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Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Pp . 313 + ix. ISBN: 9780197516447

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In the ruins of 1945 Berlin, American Christian leader Stewart Winfield Herman, Jr., worried about the danger of Communism to Christian civilization as he and other US Protestants knew it. Just as problematic, however, was the “German Problem” they had grappled with throughout the war years: how could Germany be both the birthplace of Protestantism and the country of Nazism—home to Adolf Hitler’s racial nationalism and militarism. And where did the theological liberalism of Germany fit into the picture?

This is the starting point for James D. Strasburg’s fine study, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe. It is the story of how, during and after the Second World War, leading US Protestants “identified Germany as the prime territory for creating a new Christian and democratic world order in the heart of Europe, one that could dispel any new totalitarian threat, whether spiritual or political” (2).

God’s Marshall Plan revolves around two groups of US Protestants. The first is the “ecumenists,” who worked through the powerful Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and were eager to develop a new “’World Christianity,’ an imagined global community that was ecumenically Protestant in its spirituality and democratically oriented in its politics” (2). Moreover, “they marshalled their spiritual and political energies to oppose any perceived ‘totalitarian’ threat to such an order—including communism and secularism, as well as Catholicism and Protestant fundamentalism—both at home and across the European continent” (3).

The second group is the “evangelicals” (often “fundamentalists” in Strasburg’s narrative), who “promoted biblical fundamentals and conversionary mission as the proper theological expression of Protestant Christianity. They also identified individual liberty, limited government, free market capitalism, and an America-first foreign policy as their nation’s proper political values” (3).

As Strasburg explains, his book “narrates the origins and history of these competing American Protestant missions to Germany and Europe.” More specifically, “it examines how ecumenical and evangelical American Protestants used the onset of two world wars and an era of reconstruction as rationale to spiritually and politically intervene in Europe” in order to develop their “respective world orders.” Beyond that, the book explains “how this spiritual struggle for Europe activated and advanced American Protestantism’s long-standing Christian nationalism—the belief that the United States was a Christian nation with an exceptional role to play in the world” (3).

As they worked for Europe’s spiritual reconstruction, both ecumenists and evangelicals drew on an American “‘conquering faith’—its spiritual impulse to shape, lead, and transform the globe through the spread of Protestant Christianity and American democracy.” In pursuit of this aim, both groups of US Protestants “mobilized for world war and pursued strategic partnerships with federal officials, foreign policymakers, and the American military. Through these efforts, they hoped to spread democratic values and Protestant Christianity to Europe, and as such, to remake the continent in the American image” (4).

But, as Strasburg argues, the competing agendas of US Protestants in postwar Germany both grew out of and reflected religious fractures at home, as ecumenists and evangelicals struggled over “the spiritual leadership of their nation and the so-called ‘Christian West’” (4). Moreover, European Protestants had their own ideas about the spiritual and social reconstruction of war-torn Germany and Europe, the most prominent of which was a “third way” theology of peace and reconciliation independent of either superpower. This, in turn, prompted some US Protestants to rethink their own approaches to world missions and global politics in the era of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, here too ecumenists and evangelicals clashed, and so “the spiritual struggle for Europe thus left American Protestants deeply divided and at odds over their global mission. It ultimately forged competing theologies of global engagement—Christian nationalism and Christian globalism—that transformed the United States, diplomacy, and religion in an era of world war and beyond” (5).

As Strasburg demonstrates throughout God’s Marshall Plan, when US Protestants grappled with rival ideologies—democratic liberal, fascist, and communist—very often,

their national and political allegiances overpowered their religious commitments. In particular, such loyalties often challenged their faith’s summons to love of neighbor, regardless of that neighbor’s nationality, race, or politics. Christian nationalism likewise clashed with the biblical admonition to prioritize peacemaking and to seek the welfare of the wider world. Finally, it undercut the biblical mandate to hold a higher citizenship in heaven and to declare a greater devotion to a kingdom that knew no borders. (12)

One cannot read this history and not be struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment. In so many ways, the fissures Strasburg explores throughout his book remain challenges at the very heart of American Christianity today.

God’s Marshall Plan traces this story from the aftermath of the First World War through the rise of totalitarian regimes on through the Second World War and into the Cold War that followed. With respect to the book’s title, Strasburg notes:

The Marshall Plan serves as an apt metaphor for the ambitions of American Protestants in Europe. As the American government worked to remake the continent’s markets and politics, American Protestants complemented these efforts through tent revivals, theological exchanges, and reconstruction programs designed to revive the continent’s soul. In effect, they worked to establish an American empire of the spirit. They hoped that exporting their faith’s values abroad and creating new ocean-spanning religious networks would provide spiritual support for America’s new transatlantic democratic order. (18)

Strasburg develops his argument in eight chapters. The first (“Spiritual Conquest”) explores the US Protestant response to the First World War. For ecumenists like Congregational minister, relief worker, and church leader Henry Smith Leiper, the German imperialism that led to war in 1914 required the antidote of US spiritual democracy in keeping with Wilsonian internationalism. But for evangelicals like the fundamentalist Baptist pastor and anti-evolutionist William Bell Riley, the problem was not German imperialism but German theological modernism, which required the solution of a return to the Bible, Christian morality, and evangelical mission (23). Strasburg explains the competing ideas of ecumenists and evangelicals by surveying groups and individuals as diverse as the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), President Woodrow Wilson, lay evangelist and International Missionary Council leader John R. Mott, Leiper, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong, the 1910 World Missionary Conference, German pastors Martin Niemöller and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, The Christian Century, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, revivalist Billy Sunday, Riley, fundamentalist leaders French Oliver and A.C. Dixon, and The King’s Business. But if US ecumenists “outlined a mission to create a new international system rooted in Wilsonian principles,” to make Europe “more authentically Christian,” and to “promote a democratic spirit abroad” (42), conservative Protestants founded the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association to combat “the doctrinal shallowness and modernist teachings of the Federal Council and German Protestantism” (44) and supported and supported “America First” Republican Henry Cabot Lodge’s US Senate faction which fought tooth and nail against the formation of the League of Nations. Racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-socialism, and antisemitism were also features of this movement of reaction against US participation in ecumenical Christianity and internationalist politics. As Strasburg explains, in the aftermath of the First World War, US Protestants were increasingly divided about global mission—caught between Christian nationalism and Christian globalism. Despite these divisions, however, Strasburg argues that “American Protestants still generally agreed that the United States was a Christian nation with an exceptional role to play in the world. … American Protestants worked to reshape the world through American values and outlined a vision for global spiritual conquest” (50).

In chapters 2 to 4, Strasburg describes the growth of US Protestant engagement with Germany through the economic and political upheaval of the Weimar era (“World Chaos”) and the turmoil of Nazism and its church politics (“The Lonely Flame”), and World War II and the defeat of Nazism (“For Christ and Country”). The rise of Hitler and the Nazi movement provoked alarm among US Protestants, whether because of its totalitarianism, antisemitism, and racial nationalism (ecumenists) or because its collectivist nature seemed all too similar to “Soviet communism, planned economies, and the New Deal” (evangelicals) (52). Strasburg notes that even as modernists and fundamentalists sparred in the United States, so too pro-Nazi German Christians and their opponents in the Confessing Church entered into a church struggle in Germany. American ecumenist Protestants followed these events closely, expressing concern over the unwillingness even of Confessing Church leaders to move beyond their own conservatism, nationalism, and militarism to oppose the Nazi state itself (58).

