the war he was slow to confess his own and wider German attitudes of anti-Semitism—attitudes that were pervasive throughout much of Europe yet found particularly fertile soil in the post-World War I German context.
This biography seeks neither to idolize nor to vilify Niemöller. Rather, it represents an attempt to understand him and to chronicle the journey that took him from being a Nazi sympathizer to being a transformed and committed pacifist—one who in his increasingly visible role after World War II traveled the world both to protest the Cold War, with its supposed roots in Western imperialism, and to promote “non-violence.”
Bonhoeffer & Niebuhr, With & Against
Though less well known to us than his contemporaries Dietrich Bonhoeffer—with whom Niemöller collaborated briefly in 1933 and 1934 as the seeds of the “Confessing Church” were being sown—and Reinhold Niebuhr—who generally struggled to understand Niemöller’s motives—Niemöller would achieve iconic status as a result of his imprisonment from 1937 to 1945 and his surprising release at war’s end. As it happened, Niemöller was unwilling to take up Bonhoeffer’s radical call to action in the 1930s to support German Jews and, in fact, would only gradually in 1945 and 1946 come to acknowledge German guilt and the need for repentance of anti-Semitism. Bonhoeffer himself would confide to a friend that Niemöller struck him as one of the many “naïve and starry-eyed idealists” whose dual devotion to German nationalism and Protestantism was simply unacceptable.
In very short order events in Germany would prove Bonhoeffer right. Unlike Niemöller, the young Bonhoeffer insisted that Christian faith and National Socialism were inimical to one another. For his part, Niebuhr would increasingly come to view—and later denounce—Niemöller as an appeaser. The break between the two would become complete by the early 1950s, with the increasing tensions of the Cold War. Niebuhr, of course, was quite critical of the Church’s failure to defy Communism, and to do so with the same resistance by which Christians supposedly had defied Hitler. While Niemöller after WWII concerned himself with the question, “What can the Church do for peace?” Niebuhr was asking, “What can the Church contribute to the health and the survival of a free society?”
A Problematic Evolution
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 for me.
Thus begins the volume under review, with the poetic confession offered in 1946 upon Niemöller’s revisiting of a tragically familiar place, Dachau, now as a free man. These words, of course, have been appropriated again and again over the past 70 years by oppressed groups of diverse origins and orientations. Quite appropriately, they are on display at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.; perhaps less appropriately and more recently, they have been employed by movements such as Black Lives Matter. Yet despite the remarkably wide appropriation of Niemöller’s confession, his life story remains largely unknown.
The book takes the reader chronologically through the various stages of Niemöller’s life (b. 1892)—from his childhood growing up in a beloved German Lutheran pastor’s home; to his World War I service in the German Navy as commander of a German U-boat; to growing resistance from 1933 onward to the Nazification of the German Lutheran Church; to his imprisonment in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Dachau; to the period of post-WWII soul-searching and gradual coming to grips with German guilt and need for repentance; to his barnstorming post-war travels around the world on behalf of the German people; to a thorough conversion to Gandhian pacifism, with its concomitant condemnation of Cold War aggression and wholesale embrace of a “gospel of non-violence.”
Part of the early story of Martin Niemöller—and of German identity, for that matter—is necessarily anchored in an understanding of post-WWI Germany. From the German perspective, these were extraordinarily difficult years in which Germans perceived themselves as being punished by the Allied powers for the imperialism exhibited by Kaiser Wilhelm II. In June of 1918 the Allies forced the new German government to accept the Versailles Diktat. Particularly loathsome, as Hockenos helpfully—and correctly—notes, was Article 231 of the treaty, which stipulated that Germany take responsibility for starting the war and hence for all the losses suffered due to the war (Hockenos estimates these losses to be “132 billion gold marks, or $31.4 billion” [54]). What outraged Germans was the cumulative effect of (a) the assignment of guilt for starting the war, (b) the staggering amount of reparations specified, (c) the loss of about 13 percent of German territory, and (d) a reduction of the German military. These factors, of course, are fully aside from a devastated post-war economy that in only a few years would feel the worldwide effects of the Great Depression.
Not by coincidence, then, do we witness the rise of National Socialism in the 1920s. It appealed broadly to the sense of German identity insofar as it played on perceived injustices visited by the nations upon German culture while demonstrating a yearning for the restoration of a truly strong German national identity. After all, it was assumed, such was Luther’s legacy; a strong nation and a strong Lutheran Church must go hand-in-hand. And, in fact, they did, even through the years of WWII. Nevertheless, in the mid-1930s the seeds of the Confessing Church were being sown. The efforts of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth and Niemöller would converge, ever so briefly, in an effort to declare to their fellow churchmen and to the German state that National Socialism had no place in the church’s proclamation. Such was the essence of the Barmen Declaration, drafted by Barth in late May of 1934.
