Posted on 06/18/2004 12:59:32 PM PDT by mrustow
Most of us, in this PC age, are familiar with the following sentiments or some variant, supposedly written by prominent German Protestant theologian and pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) about the Nazis.
Two things always bothered me about this passage. The first, of course, is that there are so many varieties of this "quote." Sundry versions include Catholics, homosexuals, socialists, and Social Democrats, while the US Holocaust Museum itself omits the communists. The most historically accurate statement would have it in the order communists, socialists, trade unionists, and Jews. Moreover, "they" never came for Catholics or Protestants per se. Rather, they went after many Christian religious figures who spoke out against the Nazis. Secondly, there is a complete lack of emotional focus, and the conclusion or punch line is at best facile, if not downright dishonest. He starts off confessing that he did not speak out when he should have, perhaps implying a collective guilt of all Germans. Indeed, Niemöller was a principal author of the Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis ("Stuttgart Confession of Guilt"). The problem is that many people DID speak out against the Nazis -- although it accomplished little, and even some, like Pope Pius XII, who did more than speak out, and actually helped Jews and other escape death, are now routinely pilloried in the Leftist press, even though Pius was praised after World War II by Golda Meir, and contemporary Jewish leaders. Moreover, when the Gestapo finally came for Martin Niemöller in 1937, his life was spared because George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, and others spoke up for him. In fact, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels urged Adolf Hitler to have Niemöller executed, but party ideologist, and probably the purest Nazi of them all, Alfred Rosenberg, hardly a humanitarian, argued against the idea as he believed it would provide an opportunity for people like Bishop Bell to attack the German government. Hitler agreed, and Niemöller spent the rest of the war in Dachau. It must be noted that Niemöller was a fervent supporter of Hitler, and even volunteered to serve in the German Army in 1939. He got himself put into the infamous concentration camp merely for opposing Hitler's control of the churches in Germany, and had never opposed Nazi racial theories. Far from it: In 1931 Niemöller made speeches arguing that Germany needed a Führer, and in his sermons he espoused Hitler's views on race and nationality. This all came out in a mea culpa press conference he gave in Naples in June of 1945. Widespread public outcry prevented him from entering England after the war, his mission of reconciliation notwithstanding. It was at this point that he became a committed socialist and peace-freak, campaigning against the formation of NATO, condemning Harry Truman as second only to Hitler as a mass murderer, praising Ho Chi Minh, and winning the coveted Lenin Peace Prize in 1967. Some time after he died in 1984, the poem First They Came For The Communists began to circulate in all of its many forms, and nearly always with attribution to Niemöller. But there is serious doubt whether he wrote it at all, since it is not mentioned by either of his biographers [Dietmar Schmidt (1959) and James Bentley (1984)], and the anecdote most often cited to prove its origin cannot possibly be true. In this fantasy, he is asked, in 1946, by some students how the Holocaust could have happened, and he answers with the poem. The source, though, is his second wife Sybil von Sell, whom he did not marry until 1971, who was a young child when this allegedly occurred, and could have no personal knowledge of the incident. Rather, she enjoyed the celebrity and was only too happy to feed the myth, offering no explanation of how such pearls of wisdom could have been kept from the public for 38 long years. A more realistic assessment is that the poem was written by an anonymous Leftist, perhaps a friend of Niemöller's, who knew that its turgid and vague sentiment would disappear unless credited to a well-known, if ultimately fraudulent "hero." Just one more deception brought to you by the usual suspects. What a surprise.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.
Finally, they came for me and there was no one left to speak out.
LOL... Good luck though - I've lived in Seattle for over a decade. Ain't no way I'll burn (too waterlogged)...
Even the Devil agrees:
A curious fellow died one day and found himself in limbo waiting in a long, long line for judgment. As he stood there, he noticed that some souls were allowed to march right through the gates of heaven. Others were led over to Satan, who threw them into a lake of fire. Every so often, instead of hurling a poor soul into the fire, Satan would toss him or her to one side.
After watching Satan do this several times, the fellow's curiosity got the better of him. He strolled over and tapped Old Nick on the shoulder.