Here Strasburg discusses the ideas and views of Leiper and Niebuhr, and recounts Bonhoeffer’s experiences in the United States and the impact of his experiences at Union Seminary and among Black Christians in New York. Bonhoeffer returned to Germany “as one of the most resolute German Protestants in his spiritual and political opposition to Hitler and the German Christian crusade” (64). Likewise, American ecumenists supported the Confessing Church at ecumenical conferences and other events, such as the 1934 Baptist World Congress held in Berlin. And Leiper wrote extensively in books and articles about the menace of Hitlerism, arguing that only the universal values of Protestant ecumenism could support the democratic order that would combat Nazism and, more broadly, secularism.

In contrast, evangelicals saw the rise of European dictators as a portent of the end times. Viewing current events through an apocalyptic lens (Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelations), these premillennial fundamentalists were on the lookout for the Antichrist, believing as they did that the world was indeed descending into the chaos of the end times. Here Gerald Winrod, Riley, J. Frank Norris, and Oswald J. Smith take centre stage, with their attacks on Soviet communism and New Deal America. Of note was Winrod’s 1935 pilgrimage to Germany, during which he revised his views of Hitler and the Nazi state, in part based on the virulent antisemitism Winrod now preached. So too Riley, who praised Hitler for rescuing “Germany from the very jaws of atheistic communism” and blamed Bolshevism on international Jewry (75). Other fundamentalists did raise concerns about Nazism and its persecution of Jews, including Baptist churchman John J. Rice. For all of these fundamentalists, however, Christian nationalism was the antidote to both foreign dictators and dangerous domestic developments in both church and state.

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the ecumenist pastor Stewart Herman shepherded the “lonely flame” of American Protestantism in Germany at the American Church. Herman studied and travelled widely in Germany, witnessing the rise of the German church struggle in the early years of the Third Reich. He also visited Jews in Germany and understood their plight clearly. While he appreciated Nazi attacks on Communism, Herman was alarmed over political developments in Hitler’s Germany, and his own involvement in American affairs in Berlin earned him the attention of the Gestapo. Herman tried to remain neutral, but the arrest of Niemöller in 1937 pushed him towards the Confessing Church, and Herman became something of a spokesman for the Confessing Church in international ecumenical meetings, which its representatives were prohibited from attending.

From 1938 onwards, Herman’s ministry took place under the shadow of the persecution of Jews. Though he did help so-called “non-Aryan” Christians, Herman harboured anti-Judaic and antisemitic sympathies and generally refused to aid Jews. Christian mission to Jews, urging them to convert, was for Herman the answer to Jewish persecution. Only when the Nazi regime began deporting Jews in 1941 was Herman moved to aid Jews, though once the United States declared war, he was interned with American Embassy staff. Strasburg uses Herman’s story and references to Leiper and Bonhoeffer to explore diverse perspectives and levels of willingness to act among ecumenical Protestants.

The entry of the United States into the war aroused ecumenical Protestants (Niebuhr, Herman—after his return from Germany—and John Foster Dulles) to declare that America needed to responsibly exercise its power, defeat “pagan” Nazism, and establish a new global Christian democratic order. Herman went so far as to join the Office of Secret Services (OSS). He also talked up the Confessing Church as an anti-Nazi opposition movement, helping create a myth that would later serve the Allied Occupation well. During the war, ecumenists began to draft plans for a democratic and Christian order in postwar Germany, and its integration into a multilateral federation of nations.

American evangelicals also supported the war, but also “advanced their commitments to conversionary mission, liberty, and unilateralism” (104). Viewing the war from a premillennialist fundamentalist perspective, Winrod and colleagues initially opposed the US entrance into the war, promoting “America First” isolationism. Other fundamentalists stressed links between Hitler, Satan, the Beast, and the Anti-Christ, and so supported the effort to defeat them and hold evil at bay. As Christian nationalists, fundamentalists conflated God and country, piety and patriotism. It was during the Second World War that the American flag found its way into many Protestant sanctuaries (124). Prayer became a weapon of war and Christian nationalist evangelism a form of mobilization, as in the case of the 1944 “Victory Rally” organized by Youth for Christ (YFC), bringing 28,000 Chicago area youth and service members together. Fundamentalists also attacked “modernism” and the Federal Council of Churches, which it accused of “theological Hitlerism” (127). Another sign of the resurgence of evangelicals was the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) in 1942, which attempted to look forward but still opposed women’s rights and racial equality.

Chapters 5 through 8 carry the story forward, from the spiritual reconstruction of Germany (“Reviving the Heartland”) and the threat of Soviet Communism (“Battleground Europe”) to the attempt to create a new Christian world order (“God’s Marshall Plan”) and evangelistic campaigns in the time of the Cold War (“Spiritual Rearmament”). Ecumenist Protestants like Stewart Herman played an important role in postwar Germany, serving religious and political reconstruction agendas as he travelled about on behalf of the World Council of Churches, supported by the OSS and the American Military Government (AMG). With others, he hoped the German churches could serve a foundational role in the Christian and democratic renewal of Germany.

As Strasburg argues, “In occupied Germany, American ecumenists wed their ‘conquering faith’ to America’s newfound project of building the ‘American Century.’ Men like Herman and Allen and John Foster Dulles advanced religious and state interests in tandem and used their nation’s postwar primacy to build the foundations of an American-led new Christian world order” (132). They perceived an emerging “spiritual cold war against secularism and communism” and “worked to recruit German Protestants as Christian partners in their quest to establish a new democratic and Christian alliance against these perceived threats” (133). A new Reformation would transform the German churches into a democratic, voluntaristic, and activist force.

But German Protestants (including the liberated Martin Niemöller and Württemberg regional bishop Theophil Wurm) had their own ideas about the reconstruction of their church and nation, and often opposed US Protestant agendas. German and European leaders argued that they themselves needed to rebuild their churches and spiritual life. One key battle took place over the structure of the postwar German Church. Wurm and Niemöller clashed over the formation of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), with Wurm’s traditional state church model winning out over Niemöller’s more ambitious congregational plan. Another contentious topic was the question of German guilt, and here Niemöller’s “Stuttgart Declaration” receives Strasburg’s attention. The author rightly notes the silence of the statement on the subject of the Jews. A third challenge was denazification, which German church leaders chafed against.

Evangelicals responded to the defeat of Germany and the rising threat of Communism with calls by young evangelists Torrey Johnson (YFC) and Billy Graham for a “spiritual invasion” of “Battleground Europe” (156). As Strasburg explains, they focused first on “occupied Germany, where they preached their conversionary gospel and commitments to freedom and free enterprise,” supported by American military chaplains and fundamentalist military officers (157). Once again, theological modernism, secularism, and the rejection of the Bible and of Jesus Christ were presented as important causes of the German catastrophe (and American worldliness), even as revival and return to Christ would restore Germany (and America).

