Then They Came for Me
Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out-Because I was not a Communist . . . "
Few today recognize the name Martin Niemör, though many know his famous confession. In Then They Came for Me, Matthew Hockenos traces Niemör's evolution from a Nazi supporter to a determined opponent of Hitler, revealing him to be a more complicated figure than previously understood.
Born into a traditionalist Prussian family, Niemör welcomed Hitler's rise to power as an opportunity for national rebirth. Yet when the regime attempted to seize control of the Protestant Church, he helped lead the opposition and was soon arrested. After spending the war in concentration camps, Niemör emerged a controversial figure: to his supporters he was a modern Luther, while his critics, including President Harry Truman, saw him as an unrepentant nationalist.
A nuanced portrait of courage in the face of evil, Then They Came for Me puts the question to us today: What would I have done?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
History professor Hockenos (A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past) provides a "revisionist" biography of Martin Niem ller (1892 1984), the dissident German Lutheran pastor best known for his postwar confession from which the book's title is taken. He shows Niem ller as a staunch German nationalist up to and during the Third Reich he voted for the Nazis in three elections, offered to serve in the German navy in 1939, and "showed contempt for groups he deemed anti-Christian and anti-German" who also paid a heavy price for courageously resisting attempts to Aryanize the church: he was "Hitler's prisoner" from 1937 to 1945 in two concentration camps, including years of solitary confinement. Still, the Confessing Church, the dissident wing of the Lutherans that Niem ller helped lead, was concerned only with the persecution of the churches and had little to say about the increasingly lethal persecution of the Jews. Hockenos shows that, after the war, Niem ller came to renounce German nationalism, slowly becoming a pacifist and acknowledging the Protestant Church's history of anti-Semitism and silence during the Holocaust. But his credibility in the last decades of his life was undermined by his na vet about the evils of Soviet communism. Hockenos's impressively nuanced study captures a major 20th-century religious leader and his contradictions.)
