Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 3 (Fall 2025)
From Warning to Weapon: Martin Niemöller’s Confession in America’s Culture Wars
By Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College
Americans have weaponized Martin Niemöller’s famous quotation in their culture wars. What began as a confession of moral failure during the Holocaust now serves as ammunition in America’s culture wars. The journey reveals how even the most sacred historical warnings can become weapons when civic discourse fractures along ideological lines.
The Original Context: 1946
The irony runs deep: America’s most quoted Holocaust warning was never actually spoken in its famous form by the man who inspired it. His original prose versions, delivered across Germany in 1946, listed varying groups—communists, the incurably ill, Jews—while consistently emphasizing the church’s failure to defend the vulnerable. There is no evidence that Niemöller ever articulated the confession in its famous repetitive, rhythmic, poetic form. This structure emerged later, in the early 1950s, through countless retellings, making it both more memorable and more adaptable to political purposes. The confession’s power lay in its simplicity: a binary structure of oppressor and victim, with the implicit challenge to reject the comfortable role of bystander.
Niemöller’s confession of complacency—later crystallized in the words “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out…”—materialized in 1946 only after months of pressure by colleagues from abroad for Niemöller to acknowledge German guilt. The American Lutheran, Stewart Herman, told him international aid depended on an admission of responsibility. And, Niemöller’s Swiss colleague and friend Karl Barth counseled him for months on a public statement acknowledging German Protestant guilt. One also detects in Niemöller’s various statements before and after the October 1945 Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt that some degree of moral reflection drove him forward. Yet this moral reckoning remained incomplete. He still harbored prejudices against Jews in the postwar period. He continued to resist acknowledgement of complicity in Nazi crimes. And, he did very little practically to make amends for his failings.
The Rise to Icon Status
Despite Niemöller’s political conservatism in the immediate postwar years and continued prejudices his famous words seemed to condemn, progressives in the U.S. adopted it as a battle cry. How did these words achieve such iconic status despite their problematic origins? The quote’s adoption into the American moral lexicon happened gradually through the 1960s and 1970s, promoted by progressive activists and sympathetic lawmakers from both parties who saw its universal message about standing up for the vulnerable. It took the wildly popular advice columnist, Pauline (Friedman) Phillips, writing under the pen name Abigail Van Buren, to bring Niemöller into mainstream households. In the 1970s and 80s her Dear Abby syndicated column appeared in thousands of newspapers and was read by tens of millions. Between 1977 and 1994, Phillips invoked the Niemöller quotation at least ten times in her column, making it one of her go-to tools for addressing issues of prejudice and social responsibility. The quotation found its most permanent home when it was displayed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, cementing its place in American conscience. By the 1990s, the words had transcended their original context, becoming a moral touchstone that Americans across the political spectrum could invoke. This widespread recognition made the quotation ripe for appropriation once American politics began to fracture more dramatically.
Post-9/11 Appropriation
The September 11 terrorist attacks marked a turning point in how Americans deployed Niemöller’s words. Over the five post-9/11 presidential administrations, the quotation demonstrated its remarkable flexibility, adapting to each era’s particular political battles—from post-9/11 security measures to healthcare reform, from immigration crackdowns to pandemic mandates.
Conservative commentators like Glenn Beck discovered in the quotation a powerful rhetorical weapon for the “War on Terror.” Beck invoked the Niemöller quote in his 2003 book to imply that those he called “Islamo-fascists” are coming for us, casting Muslims broadly as potential threats while positioning patriotic Americans as the endangered victims. This represented a fundamental inversion of Niemöller’s original meaning—rather than defending vulnerable minorities like American Muslims who faced backlash, the quotation was used to cast the powerful as victims of an existential threat.
Ann Coulter took this rhetorical strategy even further in her 2007 response to liberal opposition to David Horowitz’s “Islamo-fascist Awareness Week” campus tour. Twisting Niemöller’s words into a persecution narrative where conservatives were the victims, she wrote:
First they came for Rush Limbaugh, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t Rush Limbaugh; And then they came for Ann Coulter, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t Ann Coulter; And then they came for David Horowitz and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t David Horowitz; And then … they came for me … And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
Progressives mounted their own Niemöller-inspired responses, defending Muslims, immigrants, and civil liberties against what they viewed as Bush’s wartime overreach. The Patriot Act’s sweeping surveillance powers triggered thousands to gather in February 2002 for the “National Day of Solidarity with Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Immigrants,” their protest signs bearing Niemöller’s words beneath images of detained men who had vanished into America’s new security apparatus. Their leaflet ended: “Remember the tragedy of Nazi Germany when so many looked the other way as their neighbors were disappeared, persecuted and stripped of their civil liberties. What would you have done then? What will you do now?”—followed by the Niemöller quote.