But whether ecumenical or evangelical, US Protestants partnered with the US government (including President Harry Truman personally) and the American Military Government to oppose a rising Communist threat. German church leaders like Niemöller, Berlin Protestant Bishop Otto Dibelius and Berlin Catholic Bishop Konrad von Preysing also undertook speaking tours in the United States, praising the democracy and freedom of the USA and hoping to generate sympathy and support for Germany and its churches. Moreover, they supported the Marshall Plan to physically reconstruct Germany as a parallel force contributing to the spiritual renewal of Germany, alongside the efforts of US Protestants. As Strasburg puts it, “In an era when American capital, consumer goods, popular culture, and military platoons poured into Europe and began to remake the continent’s economics, society, and politics, this accompanying spiritual intervention sought to transform Europe’s soul” (185). One place these spiritual and economic plans came together was in the reconstruction of German churches, so many of which had been destroyed during the Allied bombing of Germany. Christian literature campaigns and educational projects were also important. So too were US Protestant relief efforts to gather material supplies for beleaguered Germans.

But even within the effort to rebuild Germany, Strasburg finds conflicts between ecumenists and evangelicals. The latter group criticized the World Council of Churches—Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri project was a fundamentalist attempt response to both liberal Christianity and secular society. Evangelicals like Billy Graham also criticized the Marshall Plan itself, arguing it was “folly” and a “give-away program” rooted in “deficit spending.” Once again, big government and collectivism were the enemy. Evangelicals also rejected Truman’s Fair Deal programs, calling the proposal for national health insurance “socialized medicine” and a pathway to “societal slavery” (209).

Evangelical Protestants responded to the problems of postwar Germany most forcefully through revival meetings. In 1954, YFC evangelist Billy Graham held meetings in the former Nazi parade grounds at Nuremberg, preaching salvation through Jesus Christ. But Graham was also trying to convince Germans to support the US Cold War effort to push back Communism and protect Europe. To that end, US evangelical Protestants also strongly supported the US military. “Led by a coalition of free-enterprise businessmen, Cold War hawks, and conservative clergy, these postwar crusades rallied God-fearing Americans to defend their values of faith, freedom, and free enterprise both at home and abroad against New Deal liberalism, Soviet communism, and postwar secularization” (212). This despite the fact that many German Protestants resisted rearmament.

One intriguing element of this spiritual campaign against Communism was the Wooden Church Crusade, a plan to build 49 chapels along the line of the Iron Curtain in West Germany which gained strong support among US political and industrial leaders. By the end of 1956, 28 houses of worship had been built, including a few synagogues.

In the book’s epilogue, the author carries the story of US Protestant engagement with Germany through to the end of the Cold War. Strasburg concludes that if US evangelical Protestants were more obviously “America First” in their orientation, US ecumenical Protestants were also “quick to serve their nation’s interests and advance its global project” (238). As they tried to build a just and peaceful world order, they promoted a particularly American combination of democracy, capitalism, and Christianity abroad. And as they worked to Christianize and democratize the world, protecting it against totalitarian and secular ideologies, they did so by attempting “to rebuild Germany as the European cornerstone of an American-led Christian world order” (238). In their own way, they too supported American Christian nationalism. Thus the line between the Christian globalism of the ecumenists and the Christian nationalism of the evangelicals was in truth rather blurry. And Strasburg carries this point into today, arguing that “the challenge for many Protestant Christians in the twentieth century involved untangling their faith from the creeds of nation, race, and empire. That struggle continues to this day” (239).

In contrast to this Christian nationalism, German and European Protestant leaders espoused a Third Way in the 1960s, as men like Karl Barth and Martin Niemöller sharply critiqued elements of American capitalism, militarism, empire, and domestic social inequality. In some cases, this proved influential among US ecumenists. For example, Stewart Herman, whose ideas and work are central to Strasburg’s account, ended up denouncing antisemitism and racism, supporting refugee work, learning from liberation theology and Vatican II Catholicism, and embracing interfaith partnerships with Jews (243). To a large extent, however, US Protestants continued to struggle with racial equality, immigration, and other challenges to (white) Christian nationalism, even as they remained susceptible to the allure of political power. Strasburg’s concluding hope is that studying this history “might play a part in helping American Protestants foster and practice theologies and a style of politics that more fully reflect the ways of a border-defying faith” (252).

This is a fine work of history—deeply and widely researched and clearly argued. Strasburg’s grasp of the secondary literature on both German and especially US Protestantism is solid, and the notes are filled with references to books, articles, and speeches by Protestant leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, including the personal correspondence and papers of Henry Smith Leiper and Stewart Winfield Herman and other material drawn from church and state archives in Washington, Berlin, and Geneva, among others. With almost 50 pages of rich notes, no bibliography was included.

As for criticisms, it is not surprising that this is almost entirely the story of the men who led churches and spoke for both American and German Christianity. Women are virtually absent from this account, save for the Birmingham women who donated syrup to the German relief effort (195). Yet we know that North American women were substantially involved in relief and administrative work in the postwar era, as well as in Christian missions. Did they engage with the issues raised in God’s Marshall Plan any differently than did their male colleagues? More broadly, beyond attending conferences or rallies or subscribing to church periodicals, is there evidence to indicate how deeply engaged ordinary US Protestants were in the spiritual reconstruction of Germany? The Wooden Church Crusade is an excellent example of this. Were there others? Finally, one would wish for a little more background on some of the characters whose writings Strasburg quotes. To what extent can their ideas and statements be taken as representative of their denominations or constituencies?

Those issues aside—and some go beyond the scope of an already extensively-researched study—God’s Marshall Plan is an enlightening and challenging account of how US Protestant Christian nationalism worked itself out both abroad in postwar Germany and at home in the United States. An excellent contribution to the literature, it is also, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, a cautionary tale.

Conference Report: Martin Niemöller und seine internationale Rezeption – Martin Niemöller and his international reception

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Conference Report: Martin Niemöller und seine internationale Rezeption – Martin Niemöller and his international reception, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, April 27-28, 2021

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

On this topic an international conference took place on April 27-28, 2021, at the Evangelische Akademie Frankfurt. The conference was conceived by Lukas Bormann, professor for New Testament research at Philipps-Universität Marburg, together with practical theologian Michael Heymel, and was conducted in collaboration with study director Eberhard Pausch. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was held as a videoconference.

Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) is one of the most internationally known German Protestant church leaders and theologians of the 20th century. For some years he has been back in the discussion through the biographies of Heymel (2017), Hockenos (2018), Ziemann (2019) and Rognon (2020). Historian Benjamin Ziemann takes a particular position. He emphasizes Niemöller’s temporary closeness to German national (völkische) movements and problematizes his attitude toward Judaism and Jewish people, the attribution of his activities from 1933 on as resistance against the Nazi regime, his criticism of the Lutheran regional churches, and his contribution to the ecclesiastical discourse on guilt to 1948.

The conference, supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for the Promotion of Science and the EKHN Foundation, took up these topics in the new Niemöller debate. It presented contributions on basic questions of Niemöller research and on the reception of Martin Niemöller in five European countries and the USA, which were discussed in an interdisciplinary and multinational exchange. This was done in order to arrive at a historically and theologically reflected re-evaluation of Niemöller’s work in international perspective.

Section I dealt with the particularly controversial topics of anti-Semitism and resistance. Benjamin Ziemann (Sheffield) emphasized Niemöller’s racial antisemitism as seen in his connection to the Deutsch–Völkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund after the First World War. This völkisch antisemitism remained in place through the balance of the Weimar era. Beginning in 1931-1932, Niemöller embarked on a theological interpretation of Jewry and Judaism but continued to struggle with antisemitism even into the postwar era.*

When asked if Niemöller had been a man of resistance against the Nazi regime, Victoria Barnett (Washington) answered with a “cautious no.” She indicated that resistance was a complicated matter. Personality and a common language played an important role. As a “good German,” Niemöller had seen himself in opposition to the ‘German Christians’ (Deutsche Christen), similar to other nationalist Germans. Others, especially women, had been clearer in their opposition. The Nazi policy against the church had touched him as a pastor and in his loyalty to the fatherland and challenged him as a fighter, which he had been by nature. He had been seen as a successor to Luther who became a preacher of resistance. With regard to Niemöller’s conflict between nationalistic loyalty and Nazi church policy, Barnett brought his attitude to the concept of a “loyal resister”.

