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THE STRANGE STORY OF THE FAMED ANTI-FASCIST LAMENT “FIRST THEY
CAME…”  
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Barry Yourgrau
January 20, 2026
The Nation
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_ In his celebrated mea culpa, the German pastor Martin Niemöller
blamed his failure to speak out against the Nazis on indifference. Was
that the whole reason? _

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In the dire months since Donald Trump’s return to power, you’ve no
doubt read a version of the famous mea culpa “First They
Came”—perhaps woven into the lines of an essay or op-ed, perhaps
thumbed out on social media. Part warning, part exhortation, the short
text (it’s often mistaken for a poem) comes to us as tragically
earned wisdom from the rise of the Nazis, alas grimly relevant to the
America of today. The variation considered the most authoritative (if
not the most commonly cited) reads:

 
  First they came for the Communists, and I did not
speak  out—because I was not a socialist.

  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 who  could
protest.

In the decades since these words were formulated, they’ve gradually
eclipsed the man responsible for them, blocking his presence so
thoroughly that they arrive on a page, in some instances, without so
much as an attribution. But even on those occasions when Martin
Niemöller does get his due, he tends to be credited only vaguely, as
a German pastor who ran afoul of Hitler—his story shorn of its most
arduous complexities.

Niemöller was indeed a German cleric, a man world-famous in his day
as a defiant martyr for freedom of religion, imprisoned by the Führer
for eight long years, until the very end of World War II. In the years
after his release, Niemöller began offering piecemeal the lines of
what would become his famed text, asserting them in remarks during
sermons and speeches in the bombed-out ruins of the Third Reich. While
the referents sometimes varied—some versions included people with
disabilities or Jehovah’s Witnesses, while others omitted
Communists—the theme remained constant.

And yet, if the text tolls the bitter cost of indifference and want of
solidarity, it also doesn’t go far enough with regard to its author.
For all its confessional eloquence, it is, in fact, an act of profound
obfuscation: an attempt to confess guilt without really coming clean,
to claim responsibility while obscuring what was a deep complicity.

Martin Niemöller had supported Hitler. Enthusiastically. Although he
was hailed on the cover of _Time_ as the “Martyr of 1940” and
portrayed in a Hollywood film as having thundered at the Führer,
“When you attack the Jews, you attack us all!,” 
the man himself
was far from an anti-fascist freedom fighter. A proud World War I
hero, he was also an imperialist, an ultranationalist, and an
antisemite who only really objected to the aggressions of the Third
Reich after the Nazis began intruding into the domain of the
Protestant Church. Even then, his objections remained narrow. And
while he did eventually undergo an extraordinary transformation into
an indefatigable pacifist and devotee of Gandhi, that transformation
came years after the war—a redemption wrenched from the
contradictions of a very flawed protagonist.

The historian Benjamin Ziemann, one of the two recent biographers who
have pierced through the hagiographic shimmer around Niemöller,
regards his evolution with something close to a suspicion of
hypocrisy, even duplicity. After marshaling troubling evidence of
Niemöller’s longtime attitude toward Jews, Ziemann offers in his
book _Hitler’s Personal Prisoner _that he would revise the iconic
mea culpa as follows:

  First they came for the Communists, and I did not
speak  out—because I resented the “Godless” Communists
for  their attacks on Christianity.

  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not
speak  out—because I believed in the Nazi
_Volksgemeinschaft_  [racially pure, united folk-nation].

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak
out—  because I “disliked” the Jews and denied the
legitimacy of  their faith.

  Then they came for me and detained me for eight
long  years—yet when I was finally liberated, my views
on  Communists and Jews had not substantially changed.

Niemöller’s other revisionist biographer, the historian Matthew
Hockenos, takes a more forgiving approach. In _Then They Came for Me_,
he calls Niemöller’s early views and actions repellent but commends
his courage in later life to change his deeply held beliefs and act
accordingly. “In this, Niemöller is to be admired,” Hockenos
declares, “and his evolution celebrated.”

So what are we to make of him? And of the text whose words we quote in
these desperate times?

For us, Niemöller’s story presents an abiding challenge. Seen in
one light, his mea culpa is a compromised but still worthy text, its
personal lesson urgent despite its misleading omissions. Seen in
another, it’s an act of craven concealment hiding behind a show of
rueful confession. But there is a third possibility as well: that the
text that came to be known as “First They Came” is something
difficult in an all too human way—a vital wisdom set within a moral
failure. Its full meaning, its uneasy power, requires us to hold it in
both lights together.

