Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, The Pastor Who Defied the Nazis by Matthew D. Hockenos (review)

Already in the 1930s, a mythology took shape around the German theologian, Lutheran clergyman, and cofounder of the Confessing Church, Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). Lionized as a resistance hero, Niemöller came to feature prominently in virtually every account of the Protestant Church Struggle and eventually in almost all larger accounts of National Socialism. He appeared as the conscience of the "true" German nation and spirit unseduced by Nazism. Even today, schoolchildren learn of the famous he lines he penned—in several versions—in the late 1940s which begin: "First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist," and conclude: "Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." Early biographies, the last appearing in 1984, the year of his death, unsurprisingly served up hagiography, even though Niemöller throughout his lifetime had proven to be an extremely controversial figure who had earned the enmity and scorn of the American State Department in the late 1940s and 1950s because of his desire for peace with the Soviet Union.

Matthew Hockenos's new biography provides a much-needed critical reappraisal. "Once the legend is stripped away," he writes, "Niemöller necessarily disappoints"; for he was "on the wrong side of history for much of his life" (264). Based on an analysis of Niemöller's papers, this biography retraces its subject's missteps. Before launching his theology studies in 1920 at the University of Münster, Niemöller had eagerly served in the German navy in World War I as a submarine commander, even boasting of his success in torpedoing enemy and neutral ships in attacks that claimed dozens of lives. Niemöller was—and remained for crucial portions of his life—an ardent nationalist. His faith in the fatherland remained unflagging even in the aftermath of German defeat. His decision to follow in the footsteps of his father and become a Lutheran pastor was inspired not by a strong sense of vocation (we learn that he had taken up farming in 1919) but by nationalist zeal. Niemöller despised the seemingly godless Weimar Republic and saw Christianity as the best means to renew the beleaguered German nation. This nationalism never left him, even during the darkest years of the Third Reich. He praised Hitler for his foreign policy successes. From his concentration camp cell in 1939, he volunteered for the navy, demanding in vain to be reinstated to his old naval post. Six further years of imprisonment did not disabuse him of his conservative principles. In June 1945, he infamously declared at an American-led press conference in Naples that Germany was not yet ready for democracy.

His conservatism was accompanied by antisemitism, as was the case for many of his fellow Protestant clergymen, including even those with prominent roles in the Confessing Church. In the fall of 1933, he argued that Christians needed to accept converted Jews into their churches, but only "at great sacrifice, given all that the church had 'to bear under their influence'" (100). But Hockenos explains that Niemöller was not a racial antisemite; he harbored instead a theological anti-Judaism, preaching in 1935 that the Jews "brought the Christ of God to the cross" (117).

What then led a conservative Lutheran, one loath to challenge state authority and so ostensibly unsuited for resistance, to be perceived by no less than Hitler as the ringleader of clerical opposition? Hockenos shows that it was Niemöller's anger at attempts to Nazify the church and to impose on German Protestantism ideas he deemed heretical: the excision of the Old Testament, the insistence that Jesus was an Aryan-Nordic warrior, and a "large-scale propaganda scheme for Christianity" (82). Niemöller accordingly came to oppose the Nazis' implementation of the Aryan paragraphs, which in the...