Malte Dücker (Frankfurt) suggested that Niemöller should be viewed from the perspective of cultural studies as a figure of memory. He distinguished phases of reception, which were characterized by companions of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche, or BK), church-historical heroization, and the deconstruction of Niemöller legends in response to them. Niemöller was portrayed as a Christian who confronted the rulers like Luther in Worms, or as a socio-political Protestant who appeared like a biblical prophet (i.e. Jeremiah). He was perceived as an authentic personality. In contrast, narrative contextualization of today’s post-heroic society shows him as an ambivalent hero with fractures and contradictions. An artistic form (musical, drama, film) could be suitable for this.

The lectures in Section II were devoted to Niemöller’s reception in European Protestantism and dealt especially with the period after 1945. Frédéric Rognon (Strasbourg), who presented the first French biography on Niemöller in 2020, made clear that his name is generally unknown in France today. Before 2020, only one book about him and one by him had been published: in 1938 an anonymous, hagiographically colored writing about the everyday life of the Dahlem pastor, in 1946 a brochure with four texts about German guilt, which hardly allowed French readers to understand Niemöller’s special situation. To this day, he is not recognized in France because he was German and a pastor, and especially in secular France there is a strong distrust of religious people. Moreover, for the Protestant minority, he is overshadowed by Bonhoeffer. But it is precisely the paradoxical character of his life and thought that encourages people to identify with Niemöller.

Stephen Plant (Cambridge) outlined how the relationship between Niemöller and Karl Barth changed from casual allies in the 1930s to respectful friends after 1945. For both, he said, the Lutheran churches offered a common front. Barth had seen in Niemöller “too good a German” and “too good a Lutheran.” After the end of the war, he honored him as a symbol of resistance and reaffirmed his full confidence in Niemöller when it came to the future path of the church in Germany and a confession of guilt. He also noted Niemöller’s “blind spot for church diplomacy” and admonished him in 1951 to concentrate his energies. The confessional synod in Barmen (1934) had made Barth and Niemöller colleagues, the church conference in Treysa (1945) friends.

Wilken Veen (Amsterdam) spoke about the reception of Niemöller’s appearances and speeches in the Netherlands. There he is one of the ten best-known Germans. Niemöller was very popular as a resistance fighter after 1945; he was identified with the Confessing Church and was acclaimed like a movie star during his first visit in 1946. Franz Hildebrandt’s anonymous writing of 1938 had been translated immediately. Although a nationalist, Niemöller had preached biblical sermons. His sermons in the Netherlands had been evangelistic and missionary, and only in his speeches had he expressed himself politically.

Peter Morée (Prague) illuminated Niemöller’s relationship with Josef L. Hromádka against the backdrop of the special situation of the Czech Protestant Church as a minority church in an Eastern Bloc state. Church and state were ecumenically isolated here after 1945. Hromádka had contacts with Karl Barth and the Confessing Church. Without him there would have been no ecumenical relations. Niemöller came to Prague in 1954; his visit had been in the interest of the Politburo of the Communist Party since 1951. He and Hromádka would have known that their friendship was determined by the political agenda. The Christian Peace Conference (CFK) had been founded in 1958 together with representatives of the BK (including Iwand, Vogel and Gollwitzer) in response to the refusal of the World Council of Churches (WCC) to cooperate with the World Peace Council (WFR), which had existed since 1950.

Section III focused on Niemöller as a preacher and theologian. Alf Christophersen (Wuppertal) problematized Niemöller’s position between Lutheranism and Catholicism. In his notes of 1939, there was only one church for Niemöller; his exclusive model only allowed being Catholic or Protestant. From his point of view, Luther’s mistake had been that there was no longer any magisterial authority; the confessional writings could not be updated. Niemöller had formed an ideal image of Catholicism. Later, he did not see a plural Protestantism, but polarized it through his declamatory preaching.

Michael Heymel (Limburg/Lahn) presented Niemöller in three ecclesiastical fields of work—as preacher, theologian, and ecumenist. Niemöller’s sermons from 1945 to 1981, unlike those of the Dahlem period, have not yet been critically edited, and comparative studies are lacking. Niemöller had always wanted to preach Jesus Christ as the only Lord and to reach people in the reality of their lives. As a Bible-oriented theologian, influenced by Luther and Prussian Pietism, and one who was concerned with faith and the church as a Christocratic brotherhood, he criticized an academic theology without reference to the congregation. As an ecumenist, he said, he worked for communion with Christ in all churches and the “brotherhood of all people” and adhered to the WCC’s programmatic objectives. “The time of the white man is over,” he declared, adding that one must adjust to an ecumenism not dominated by the West.

Lukas Bormann (Marburg) devoted himself to Niemöller’s approach to the Bible in the Dahlem sermons, first emphasizing the importance of scriptural interpretation in the sermon and the service in a cognitive science perspective as a religious ritual. As a preacher in 1933-1937, Niemöller stood in a unique way for the religious distinctiveness of Protestantism. In his sermons on Volkstrauertag, or Heldengedenktag from 1934 on, there was no enthusiasm for war and no heroic pathos, but rather an increasing distancing from the National Socialist instrumentalization of “heroic remembrance.” The preacher addressed a “we” beyond the National Socialist state, created solidarity among those who positioned themselves beyond National Socialism, and strengthened the individual. Admittedly, an ethical orientation in the sense of a ‘church for others’ (Kirche für andere) was missing.

Matthias Ehmann (Ewersbach) pointed to a forward-looking theological contribution of Niemöller to the transnational responsibility of the churches. At the WCC World Conference on Migration in June 1961, Niemöller, at the beginning of his term as one of the presidents of the WCC, called on the churches to show solidarity with non-Christian migrants. He referred to the image of the Good Samaritan and stressed that mission to people in need took precedence over church structures. An increase in churches founded by migrants was to be expected, he said. Ehmann praised Niemöller’s speech as a differentiated contribution to interreligious dialogue that took into account the growing diversity of the churches.

Section IV turned to the leading figure of the Pfarrernotbund and later church president. Thomas Martin Schneider (Koblenz-Landau) characterized the Barmen Theological Declaration (BTD) as a church-political and theological consensus paper and confession of basic Reformation truths, which was received differently in the two wings of the Confessing Church. The BTD did not contain a political program, but after 1945 it was claimed politically for different goals. It had been called the “sum” of Niemöller’s theology, although as late as 1934 he referred to theological teachers such as Wehrung and Althaus who were in tension with the BTD. He was concerned with the one ecclesiastical office of preaching, whereas the fourth Barmen thesis speaks of ministries of equal rank. Niemöller had no understanding for Lutheran concerns—the experience of Barmen was more important to him than the theology of the BTD. All in all, he only took up the Christocentrism of the first thesis, but showed hardly any interest in the other theses.