GOOD SOLDIER: Niemoller, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant of the
German Imperial Navy, earned the Iron Cross First Class for his role
in the First World War,._(Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)_

Long before Martin Niemöller became a renowned international
figure—before life’s twists and turns would torque him from a
fascist sympathizer into an ecumenical citizen of the world—he was,
above all, a patriotic German and a nationalistic Lutheran.

Born in 1892 in Westphalia, in Prussia, he was the second-oldest son
of a Lutheran pastor in an imperial Germany under the authoritarian
Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was a grand Germany back then, a nation of
Christian church and state, throne and altar. Obsessed with the
Imperial Navy from an early age, by 1918 Niemöller was joyously
commanding a U-boat—an especially dangerous posting—having won an
Iron Cross First Class for the action he’d already seen. When the
war ended with Germany’s defeat and the kaiser’s abdication,
followed by the turmoil of the 1918–19 revolution that gave way to
the Weimar Republic, the profoundly conservative Niemöller was
appalled and resigned his commission.

After a brief try at farming, he decided to become a pastor like his
father, a secure profession in Germany with state funding. But even
during his theological studies in Münster, he did not fully retreat
into the cloth, as he yearned for the return of Germany’s lost
imperial glory, abhorred godless Bolshevism, and despised the newly
born German republic, its democratic, secularized ways, and its war
reparations. He led a unit of the Freikorps, the right-wing militia,
to put down a workers’ uprising in the Ruhr region and joined
various reactionary nationalist groups—including, Ziemann reports,
the first fascist mass party in Germany, for which he had to affirm
his purely Aryan racial descent.

In 1931, Niemöller arrived as the third pastor at St. Anne’s
Church, a prestigious congregation in the wealthy Dahlem parish in
suburban Berlin. He was 39, dynamic, and good-looking in a
sharp-featured Prussian way, married and with a large family. Both of
his fellow St. Anne’s pastors, Ziemann notes, had received the Iron
Cross First Class as well. The congregation included many Nazis and
their supporters.

Despite his extreme views, Niemöller never joined the Nazi Party
(though his younger brother, Wilhelm, a pastor too and his future
first biographer, was a member from 1923 to 1945, Ziemann reports).
But he eagerly supported Hitler’s policies for national renewal and
a promised re-Christianization of the nation. A month after Hitler was
appointed chancellor in 1933, Niemöller cast his ballot for the
National Socialists. From the pulpit that voting day, he essentially
celebrated Germany’s reawakening.

Niemöller might have continued along this path, “_Sieg
heil!_”–ing his way through the rise of the Third Reich, but only
a month later, the events began that would land him in a concentration
camp.

Under the leadership of Bishop Joachim Hossenfelder, a rising movement
of German Christians, which he dubbed “Storm troopers for Christ,”
threatened to Nazify the Protestant Church (two-thirds of Germans were
Protestant), melding the swastika with the cross, urging that the Old
Testament be dropped from the Bible, and denying Jesus’s Jewishness.
To this program was added a call for the “Aryan paragraph”—a new
article in German law that disqualified Jews from the civil
service—to be applied to pastors and congregants who were converted
Jews, thereby overruling the sacramental transformation of baptism.

For Niemöller, and for others, submitting to the Aryan paragraph in
particular would be heresy, a violation of Martin Luther’s
fundamental doctrine of two distinct and autonomous kingdoms: the
state for earthly governance, the church for spiritual—both
demanding fealty and obedience. It constituted an unacceptable
interference in the church’s realm, notwithstanding German
Protestantism’s history of being “anti-Judaic” (that is,
theologically antisemitic). Jews were held responsible for killing
Jesus and thus condemned to their unhappy fate. (Niemöller repeated
this from the pulpit.) Nazis, for their part, liked to quote from
Luther’s virulently antisemitic late-in-life tract _On the Jews and
Their Lies_. Niemöller, however, defended the independent authority
of his realm, where Jews could be transformed into Christians.

WARY FRIEND: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and anti-Nazi
dissident who occassionally worked alongside Niemoller. He was
executed in the spring of 1945._(Archiv Gerstenberg / Ullstein Bild
via Getty Images)_

As the _Kirchenkampf_ (church struggle) intensified, Niemöller held
firmly to this dual—but to his mind, fully consonant—approach.
While declaring his earthly trust in Hitler, he emerged as a rousing
figure of the ecclesiastic opposition, allying with very disparate
others such as the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the cultured son of a
preeminent German psychiatrist, and the venerated Swiss leftist
theologian Karl Barth. Both Bonhoeffer and Barth called for speaking
out against the Nazis more forcefully; Bonhoeffer insisted that not
only was the church obliged to succor all victims of Nazi persecution,
converted or not, but, if necessary, to jam the spokes of the crushing
wheel. He was clear-eyed about his sometime ally: “Fantasists and
naïves such as Niemöller,” he wrote to a friend, “still think
they are true National Socialists.”