Barack Obama’s presidency unleashed a tide of Niemöller appropriations by conservatives comparing his policies to Hitler’s. Under Obama, they cast government surveillance and healthcare reform as steps toward totalitarianism. The moral authority of the quote lent legitimacy to their claims of persecution that might otherwise seem implausible. Libertarian Ron Paul, for instance, strategically invoked Niemöller to condemn government surveillance of cell phone data, framing Fourth Amendment violations as steps toward totalitarianism and implicitly linking Obama’s administration to both fascist and communist oppression.
Liberal appropriations revealed their own complexities. While progressives invoked the quotation to defend Muslims and immigrants against Bush’s policies, they also turned it against Obama when his policies failed to match his transformational rhetoric. Progressives criticized Obama’s surveillance expansions and “pre-emptive prosecution” of Muslims, demonstrating how the quotation’s binary structure could be deployed against any perceived threat to civil liberties. Rabbi Michael Lerner in a 2012 article in Tikkun, “Slouching Toward Nuremberg,” did just that. After reciting Niemöller he warned, “God forbid something like that might happen in the U.S., but the signs of a gradual slide towards Nuremberg, and concomitant citizen apathy, are very much present in the current political milieu.”
During Trump’s first administration, the quotation’s reduction to a meme—”First They Came For…”—allowed liberals to fill in “immigrants” and conservatives to fill in “gun owners,” thus reducing a complex meditation on complicity to a fill-in-the-blank persecution narrative. When Trump went after the Muslim Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in 2019 for her alleged anti-Semitism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to her defense tweeting that members of Congress had a duty to speak up and defend a colleague unfairly attacked by the president. She included the meme “First They Came . . .” and a photo of the Niemöller quote from the USHMM. The backlash to using a Holocaust-oriented quotation to defend a Muslim woman who allegedly made light of the Islamic terrorist attack on NYC’s financial district was intense. The Nation’s D.D. Guttenplan, however, came to her defense with a piece titled “First, They Came for Ilhan Omar,” highlighting how the quotation’s deployment had become a minefield of competing historical claims.
Biden’s presidency brought no respite from cultural acrimony. Covid vaccine mandates prompted Wayne Allyn Root’s warning: “This is 1938: First, They Came for the Unvaccinated,” casting public health measures as Nazi persecution. The Dobbs decision overturning Roe triggered new appropriations of Niemöller’s words, with activists like George Takei declaring “First they came for Roe; Obergefell is next.”
In the wake of Kamala Harris’s loss to Trump, Democratic strategists debated whether speaking up for marginalized groups hurt electoral chances, prompting angry responses that they had fundamentally misunderstood Niemöller’s lesson. By 2025, the quote had become simply shorthand for “pay attention to this injustice,” divorced from its original context of personal complicity and moral reckoning.
Implications for Historical Memory
This weaponization of Niemöller’s confession offers sobering lessons for how historical memory functions in political discourse. Recent scholarly work revealing the extent and longevity of Niemöller’s antisemitism may further complicate the quotation’s moral authority, though whether this will reduce its political utility remains unclear. Indeed, if Niemöller’s original confession was itself primarily strategic rather than purely moral, it makes the quote’s later political exploitation seem less like desecration and more like continuation of a process that began with Niemöller himself. Adding to these ironies is the likelihood that Niemöller never spoke the famous words in their widely recognized form. The quotation’s journey from solemn warning to political ammunition demonstrates how historical memory can be simultaneously preserved and destroyed—its words remembered while its meaning evaporates.
The culture wars have revealed the quote’s dangerous flexibility. In a fractured democracy where shared moral frameworks have collapsed, even the most iconic historical warnings become weapons in ideological warfare. The quotation’s binary structure—so effective in its original context—proves too simplistic for complex political realities, encouraging a kind of moral narcissism where every political disagreement becomes existential persecution.
For historians, the fate of Niemöller’s quotation serves as a warning about the limits of historical memory as moral instruction. When civic discourse breaks down, even the most carefully preserved lessons from the past become ammunition for the very conflicts they were meant to prevent.