Gisa Bauer (Karlsruhe) looked at the relationship between Niemöller and the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau (EKHN) from the perspective of the history of perception. In the official self-representation of the EKHN, Niemöller stood for a political church. The radical wing of the EKHN had voted for him as church president. Pastors of this direction had been strongly positioned in Hesse; the regional council of brethren had elected him as chairman in 1946. Niemöller helped to shape the first thrusts of the politicization of the EKHN, after which he became its symbol. The commemorative publication of 1982 and funeral and memorial speeches of 1984 elevated him to the pantheon of the political church. It is difficult to separate the symbolic and the historical person, Bauer pointed out.

Jolanda Gräßel-Farnbauer (Marburg) showed how Niemöller positioned himself in the process towards equality for women in church positions. While he was initially ambiguous in the church synod and in 1955 still argued from the basis of creation-related biological differences between men and women, in 1958-1959 he argued for a law on women pastors, which paved the way for equality. In 1969, he even proposed Marianne Queckbörner, then only 37 years old, to the synod as church president, but Helmut Hild was elected. The EKHN still does not have a woman as church president at its head. How it would have developed if Niemöller’s suggestion had been followed stimulates the historical imagination considerably. Niemöller had taken a positive attitude towards women vicars in the church struggle. He did not share the anti-feminism of some representatives of the Confessing Church, who denied women the administration of the sacraments.

Finally, Section V focused on Barmen and the legacy of the Confessing Church, with two lectures examining Niemöller in the light of his relationship with two fellow Confessing Church members in the postwar period. Gerard C. den Hertog (Amsterdam) spoke about Niemöller’s and Hans Joachim Iwand’s common path from national Protestantism to the ecumenical peace movement. Iwand came from eastern Germany, was a soldier and became involved in the Freikorps in 1921. As a theologian, he presented a polemical Luther. Niemöller had known Iwand since September 1934 and had received his Luther studies, which advocated the doctrine of justification, in the concentration camp. As a Dortmund pastor, Iwand was committed to Jews; there was no anti-Semitism in him. Niemöller had been “the closest of friends” with him and had written to him: “We understand each other before we talk to each other.”

On the other hand, Hannah M. Kreß (Münster) made clear how the relationship between Niemöller and Hans Asmussen changed between 1945 and 1948. The latter had been involved in the Reich Church since 1933, was active at the Church College in Berlin and supported Else Niemöller during her husband’s imprisonment. Conflicts broke out in Treysa, where Asmussen became the head of the Evangelische Kirche Deutschlands (EKD) church chancellery. He was concerned that the brethren councils might gain too much influence among the Lutherans. In a letter to him in 1946, Niemöller had reckoned with the founding of the EKD. It lacked the connection to Barmen. He feared an understanding of ministry in the EKD that he considered to be hierarchical in the style of Catholicism. Asmussen had come into conflict with the Council of the EKD and left office in 1948. In that year, Niemöller had broken off his friendship with him. An important role in the alienation process was played by the disagreement over the church’s participation in public political activities.

Arno Helwig (Berlin) reported on remembrance work at the Martin Niemöller House in Berlin-Dahlem, which served as a peace center in the intellectual environment of Gollwitzer and Marquardt from 1980 to 2007 and was shaped as such by Pastor Claus-Dieter Schulze. After 2007, it became a memory and learning space. The former pastor in Dahlem, Marion Gardei, is now the commissioner for remembrance culture in the Evangelische Kirche Berlin-Brandenburg-schlesische Oberlausitz (EKBO). In 2018-2019, the house was reopened with a permanent exhibition covering the topics of Jews, human rights, social responsibility and resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. Niemöller’s work after 1945, however, is almost completely missing.

What remains of the Confessing Church? Who carries on the memory of it? Harry Oelke (Munich) took up these questions about the significance of the legacy of Barmen for today’s Protestantism, limiting himself to the German Protestantism of the regional churches. Four phases of the culture of remembrance of the Confessing Church can be distinguished: (1) a contemporary witness-supported communicative memory formation (1945-1970), in which church history was written by and about participants and, with the exception of Niemöller’s call to repentance, no self-critical remembrance was practiced (“Confessing Church myth”); (2) a politicization, polarization, and pluralization of Christian value concepts (1970-1989); (3) a canonization (1990-2005), in which the Confessing Church had become a part of Protestant identity. (4) The present perspectives (since 2005) have been characterized by the loss of contemporary witnesses, the end of the culture of excitement, an objectification of the culture of historical scholarship and, in some tension with this, a tendency towards moral evaluation.

The final discussion circled around open questions and tasks of further research. 75 years after the end of the war, there is a danger that the Protestant Church will shirk its responsibility for the legacy of the Confessing Church, especially since the EKD is planning a considerable reduction in funding for the Institute for Contemporary Church History. Who would be the bearer of the memory of the Confessing Church in the future was up in the air. Benjamin Ziemann made it clear that he was against renaming institutions that bear Niemöller’s name. It remains to be considered how Niemöller could be present in a contemporary form in the practical culture of remembrance. Dahlem, with its new exhibition, stands as an example of how the memory of Niemöller is possible in a post-migrant society.

Research will focus on clarifying open questions about Niemöller’s understanding of preaching after 1945, his ecumenical commitment against colonialism and racism, and his attitude toward the state of Israel. For this purpose, further sources have to be opened up for scholarship, such as Niemöller’s unedited sermons after 1945, the sources on his activities as president of the World Council of Churches or also as head of the administrative council of the Palestine Association. Terms such as ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘resistance’ need to be further differentiated and clarified in relation to Niemöller. When it comes to the Confessing Church, the concept of resistance should in any case not be too narrowly defined. Finally, theological and non-theological perspectives of the perception of the life and work of Martin Niemöller must be combined.

A conference volume is to be published in the series “Arbeiten zur kirchlichen Zeitgeschichte” (AKIZ.B) by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen.

* This paragraph was edited for clarity after publication.

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition (Munich: DVA, 2019). 640 pages. ISBN: 978-3-421-04712-0.

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

At Christmas 1940, Martin Niemöller appeared on the front page of Time Magazine as the “Martyr of 1940.” Since that same autumn, the film Pastor Hall, inspired by a drama by the playwright Ernst Toller, had been showing in American cinemas. It captured the story of the “Church Struggle” in Germany on celluloid, with little attempt to conceal Niemöller’s biographical details. Since his arrest in the summer of 1937 and subsequent transfer to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler, Niemöller had become a worldwide symbol of church resistance to the National Socialist dictatorship. Interest in his person continued even after his liberation at the beginning of May 1945. Despite the irritation that Niemöller provoked by making nationalistic statements in his first public postwar interview, he and his wife travelled to the United States for several months in 1946 and 1947, where he gave over 200 public lectures in 22 states.

To this day, Martin Niemöller remains one of the most famous German churchmen of the twentieth century. He is regarded as an upright resistance fighter against Hitler, who testified to his stance with seven years of incarceration in concentration camps, as a preacher who admonished German “guilt” and as someone who had transformed from an imperial submarine commander of the First World War into a pacifist, who during the 1950s eloquently and powerfully opposed the Federal Republic of Germany’s Western alliance, its remilitarization, and nuclear weapons. Now, 35 years after Niemöller’s death in 1984, Benjamin Ziemann, Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, cuts through the thicket of legend concerning Niemöller’s story and uncovers important strands of his life.

