A Confessional Courage

Martin Niemoeller, born in 1892 in the small Westphalian town of Lippstadt, spent his boyhood as the son of a Lutheran pastor in the industrial town of Elberfeld. At 18 he became a navy cadet, serving on U-boats during World War I, eventually as a commander. After leaving the navy, he followed up on a boyhood sense of vocation to the ministry. In 1920 Niemoeller and his wife, Else Bremer, moved to Muenster, where they stayed during the years of political and economic instability in which the Nazis first emerged. Young Niemoeller was a militant patriot and a leader in the Academic Defense Corps, an armed student nationalist organization which he helped found.

After his ordination, Niemoeller spent seven years as a church administrator. In July, 1931, he accepted a call and moved with his wife and six children to the Dahlem parish in Berlin.

In the November, 1932 Protestant Church elections, the Nazi-steered "German Christians" gained the majority, and in April, 1933, when Hitler's anti-Jewish laws began to eliminate Jews from all levels of society, the churches halfheartedly supported the move.

Although Niemoeller wanted to keep his church work separate from politics, he began to realize that Hitler, despite lavish religious rhetoric, intended to subjugate the official churches to totalitarian Nazi rule. When legislation was adopted by the Protestant Church to remove baptized Jews from the clergy, Niemoeller and a number of other pastors decided it was necessary to act to keep German Christians from adapting Christian doctrine to fit Nazi ideology.

Niemoeller sent a circular letter to all German pastors inviting them to join a "Pastors' Emergency League." This voluntary association of clergy intended to pool their spiritual and material resources to support those pastors, mostly of Jewish origin, who were being dismissed by the official church. By September, 1933, there was a widespread response to this call, and almost overnight Niemoeller became the key spokesperson for the German churches' opposition to Hitler.

The Emergency League network eventually fed into the larger movement that in 1934 resulted in the formation of the Confessing Church. In opposition to the Nazi church policies and the official German Christians' church, the Confessing Church claimed sole authority as the Protestant church of Jesus Christ in Germany. Its theology was one of the cross and not of Germanic superiority.

The Confessing Church, however, did not oppose the Nazi state with political resistance. It was only after the war that Niemoeller pointed to his own and others' failure to oppose the regime's legalized atrocities in time, saying, "When the Nazis came to get the Communists, I was silent. When they came to get the Socialists, I was silent. When they came to get the Catholics, I was silent. When they came to get the Jews, I was silent. And when they came to get me, there was no one left to speak."

But the illegal status and oppositional course of Confessing Church members did, by 1934, lead to clashes with the state over church issues. By the summer of 1939 most members were removed from the scene either through imprisonment or through the draft.

In 1937 Niemoeller was arrested and imprisoned in Berlin. When even the Nazi court that tried him the following February on charges of breaching the peace could not bring itself to find evidence and impose a sentence, Hitler dismissed the judges and had Niemoeller taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as his "personal prisoner." In July, 1941, he was moved to Dachau near Munich, where he was held for the duration of the war.

The story of Niemoeller's leadership in the postwar German church is one of constant alertness to the dangers of an established, self-interested church. Niemoeller had a major part in the formulation of the October, 1945 "Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt," in which the Evangelical Church claimed its share of responsibility for the suffering brought by Germany on the world. He tried to make clear in countless speaking tours throughout Germany that no renewal was possible without recognition of the sins of the past.

Niemoeller and other Confessing Church pastors called on the German church to recognize the lesson of the Nazi catastrophe: The church becomes guilty toward humanity when it is concerned primarily for its own institutional well-being and the souls of its members. But it was an unpopular message, and the surviving leaders of the Confessing Church became more and more of a minority.

Meanwhile, reconstruction and the beginning economic boom in Germany had raised the issue of German rearmament and remilitarization. In the early 1950s, when anyone who dared to talk of a neutral Germany was called a traitor or a Communist, Niemoeller was among the most outspoken against German rearmament.

At age 89 Niemoeller is still concerned with the issues of the church and its stance toward the state and war. Less than two months ago, he marched in Hamburg with more than 70,000 other Christians to protest the arms race (see the story in "For the Record," page 6). As in the 1950s, the public position taken by church leaders like Niemoeller and others whose roots are in the Confessing Church of the 1930s is not welcomed by the state, nor in fact by the churches. Nevertheless, their personal authenticity, and the patience and compassion with which they live what they preach while fully expecting to be misunderstood and abused is a challenge and a source of hope.

Nancy Lukens was on the editorial staff of Sojourners when this article appeared.