He wasn’t wrong. In September 1933, Niemöller replied as follows to
a parishioner’s request that he publicly condemn the Nazi
persecution of all Jews, not just converts: “The Church does not
preach to the state, interfering in its powers (exercised justly or
unjustly), which also applies to the Jewish question.” He continued,
“I also affirm the relative right of our people to firmly fend off
the exaggerated and damaging influence of Jewry that has existed in my
view.”

In January 1934, an exasperated Hitler called the disputing church
faction leaders to the Reich Chancellery. It was Niemöller’s sole
encounter with the Führer. He wore his Iron Cross. His conduct at the
meeting subsequently became the stuff of popular myth, touted long
afterward by Niemöller himself. Supposedly, he declared that neither
Hitler nor any other earthly power could usurp the church’s
God-given authority and responsibility for its separate domain.
Ziemann and Hockenos both write that there is no evidence for this
heroic defiance. Ziemann calls Niemöller’s account a
“whitewash” of an encounter that in fact was disastrous from the
start: Hermann Göring, who was present, produced the transcript of a
phone tap that seemingly implicated Niemöller in conniving to use
Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, against Hitler on church
issues. The stunned pastor struggled to protest, but from then on was
snubbed.

“This time the U-boat commander has torpedoed himself,” an ally
complained.

After this performance and in the wake of the wiretap, the Gestapo
arrested Niemöller on numerous occasions and held him for
questioning. He was required to periodically report to the
authorities. The newly formed Nazified Reich Church repeatedly
suspended him for defying its edicts.

ENDURING ECHO: A woman carries a sign riffing on Niemoller’s
celebrated text during a protest against Mahmoud Khalil’s
detention._(David Dee Delgado / Getty Images)_

For the next several years, Niemöller danced a dangerous two-step,
shifting boldly between his double loyalties.

In May 1934, he and the embattled opposition finally split away as the
Confessing Church, proclaiming it the true Protestant Church of
Germany. Its manifesto, as it were, was the Barmen Confession, written
by Barth. The Nazi state was emphatically told that it had no
jurisdiction in the realm of Jesus Christ. Yet that very summer,
Niemöller was once again reaffirming his nationalist bona fides,
writing and quickly publishing _From U-Boat to Pulpit_, a memoir of
his submarine exploits and his struggles against the Weimar Republic.
By the end of 1934, it had sold 60,000 copies. Hockenos observes that
the author sent it to Joseph Goebbels with a note saying it was
written in the “spirit of the Third Reich.” At the Dahlem church,
remarks Ziemann, the pastor would receive the “_Sieg heil!_”
salute from parishioners, and acknowledge it.

Still, Niemöller was now speaking out ever more forcefully on the
church issue, drawing overflow crowds to his sermons—and gaining
international press attention. Come 1936, having well realized that
National Socialism was not re-Christianizing the country, he was
openly mocking figures like Goebbels. The Gestapo was ever-present:
Fellow Confessing Church pastors were routinely arrested, some sent to
concentration camps.

Around this time, Niemöller also added his name to a brave—albeit
strictly confidential—plea to Hitler (mostly drafted by others in
the Confessing Church) that called out the Gestapo and the
concentration camps and even antisemitism more broadly. It was
ignored. On July 1, 1937, the Gestapo arrived yet again at the
graceful brick Dahlem parsonage and detained him. This time,
Niemöller would be held until 1945.

While his arrest provoked international outrage, his well-wishers and
the press would have been disturbed if they’d witnessed his defense
at a closed trail seven months later. There, Ziemann reports, after
noting his war service and Freikorps doings, Niemöller claimed
(falsely, says Ziemann) to have voted for the Nazis even back in the
1920s, as well as stated that Jews were “alien” to him and that he
“disliked” them. He also cited his congratulations to Hitler in
1933 for withdrawing from the League of Nations.

Niemöller was cleared of all charges except one, whose time he’d
already served. But Hitler had no intention of letting such a
formidable antagonist get loose. At his order, his “personal
prisoner” was immediately sent to Sachsenhausen, the main
concentration camp for the Berlin region. He’d remain there until
1941, when he was transferred to Dachau, near Munich, until the end of
the war.