Born in 1892, Niemöller came from the home of a Westphalian pastor and chose the career of naval officer. Caught up in the national Protestantism of his time, he experienced the German defeat in the First World War as nothing less than a catastrophe. Only then did he decide to study theology, which he successfully completed in Münster. The book chapter on the völkisch and German national “student politician” is one of the most striking. Niemöller belonged to various far-right parties and associations such as the antisemitic German Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation (Deutschvölkischen Schutz- und Trutzbund) and the National Association of German Officers (Nationalverband Deutscher Offiziere) and counted himself among the enemies of Weimar democracy. He also personally held, as Ziemann comprehensively proves for the first time, an aggressive attitude of racial antisemitism. As a father of several children and with his entry into civilian professional life, Niemöller became more moderate in the second half of the 1930s, but initially his political stance did not change. In 1931, after seven years as the organizer of the Westphalian Inner Mission, he moved to Dahlem, a well-to-do parish in Berlin’s southwest. Like many German nationalist pastors of his generation, Niemöller welcomed Hitler’s chancellorship, the “Third Reich,” and the emergence of a “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) founded on Christianity.

Those disputes, which are treated today under the term “church struggle,” were crucial tests. As head of the Pastors’ Emergency League, founded in mid-September 1933, Niemöller became one of its most important protagonists in the second half of 1933 and gained importance throughout the Reich. Ziemann expertly describes the activities of Niemöller in the conflicts of the “church struggle,” accompanied by ecclesiastical, political, and personal tensions and breaks, and ascribes to him a key role in the debates of the Confessing Church concerning the inevitable consequences of Barmen Theological Declaration of the end of May 1934. He experienced the February 1936 division of the Confessing Church into a Dahlemite wing led by Councils of Brethren and a Lutheran wing led by regional bishops not only as a loss, but also as an opportunity for the (Confessing) Church.

His involvement, which led him to become increasingly opposed to the Nazi state and the growing state pressure on the church, ended abruptly on July 1, 1937, with his arrest. After a comparatively mild judgment by the Special Court at the regional court level, which would actually have resulted in his release, he was transferred directly to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. In the detailed description of his concentration camp imprisonment in the almost fifty-page chapter on Niemöller’s time of suffering as the “personal prisoner of the Führer,” two themes stand out. One was the almost-two-year deliberation about conversion to the Catholic Church, which he only finally decided against at the urging of his wife, in February 1941, a few months before his transfer to Dachau. The other was the “empathy for communists and other victims of Nazi terror,” which Ziemann exposes as a subsequent self-stylization of the postwar period. Rather, he demonstrates an ongoing anti-Bolshevik and nationalist stance: “Even at the moment of liberation from the concentration camp, he interpreted the defeat of the German nation as the fall of the West” (p. 356).

Up to the 1970s, Niemöller remained a public figure and a noticeable and by no means uncontroversial voice in the social debates of the early Federal Republic. Ziemann goes into great detail about Niemöller’s disappointment at the development of the postwar Protestant Church, which he accused of episcopal and confessional tendencies and of supporting Konrad Adenauer’s policies, which he characterized as restorationist. Rooted in his understanding of a “prophetic guardian role” for the church, this went hand in hand with his keen criticism of the founding of the Federal Republic (“conceived in Rome and born in Washington”), the decision to ally with the West, and West German rearmament. Biographically, Niemöller’s sharpest break occurred at the end of the 1950s over the question of war and peace. Under the impact of the destructive force of hydrogen bombs, the former naval officer—who, despite his pacifist criticism of politics and the West German military, felt committed to the ethos of an officer throughout his life—became the most outspoken leader of the West German peace movement, in the campaign “Fight Against Nuclear Death” (“Kampf dem Atomtod”) and after 1957 as president the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft). Only then did Niemöller’s Protestant nationalist guiding principles wear off, which in the immediate postwar period were still expressed in nationalist speeches and manifest in his participation in the mythology of German victimhood. Ziemann’s portrait of the post-war Niemöller is extremely multifaceted, describing how Niemöller, increasingly shaped by international and ecumenical concerns, dramatically shifted his stance toward the church and underwent a political transformation.. Ziemann, however, does not lose sight of the continuities: Niemoller’s persistent unease (which he never completely abandoned) with representative party democracy and media diversity , his latent anti-Catholicism and anti-Americanism, as well as his persistent culturally and socially fueled antisemitic resentment.

Anyone interested in Martin Niemoeller’s eventful life cannot ignore Ziemann’s extremely rich, brilliantly written, critical, yet balanced account. In the controversial and polarizing person of Niemoller—the “volcano” Niemöller, as the Bishop of Württemberg Theophil Wurm once put it—he also depicts the fundamental conflicts that marked the four political systems of the late empire, the unpopular and defeated Weimar Republic, the National Socialist ideological dictatorship, and the Federal Republic, which was in search of new ways forward. Using the example of the “belated” pastor, the “church fighter” (“Kirchenkämpfer”), the church president of the postwar Hesse-Nassau Regional Church, and the internationally-recognized ecumenist, Ziemann also reflects the fundamental upheavals of twentieth-century religious life.

The strength of his biography is also a result of the fact that he does not stop at the public Martin Niemöller. Without committing any indiscretions, Ziemann writes about the strict “patriarch” and family man; the restless, often overwhelmed and driven worker; the impatient, polemical, and self-opinionated disputant who also offended those who were on his side; and, last but not least, the one who was challenged, who repeatedly suffered severe personal crises. And he writes about Else Niemöller, his wife who died in a car accident in 1961 and with whom Martin had been married for almost forty years. One of Ziemann’s great achievements in his publication is that he acknowledges her role as a discussion partner and advisor, editor of his sermons, emotional support during his term in prison, and, last but not least, as the one who took care of the family during Niemöller’s extremely time-consuming activities as an organizer of the Inner Mission, as a pastor, and as a church politician. Benjamin Ziemann’s Niemöller biography is already a standard work.

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche, eds. Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2019). 268 pages. ISBN: 9783579085449.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (Retired)

In the first week of February 1941, while Martin Niemöller languished in the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, the London Times was one of several international newspapers to announce his conversion to Catholicism. The New York Times headlined this story more circumspectly: “Niemöller’s Friends Deny His Conversion: Say Imprisoned Pastor Is Only Studying Catholic Doctrine” (New York Times, 5 Feb. 1941). Neither version was quite on target. Niemöller had not converted to the Catholic Church; however, his study of Catholic doctrine hardly represented mere curiosity. It involved a serious consideration on his part to convert. This brief moment in Martin Niemöller’s life has received relatively little attention, though it does get mentioned by some, including Matthew Hockenos in his recent Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (reviewed in CCHQ, 25/1, March 2019).

This book, edited by Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann, has given a surprising moment in Niemöller’s life its most thorough explication. It also offers readers an edited version of the handwritten manuscript Niemöller produced within a period of less than three months during his four years of solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen. His assessment of Catholicism versus Protestantism, a document which numbers over 200 pages in Niemöller’s hand, now comprises 150 printed pages in this book.

