Background
Martin Niemoller was born in Lippstadt, Westphalia, on 14 January 1892.
Martin Niemoller was born in Lippstadt, Westphalia, on 14 January 1892.
A submarine Commander during World War I, who was awarded the decoration Pour le Mérite for his services, Niemoller studied theology after the war and worked for the Inner Mission, Westphalia, between 1924 and 1931.
From 1931 until his arrest in 1937, he was pastor of the Berlin-Dahlem church. Like many other German Protestants, Niemoller had originally welcomed the Nazi rise to power as the beginning of a national revival, and his autobiography, From U-Boat to Pulpit (1933), was widely praised for its patriotism in the Nazi press.
By the beginning of 1934 Niemoller, however, was disillusioned as Hitler began to ‘co-ordinate’ the Evangelical Church and subordinate it to State authority with the help of Reich Bishop Ludwig Muller. To protect the Lutheran church against these inroads, Niemoller founded the Pfarrernotbund (Pastors' Emergency League) in 1934 and took over the leadership of the Bekenntniskirche (Confessional Church), becoming the central figure in its resistance to the Nazi-oriented German Christians. At its General Synod in May 1934, the Confessional Church declared itself the legitimate Protestant church of Germany and attracted some 7,000 pastors to its ranks. Enraged by Niemoller’s rebellious sermons and his widespread popularity, Hitler ordered his arrest on 1 July 1937. Tried before a special court in March 1938, Niemoller was found guilty of subversive attacks against the State, but was given the relatively mild sentence of seven months in a fortress and a fine of 2,000 marks. Following his release, he was re-arrested on Hitler’s express orders and spent the next seven years in concentration camps in ‘protective custody’, until his liberation by Allied forces in 1945. In 1947 he was elected President of the Protestant church in Hesse and Nassau, a position which he held until 1964. A convinced pacifist, he frequently spoke out against the danger of nuclear weapons and sought contacts with the eastern bloc.
He lived in Darmstadt after his retirement in 1965 and was appointed one of the six Presidents of the World Council of Churches between 1961 and 1968.
Niemoller shared the anti-communism of the National Socialists and their detestation of the Weimar Republic, which he himself had branded as ‘fourteen years of darkness'.