THE MYTH, THE LEGEND: A London artist spray-paints a statement adapted
from Niemoller’s famous quote as part of a World Press Freedom Day
installation. _(Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty
Image)_

A pattern now entrenched itself: the international veneration of
Niemöller as a defiant hero, to be jolted by the exposure of ugly
contradictions.

It needs emphasizing how lionized a symbol of Nazi resistance
Niemöller had become. Just in the United States, for example,
churches all over the country set their congregations praying for the
“fighting pastor.” One Brooklyn clergyman restaged Niemöller’s
arrest on his pulpit, then delivered his sermon from behind mock
Sachsenhausen cell bars. _The New York Times_ and _Time_ magazine
issued regular updates on his fate. _Time_, as noted, put him on its
cover as the “Martyr of 1940.”

pattern now entrenched itself: the international veneration of
Niemöller as a defiant hero, to be jolted by the exposure of ugly
contradictions.

It needs emphasizing how lionized a symbol of Nazi resistance
Niemöller had become. Just in the United States, for example,
churches all over the country set their congregations praying for the
“fighting pastor.” One Brooklyn clergyman restaged Niemöller’s
arrest on his pulpit, then delivered his sermon from behind mock
Sachsenhausen cell bars. _The New York Times_ and _Time_ magazine
issued regular updates on his fate. _Time_, as noted, put him on its
cover as the “Martyr of 1940.”

A lobby card for the 1940 film _Pastor Hall_._(LMPC via Getty Images)_

That same year, the first movie inspired by Niemöller’s heroism,
_Pastor Hall_, was released in England, adapted from a 1939 play by
the German Jewish exile Ernst Toller. (Ironically, Toller had led the
very short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic during the German
Revolution, which the Freikorps helped crush). _Pastor Hall_ was
brought to America by James Roosevelt, who got his mother, Eleanor, to
read a foreword for the US release. The film shows Pastor Hall being
brutally flogged in wretched concentration-camp conditions. This was
pure invention: Niemöller was never physically abused or punished
with forced labor in all his eight years of imprisonment. The Nazis
didn’t want to enhance his martyr status.

The hosannas that year occurred despite the shocking news that had
followed the invasion of Poland in 1939: From Sachsenhausen,
Niemöller had petitioned the Nazi navy to serve again. His request
was declined.

Still, his myth swelled. In 1944, Paramount Pictures made _The Hitler
Gang_, a taut, noirish portrayal of the Nazis’ rise, using real
names, told as if Hitler and his henchmen were gangsters. The film was
directed by John Farrow (Mia’s father) and written principally by
the Oscar-nominated team behind _The Thin Man_. It featured the
one-on-one confrontation scene mentioned earlier, with Niemöller now
upbraiding the foaming Hitler about the Jews, after having excoriated
him: “Do you think we’re really so contemptible that we would
surrender the sacred faith given to us by God and accept a political
program in its place?” More invention.

Between these two films, a book appeared: _I Was in Hell With
Niemöller_, by “Leo Stein,” who claimed to have shared a
Sachsenhausen cell with the pastor and recorded his humane bravery and
his regrets about Hitler. It’s still cited today; it was a fake,
from cover to cover.

Niemöller was actually in solitary at Sachsenhausen, though he was
allowed occasional brief, heavily monitored visits by his wife. In
Dachau, he also received visits. He was housed there with three German
Catholic priests in a separate facility for “special and
honorable” prisoners, along with foreign inmates with whom he could
mingle and share meals. On Christmas Eve 1944, he conducted a
profoundly poignant service in a makeshift cell chapel for six fellow
Protestants whose countries Germany was besieging or occupying. In the
war’s chaotic final days—shortly after Bonhoeffer was stripped
naked and gruesomely hanged at Flossenbürg camp for his connection to
the plot to kill Hitler—Niemöller was rushed away with select
others into northern Italy by SS troops, according to Ziemann to be
either murdered or held as a bargaining chip. Hockenos argues for the
latter. Niemöller was at last liberated on May 4, 1945, to
international jubilation.

FROM HAWK TO DOVE: Martin Niemöller attends a vigil protesting the
deployment of missiles near Dortmund, Germany in 1959._(Ullstein Bild
via Getty Images)_

Did the years of internment change him? In the immediate aftermath of
his liberation, it was not entirely clear that they had.