Many or most readers of this CCHQ online journal will know at least the main features of Martin Niemöller’s life. He is one of the most famous and most important participants in the German Protestant Kirchenkampf (Church Struggle) alongside important friends and colleagues such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. He founded the Pastors’ Emergency League in the fall of 1933. He participated in the creation of the Barmen Declaration in 1934, and he played a leading role in the first three years of the Confessing Church. Niemöller was arrested on 1 July 1937 and spent the next eight months in prison in Berlin, awaiting the outcome of his case. Then, having completed the necessary prison time required by the court, he was not released but designated a “personal prisoner” of Adolf Hitler. Instead of going home to Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin, he was hurried off to solitary confinement at the nearby concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, where he stayed from March 1938 until July 1941. At that point he was transferred to Dachau, near Munich, where he remained incarcerated until the collapse of the Nazi regime in May 1945. Niemöller emerged from Dachau a famous figure and he quickly became a leader in the postwar German Protestant Church. His international stature also was high, resulting among other things in a stint as President of the World Council of Churches from 1961-68. After a postwar life traveling the world as a famous advocate for various causes, he died in 1984 at the age of ninety-two. (Personal note: I caught up with Martin Niemöller in 1973 and sought his friendly advice, but only via telephone.)

Martin Niemöller was not a theologian, though he knew theologians. Martin Niemöller also had a first career that gave him a portion of public recognition. Born in 1892 to a Lutheran pastor, he chose life as a naval officer. When World War I began, he commanded a submarine which supported the German cause by sinking British ships. His first burst of fame in Germany came from these activities, especially with his war memoir, From U-Boat to Pulpit (1934), in which he described his wartime exploits as well as his postwar turn toward the church. By 1933, when Niemöller began developing what became his high profile in the Confessing Church, he was already forty-one years old, a pastor in the Dahlem suburb of Berlin, a husband, and a father to seven children.

It is clear from Christophersen and Ziemann’s careful work that Niemöller pursued the possibility of conversion to the Catholic Church with great seriousness. By the summer of 1938 he was using a Catholic prayer book for his daily devotions while sequestered in Sachsenhausen. By August he wrote to his wife that he was “astonished by the richness of prayers and biblical readings” (“erstaunt über den Reichtum an Gebeten und biblischen Lektionen”) in the Catholic tradition (p. 9). By the spring of 1939 he was angered by the attempt of church authorities in Berlin to remove him from his pastorate in Dahlem, a form of discipline intended for the most active opponents of Reich Bishop Müller and the Deutsche Christen (“German Christian”) leadership in the Protestant Church. By July 1939, he wrote, “the Protestant State Church has never been a Christian church” (“Die Evangelische Landeskirche [ist] niemals christliche Kirche gewesen”), but merely a bureaucracy (p. 11, quoting from Martin Niemöller, Brief aus der Gefangenschaft, 61). Soon he was asking Elsa, his wife, to send him books by or about converts to Catholicism, people such as John Henry Newman. This mid-nineteenth-century professor at Oxford University was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1825, famously converted to Catholicism in 1845, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1847, and was created a cardinal in 1879. (Newman eventually achieved sainthood in the Catholic tradition in 2019).

From late August to the beginning of November in 1939, Niemöller began and finished the manuscript now described and printed in this book. Christopherson and Ziemann have had access to many sources. These include the document itself, plus letters Martin and Elsa Niemöller were allowed to send every two weeks, and records of the twice-per-month visits Elsa was allowed to make to Niemöller in Sachsenhausen, especially as recorded in notes Niemöller made after those meetings. All of these handwritten materials are available to us based on two pieces of good fortune. First, Niemöller was able on short notice to pack papers into his luggage when transferred from Sachsenhausen to Dachau. Then on 5 April 1945, when the Catholic priest, Michael Höck, was suddenly released from Dachau, he agreed to carry Niemöller’s “things” (“Sachen”) to safety (p. 39).

As Niemöller leaned toward the Catholic Church, it was based partly on his attraction to certain forms of piety in the Catholic faith. His primary concern, however, involved the role of authority. Niemöller was no fan of the tremendous variety of beliefs and emphases within the Protestant tradition, nor was he entirely comfortable with the fruits of modern biblical scholarship. Rather, he valued straightforward teachings of the biblical text. Writing to Elsa, Niemöller regretted about Luther “that in practical terms he abolished the teaching office of the church” (“dass er das Lehramt der Kirche praktisch abgeschaft hat”) (p. 43). He also envied the “apostolic succession” Catholics claimed on the basis of biblical authority, especially the text in which Jesus elevated Peter to a position of special authority.

It is clear that these pages in which Niemöller compared Catholic and Protestant teachings represented for him not just a personal inclination–plus his aversion to the wildly pro-Nazi theological claims of Deutsche Christen in the Kirchenkampf, of course. It also was his one effort to join the ranks of his theologian friends. He did so with some trepidation, not least because so many of his friends were such important theologians. Hans Asmussen, a prolific scholar and a close friend in the Confessing Church, stayed close to Elsa Niemöller as advisor and friend during Martin’s incarceration. Martin asked Elsa to seek Asmussen’s assistance and council and welcomed the chance to use Asmussen’s help. In May 1939, however, he also showed some recognition of his role as a beginner. As he wrote to Elsa, “Certainly Asmussen in my situation already would have written a thick book, or several” (“Asmussen hätte in meiner Lage sicher schon ein dickes Buch oder mehrere geschrieben”) (p. 29).

In fact, Elsa secretly worked together with Asmussen, Helmut Gollwitzer (another close friend and an assistant pastor in Dahlem), and Martin’s clergyman brother Wilhelm Niemöller to try to steer Martin away from his plan to convert. In all cases, they gave assistance and advice to Martin, but usually with small warnings or a nudge against Martin’s intended path. For Elsa, of course, the implications were the most pressing. She worried about financial considerations if Martin gave up his position and his career: “Then you can become a scavenger; and where are we left with the children? In that case we could not feed [or perhaps “support”, RPE] more than three” (“Dann kannst du Strassenkehrer werden; und wo bleiben wir mit den Kindern? Mehr als 3 können wir dann nicht ernähren”) (p. 12). During these months there were tears. There were requests that Martin promise not to make a hasty decision, or not to make a final decision without talking to her beforehand. After nearly two years of contemplation and indecision from July 1939 to the spring of 1941, Niemöller finally gave up on the idea of conversion. Christophersen and Ziemann describe various important reasons for this outcome, but conclude, “The real reason was the tenacity of his wife” (“Der wahre Grund war die Hartnäckigkeit seiner Frau”) (p. 22).

Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018). 322 pp. ISBN: 978-0-465-09786-9.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

Matthew Hockenos, a mid-career historian of modern Germany, has provided us with a new and much-needed book about Martin Niemöller, one of the best-known Protestants to speak out against Nazi church policies, who then suffered imprisonment from 1937 to 1945 as a result. This work, published by Basic Books, is carefully researched, well argued, very nicely written, and deserving of a broad audience. It also will reward academics and others interested specifically in the role of German Protestants in Nazi Germany.

For those of us focused on contemporary church history and Nazi Germany, Martin Niemöller is a pretty famous guy. Matthew Hockenos (one of the editors of this Contemporary Church History Quarterly) is fully aware of that. However, he begins his book by acknowledging that Niemöller’s so-called “confession” is far, far better known than Niemöller himself. Beginning “in the late 1970s and the early 1980s,” he argues, human rights activists and secondary school teachers made these lines ubiquitous. “College students adorn their dorm-room walls” with these words, he writes, and the statement is “prominently displayed” in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and elsewhere (2-3). Hockenos borrows a small portion of these famous words from Niemöller for his title. The more complete version also forms his epigraph for the book:

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

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 to speak for me. (1)

Hockenos is certainly correct to assume that millions of people who know these words do not know Niemöller. His book also makes the implicit claim that many who know Martin Niemöller do not know him well enough.

