Martin Niemoeller on the failure of the churches to protest Nazi crimes

[bobbieinok]

http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm

(introduction to the webpage)

Martin Niemöller's
famous quotation:
"First they came for the Communists"
What did Niemoeller really say?
Which groups did he name?
In what order?
a page by Harold Marcuse, UC Santa Barbara
created Sept. 12, 2000, last updated March 25, 2005

I still haven't been able to come up with a definitive answer to the first question, but do have some preliminary answers to the other two

.....

later Niemoeller statement on the page (translation of the original German)

In a 6 January 1946 speech delivered for representatives of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt (published in Die deutsche Schuld, Not und Hoffnung, Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1946, pp. 1-19, quotation on pp. 5ff),

....

...Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible? The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.
…
We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934 - there must have been a possibility - 14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30-40,000 million people, because that is what it is costing us now.