Until his arrest in 1937 Niemöller would preach with vigor, warning his fellow Lutherans that they were being drawn into a titanic battle, and that German nationalism represented, in truth, heretical Christianity. On July 1, 1937, Niemöller became Hitler’s “personal prisoner,” given Hitler’s and Goebbels’ united concern that German church protest was negatively influencing international relations. From March 1938 until July 1941 Niemöller was placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (north of Berlin) and then moved to Dachau (in the south) until war’s end. Interestingly, the latter KZ-Lager housed many clergymen from all over Europe, suggesting very clear policy directives.
Between July of 1944, when the last assassination attempt on Hitler occurred, and the end of the war (i.e., eight months later), over 11,000 Germans who were considered “enemies of the Reich” were executed by Hitler’s orders. Among these were Bonhoeffer and many Confessing Church pastors. Martin Niemöller, however, would not be among them. To be sure, this was not the original plan; the Nazis had no intention of allowing Niemöller to survive the war, particularly given his notoriety around the world. He was spared only because a bus spiriting a number of Dachau’s prisoners away into the Alps was intercepted by American forces.
Niemöller’s eventual acceptance of German guilt and of the need for thoroughgoing repentance did not sit well with many fellow Germans, both within and outside the pastorate. In fact, this message at home met with considerable resistance. Hockenos speculates—and in my opinion on valid grounds—that the worldwide attention focused on this German resistance pastor who had survived eight years in concentration camps, resulting in worldwide travel and extraordinary speaking opportunities, came to be viewed by Niemöller himself as a reprieve. It was a reprieve to the extent that Niemöller’s message back home was not popular.
The final transformation in Niemöller, from militarist to pacifist, would become complete in the 1950s. He was increasingly drawn to the influence of Gandhi, whose ideological pacifism he had come to admire greatly. This transformation would also win him many friends in organizations such as the World Council of Churches. Here the paths of Niemöller and Reinhold Niebuhr—once united in the cause of resisting tyranny—now divided. Niebuhr, consistent with his position on Nazi tyranny, could not understand why Niemöller (or anyone else likeminded) would not marshal the very same resistance to Communist totalitarianism. In the years to come, Niemöller would visit the Soviet Union a dozen times—a door that remained open due to his unrelenting criticism of the U.S. and Cold War aggression, for which he drew no little criticism. He even visited Hanoi in 1967 at the invitation of Ho Chi Minh. Luther’s gospel had become the gospel of non-violence for this Lutheran pastor in post-WWII Germany. The transformation was now complete, from unbending militarist to militant pacifist.
Ending with Gandhi
The “imperfection of Niemöller’s moral compass,” in the words of the author, makes Niemöller a fascinating—and perhaps instructive—study. It is easy to render someone like him a hero, given all that he experienced in his remarkable lifetime and under extraordinary life circumstances. That project, however, is not so neat and tidy, even when we may grant him the honor of changing his mind on things that really matter.
Niemöller was a 41-year-old father of six and a seasoned pastor when he applauded Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. Even as late as 1945, he refused to denounce anti-Judaism. At the same time, his growing—and in the end, consummate—admiration for Mahatma Gandhi was, in many respects, tone-deaf to the realities of European Jews, as George Orwell, to his great credit, protested as a journalist in India. Criticisms of Gandhi were not without merit; after all, as Orwell pointed out, ideological “non-violence” was far easier in an English protectorate such as India than in the Soviet gulags of his own day, where “non-violent” activism would have been non-existent. What’s more, argued Orwell, Gandhi’s pacifism would have been irrelevant in Nazi Germany, with its death camps strewn throughout Eastern Europe. The bottom line of Gandhi’s “non-violence” was to advise European Jews to commit suicide and only therewith to warn the nations of the totalitarian
threat.
Today anti-Judaism is pervasive, not merely throughout the Middle East (where it is a raison d’être) but also throughout Western nations—i.e., in nations that should know better and wherein Islamists have decidedly concentrated their assaults. Recall the final element in Niemöller’s poetic lament: “Then they came for the Jews. . . .” That same spirit is alive and well in our midst.
While one may rightly reject Niemöller’s ideological propensity toward nationalism (a temptation of every age, and no mere German tendency), we also may reject his final landing point—an ideological position that simply cannot square with historic Christian belief. And in this sense, one must resolutely side with Reinhold Niebuhr, who, having worked with Niemöller in the 1930s as menacing clouds were forming on the horizon, in the end made the difficult yet faithful decision to categorize him as an “appeaser.” Alas, where cultural and socio-political evil confront a relatively “free” citizenry, the citizens—assuming they possess any sort of moral impulse—have no alternative but to resist. Such a posture is anchored not only in “Lutheran” presuppositions, which animated early-sixteenth-century social and political life, but in the width and breadth of mainstream Christianity—from Augustine to Aquinas to Grotius to contemporary “just war” voices.
Resistance to cultural and socio-political evil applies in any age, regardless of whether we are facing a “hard” or “soft” form of tyranny.
J. Daryl Charles is the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Retrieving the Natural Law (2008), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (2018), and, most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace: God's Gifts for a Fallen World, Volume 3 (2020). He is a contributing editor to Touchstone.
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