"Excuse me, there, Your Darkness," he said. "I'm waiting in line for judgment, and I couldn't help wondering why you are tossing some people aside instead of flinging them into the fires of hell with the others?"
"Ah," Satan said with a grin. "Those are from Seattle. They are too wet to burn."
Sorry about that. As an act of contrition, I'm going to throw 40 Hail Marys.
mrustow, graduate of the Samuel Goldwyn School of Theology.
I saw this as a poster on a dorm wall around 1971, so It's been around for a while.
There are some days when you surpass your normal brilliance and ascend to the heights of true genius.
This is one of those days. You made me smile on a day where I was finding little to smile about.
Incoming!
Cool :0)
(and thanks)
[sigh]
I agree.
First they came for the communists and I gave out their names and addresses.
ROTFL...
Interesting. Since the Nazis are widely (erroneously) considered the Right, I guess that necessarily makes anyone opposing them the Left? I don't know Niemoller's history, but was he truly "the Left"?
I'm hoping your irony supplements help here.
You mean there are several "Niemoller's a Bum" stories floating around? I don't plumb the murky depths for stories on the man, but this is the first one I've seen
LOL! Oh, absolutely! I mean, if you're going to do something, do it right.
The fact that many of us have heard it over the decades, with different variations on this or that sentence or who said it, doesn't make it's message any less true.
"Bapstists" are to "Baptists" as "Rollexes" are to "Rolexes".....
The plural of "Rolex" is "Rolices." The plural of "Kleenex" is "Kleenices."
Does that mean that the plural of "Ping" is "Pingices"? ;0)
ping
Yeah? So? I bought my religion from some guy in a back alley in Asia. Wanna make something of it? Huh? Huh? ;0)
It wouldn't happen to have been in the vicinity of one or more of the following posters, would it?
"What if they had a war, and no one came?"
"We're the people your parents warned you about" (A picture depicts a mob of scraggily-looking characters, like something out of Seven Little Monsters.)
"Why?" next to the picture of a GI who had just been shot.
When I was a university student in West Germany during the early 1980s, I saw the above posters on dorm doors all over the place, often translated into clumsy German. The typically America-bashing Gerry students worshiped anything from the American left.
Niemoeller's great moment came when he helped to organize the "Confessing Church" movement which attempted to prevent the Nazis from taking over the German Protestant churches. The specific issue that sparked what was called the Church Struggle was the attempt to apply to the church the so-called Aryan Paragraphs, which banned Jews from the civil service, etc. This meant the dismissal of the (not very numerous) pastors of Jewish origin. The Confessing Church insisted that the church could not accept "integration" (the Nazi word was Gleichschaltung) into the totalitarian state. The Church already had a Lord, and it was not Hitler. That was the issue Niemoeller put his life on the line for. It was right and it took a great deal of guts.
However, neither Niemoeller nor the Confessing Church ever made any statement on behalf of the Jews outside the church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the very few German Protestants who saw clearly the moral enormity of what was at stake.
After the war, Niemoeller and other Confessing Church participants were wracked with guilt over this failure. The Stuttgart Confession was in my view an essentially decent and proper attempt on the part of Confessing Church leaders to lead the German people in coming clean about the persecution of the Jews. I don't share the view that the German people were collectively "Hitler's Willing Executioners" but you really can't say that as a group they were particularly indignant about the mistreatment of their Jewish neighbors.
Many of these church leaders, however, reacted to their guilt by swinging over to an uncritical support of leftist "peace" agitation (some of it Soviet funded). Niemoeller does not, frankly, seem to me to have been the brightest bulb in the chandelier, and he took this path. My sense is that his reasoning went something like: "Before I was too mindlessly patriotic to see the evil clearly, so I will join up with the critics of the postwar west to make sure I never do something like that again." It was a stupid moral strategy, which merely made Niemoeller and others blind to the burning evil of the second half of the twentieth century.
Niemoeller did a tough right thing at great cost at a dark moment in human history, and that can't be taken away. He never saw the big picture clearly before or after the war, and that's part of the record too.
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