At a press conference arranged by US occupation forces, the celebrated
symbol of Nazi resistance defended his newly revealed attempt to
volunteer for military service from Sachsenhausen: “If there is a
war, a German doesn’t ask, is it just or unjust, but he feels bound
to join the ranks.” He declared—not as a critique—that the
German people weren’t suited for democracy, longed rather for
authority. He did not say he opposed Hitler’s political programs,
averring that as a cleric he hadn’t been “interested” in
politics. _The New York Times_ grimly assessed that, though admirable
in certain ways, the fighting pastor was a “singularly ineffectual
figure in a country and a world crying out for justice.” An appalled
Eleanor Roosevelt, Hockenos notes, wrote in her newspaper column that
Niemöller’s remarks were “almost like a speech from Mr.
Hitler.”

But then, another turn: Hitler’s “personal prisoner” was
“stunned,” he told an Allied interrogator, after learning from
American newspapers what had “really happened” with the slaughter
of Jews. That October, at an Evangelical Church conference in
devastated Stuttgart (in Germany, _evangelical_ just means
Protestant), Niemöller helped formulate the Stuttgart Declaration of
Guilt. German Protestants, he sermonized, were guiltier than the Nazis
for not having spoken out. “We are responsible,” the Stuttgart
Declaration confessed, “for millions and millions of people being
murdered, slaughtered, destroyed, thrown into hardship and chased out
to foreign lands, poor human beings, brothers and sisters in all
countries of Europe.” Even so, Ziemann notes, there was no specific
mention here of Jews.

A few weeks later came the moment that Hockenos credits for
instigating the extraordinary evolution that Niemöller would undergo.

It was at Dachau, where he stopped to show his wife his old cell.
There was a plaque commemorating the many thousands who perished at
the camp (despite its not being a dedicated extermination
facility)—starting back in 1933. The two visitors were shaken to the
core. As Niemöller would go on to repeat to audiences, 1933 was four
years before he was compelled to silence and ignorance by
imprisonment. Four years when he should have spoken out.

 
Niemöller didn’t resume his pastoral duties at the Dahlem parish.
Instead, he toured the country, expressing guilt for not speaking out.
Such expressions of guilt were not well received by his countrymen.
Especially when he pressed the matter further, calling on Germans now
to collectively take responsibility for the Holocaust, declaring in a
May 1946 sermon, according to Hockenos: “Six million Jews, an entire
people, were cold-bloodedly murdered in our midst and in our name….
We have to accept the burden of that legacy.” It was during this
time that Niemöller’s famous credo began to emerge in bits and
pieces.

All the while, more Niemöller contradictions. He railed about the
treatment of the German people by the occupation forces. He fiercely
opposed denazification as far too blunt and punitive an instrument,
insisting it would only further victimize suffering Germans. “There
is a new antisemitism in Germany,” he contended in a statement
quoted by Ziemann. “It is caused by the Americans letting Jews carry
out the denazification.” There were other such ugly outbursts.

Even so, America was clamoring—over the objections of some prominent
figures—for him to visit. In late 1946, despite vehement disapproval
from Eleanor Roosevelt, leading rabbi Stephen Wise, and others,
Niemöller and his wife arrived for an American tour—the first
prominent German civilians to be granted US visas after the war. For
five months, Niemöller barnstormed the country, addressing overflow
audiences in English. In New York, he met Reinhold Niebuhr; in
Hollywood, John Farrow, the director of _The Hitler Gang_, and Bing
Crosby, whose priestly turn in _Going My Way_ he admired. He was often
on the radio. He recited “First They Came” only once, at his lone
appearance before a German-speaking audience. His overriding concern
was to lobby for American aid to his shattered, starving homeland. His
tour was a great success personally, as well as financially for
Germany.

Back in the misery of his homeland—where he found himself denied
victim status by the German Association of the Victims of the Nazi
Regime, in large part for his statements following his 1937
arrest—Niemöller became the first president of the newly formed
Evangelical Church of Hesse and Nassau, which included Frankfurt.
There, he fought ferociously against denazification. At the same time,
as the chairman of the Evangelical Church’s foreign office, he began
to travel widely, then more widely, trying to reestablish to the world
the religious legitimacy of the German Protestant Church after the
horrors of Nazism.

ROADSHOW: Martin Niemöller delivering an address at the First
Presbyterian Church in Seattle in 1946, during his postwar speaking
tour of the United States._(Bettmann)_

or this writer, Niemöller’s globe-spanning travels were a major
factor in his evolution. From here on, the compass of the last four
decades of his long life would swing by degrees in an increasingly
radical—one might even say miraculous—direction. Perhaps the
committed nationalist was finally changed by his contact with the
wide, multi-faith, multifaceted world (an exposure that built on his
ecumenical fellowship behind the barbed wire of Dachau, which Hockenos
sees as a deeply affecting experience). Or perhaps, once the gears of
self-reflection and regret began to turn, especially after his visit
to Dachau, he did what few people do: He let them turn and keep
turning, pushing him ever harder in the direction of justice.

Bitterly opposed to the 1949 partition of Germany, Niemöller visited
churches in the Communist GDR, and then even Orthodox ones in Russia,
for which he drew harsh criticism not just in West Germany but in the
US, and which led to his ousting from the church foreign office in
1965. Still, he continued. He traveled throughout Asia and Africa,
coming to regard the Global South as true Christianity’s future. He
became a copresident of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to
1968, resigning midway as president of the Hesse and Nassau church and
eventually turning away from institutional Christianity. He attempted,
he said, to act in imitation of Christ in the world—declaring in
1975, “Like my Lord and Savior Jesus I stand by those who have been
abandoned by everyone—including the communists—the outcasts, the
wretched, the famishing, and the starving.” (He even said at one
point that pastors could be Communists.)

He became celebrated as a global “ambassador of God,” one who
openly intruded now into the realm of the state, an Iron Cross hero
turned high-profile pacifist (after a harrowing 1954 conversation
about the hydrogen bomb with the Nobel Prize–winning nuclear chemist
Otto Hahn) and Gandhi admirer—a vocal exponent of social justice,
anti-nationalism, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism and an opponent of
apartheid. He shared a stage with Martin Luther King Jr., met with and
praised Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War. He became a prominent
fixture of the international anti-nuclear movement and accepted the
Lenin Peace Prize. A constant critic of West Germany and its
rearmament, he backed the country’s youthful upheaval of 1968.

“Aged 90, I am now a revolutionary,” he told _Stern_ magazine in
1982, two years before his death. “If I live to be a hundred, maybe
I’ll be an anarchist.”

While Hockenos salutes the extraordinary transformation of this German
ultra-conservative, with his “repellent” early views, into someone
with the courage to change deeply held beliefs, Ziemann is not so
forgiving. He traces unsettling continuities, with particularly acute
sensitivity to Niemöller’s behavior regarding Jews. In all his
globe-trotting, for instance, the ambassador of God somehow never set
foot in Israel. Ziemann indicts Niemöller for remarks such as saying
in 1963 that he couldn’t hold it against Arabs if they felt
“threatened and under attack” by the Jewish state. Or, in 1967,
privately expressing that if he were an Arab, he’d be
“antisemitic” about an “alien people founding a state on his
soil.”

One might agree with the gist of Niemöller’s remarks (though
Ziemann doesn’t), but given his history, there remains a lingering
odor of antisemitism.

How, then, do we weigh the case of Martin Niemöller? Certainly he
remains… “complicated.” Contradictions unresolved. For all the
bravery he showed and the good he promoted, for all the ways he
evolved, he remains flawed. A challenge.

And yet this challenge is instructive.

When the current age of cruelty finally comes to an end, some of its
enablers will no doubt proclaim their regrets. Perhaps they’ll
lament that they didn’t understand the full import of Trump’s
actions. Or that they failed to resist because they didn’t see
themselves reflected in MAGA’s victims. Or were afraid they’d be
next. But whatever their explanations, we would do well to remember
Niemöller’s example and attend not only to their words but to
what’s left unsaid and unacknowledged. To what, we should ask, are
they actually confessing? For what are they apologizing? And, most
crucial of all, what will they then do about it?

Nor should we stop there. Martin Niemöller’s story also demands
something of us—we who nod righteously as we read his mea culpa,
satisfied in the knowledge that we are not silent, that we understand.
As we now know, Niemöller’s story is a warning not merely about
indifference but about the sneaky, self-deluding power of complicity.
It is a reminder to question the real strength of our empathy, and to
resist the lure of complacency. Most of all, perhaps, it is a prod, a
spur to do the explicit thing the German pastor mentions only
figuratively when he laments his failure to “speak out.” We must
act.

Barry Yourgrau is a fiction writer (_Wearing Dad’s Head_, _The
Sadness of Sex_), memoirist (_Mess_), and journalist. His website is
barryyourgrau.com [[link removed]].

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