Part of the problem with “knowing” Niemöller involves hagiography. In our postwar search for Christian heroes within the confines of Nazi Germany, he naturally attracted attention. Niemöller was an important co-founder of the Confessing Church, that 20 percent of Protestants in Germany who resisted the Nazified distortions of Christian theology pushed by the enthusiastically pro-Nazi Deutsche Christen. Within the Confessing Church, he was a leader in what became known as the “radical Niemöller wing,” a rump group that also included the even more famous Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They were less willing than many in the Confessing Church to combine opposition to Nazified heresies (such as throwing the Old Testament out of the Bible or removing Christian pastors “of Jewish descent” from the clergy roster) with ongoing enthusiasm for the political leadership of Hitler. Hockenos comments, “Previous biographies (two in German and three in English, to date) have done little to probe the depths of this complicated man, preferring instead to present him in a mostly heroic light.” He then describes his book as,

a revisionist biography that weaves together Niemöller’s personal story with the great dramas of the twentieth century that drove his moral and political evolution. It seeks neither to vilify him nor to add to the existing hagiographies, but rather to understand him and his confession and to reveal what his transformation from Nazi sympathizer to committed pacifist tells us about how and under what circumstances such reversals are possible. (3)

The second part of the problem in Niemöller’s biographical treatment, according to Hockenos, is also rooted in the hagiographic impulse: a tendency to focus primarily upon Niemöller’s life from 1933-1945. Hockenos devotes about one-third of his book to Niemöller’s life before 1933. During this period, Martin Niemöller mirrored virtually all of the characteristics that led so many Christians to welcome Adolf Hitler as a savior of Germany from its many troubles. Martin’s patriotism and reverence for authoritarian leadership had been nurtured by his father, Heinrich, a Lutheran pastor in Lippstatt and then in Elbersfeld, both in northwestern Germany. In 1892, the year of Martin’s birth, his father visited Wittenberg to attend the 375^th anniversary of the Reformation, organized as a special, national celebration by the recently installed Kaiser Wilhelm II. “With the crowds cheering, a young pastor in his robe and collar, overwhelmed by the patriotic religious experience, hurled his hat toward the kaiser’s entourage, where it landed amid the honorary guard.” This was Martin’s father. Though chastised by the captain of the honor guard, Heinrich later would tell this story and add, “But I would do the same again” (15).

In 1898 Martin’s father again had the unexpected pleasure of sharing an event with the Kaiser. Wilhelm II, nurturing the robust expansion of Germany’s military and colonial place in the world, organized a trip to Jerusalem to inaugurate on Reformation Day the German-built Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. Heinrich had to travel on a British steamer, hired by the German Protestant Church, rather than Wilhelm’s royal yacht. However, though only a simple pastor among more important church officials, he was awarded the last spot on this steamer by the Protestant Consistory of Prussia. Mostly thanks to donations from his parishioners to pay the necessary fee, this chance to visit the Holy Land for such an auspicious occasion became one of the most treasured memories of Heinrich Niemöller. Hockenos then fits this early event in Martin’s life, his awareness of his father’s deep love for Germany and respect for the Kaiser, into the story as follows:

The German Protestant pastorate claimed that it was apolitical and above party politics, but in fact the vast majority of pastors were intensely loyal to the Hohenzollern monarchy and supported right-wing anti-Semitic parties. To celebrate Reformation Day in Jerusalem in the presence of His Majesty was an unforgettable benchmark in Heinrich Niemöller’s life. That his trip was as much a celebration of German power and prestige as a religious pilgrimage is evident in certain entries in his ornate memory book, Up to Jerusalem. . . . The consecration of the Redeemer Church itself was a milestone in the history of German Protestantism . . . . Nothing could better demonstrate the alliance of throne and altar, in his view, and that of many others. (18-19)

A second phase of Martin Niemöller’s political education came when he joined the German navy, an experience he later described in his 1934 memoir, From U-Boat to Pulpit. Martin had dreamed of joining the navy ever since his toddler years when he wore his sailor suit to church on Sundays. He became a naval cadet at the age of eighteen, after finishing at the “top of his class” at Gymnasium (a common experience for the intelligent and disciplined Martin). He graduated and received his rank of lieutenant in 1913 at the age of twenty-one (22-25). One year later this placed him at war, and Hockenos’s chapters on World War One and its aftermath show us how the milieu and attitudes Niemöller imbibed from his father shaped him during that fraught period of German history.

Hockenos introduces the background to World War One by describing Kaiser Wilhelm’s great desire to make Germany a world power, especially including the creation of a navy to rival that of Great Britain. He then uses a quotation from Admiral von Tirpitz to give us a window on the logic: “The pressure exerted on England, just by the presence of our fleet—the threat to their position as a world power–better than anything else, ensures peace.”[7] This came in April 1914, so that the peace von Tirpitz thought Germans were ensuring by their aggressive naval build-up and their challenge toward England lasted a bit less than four months. Hockenos also highlights both the irony and the complexity of Niemöller’s exultant response, as a naval officer, the son of a pastor, and a future pastor, to his part in the sinking of British ships and the toll of the dead. He listed death tolls in individual actions from dozens to hundreds. In one case of 1916, after laying underwater mines which sank nine ships, Niemöller later wrote in his memoir (long after the heat and adrenalin of battle), “Revenge is sweet” (36).

Niemöller did not approve of Kaiser Wilhelm’s abdication and flight from Germany, to the extent that he himself considered his naval officer’s oath of loyalty to the Kaiser still in place until Wilhelm’s death in 1941. He also resented the advent of democracy and creation of the Weimar Republic. He and his brother Wilhelm, a (soon-to-be) fellow pastor and future historian of the Confessing Church, both sympathized with and participated briefly in the Freikorps, rightwing paramilitaries opposed to the Weimar Republic. Then, though it might seem jarring to those who know Niemöller as an opponent of Hitler, both Martin and Wilhelm gave early support to Hitler, Wilhelm even joining the Nazi Party in 1923. Both of them voted for Hitler and celebrated Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Refusing to give Niemöller too easy an out for his early politics, Hockenos writes,

He was a middle-aged man who had read Mein Kampf and knew very well what Hitler stood for. And even after he watched Hitler abolish the national parliament, ban political parties and trade unions, and persecute his opponents, Niemöller refused to distance himself from radical nationalism and anti-Semitism—even on occasion after 1945. (264)

However, Hockenos also admires Niemöller’s gradual change in the years after 1945:

His transformation from nationalist to internationalist, from militarist to pacifist, and from racist and anti-Semite to champion of equality all evinced a more general transformation—from provincial, narrow-minded chauvinist to compassionate, open-minded humanitarian. In this, Niemöller is to be admired and his evolution celebrated. Committed as most of us are today to particular beliefs, we would do well to engage with the life of a man who changed his—even if that effort ultimately falls short of the truly heroic. (5)

I have focused here on that early portion of Martin Niemöller’s life, that which tied him most closely to the world of his father’s German nationalism and rightwing politics. This is the sort of thing that helps explain his early willingness, and that of very many Christians in Germany, to accept the leadership of Adolf Hitler, even with enthusiasm. These products of Wilhelmine Germany faced the high costs and wrenching defeat of World War One, followed by the challenge of democratic norms and cultural openness under the Weimar Republic, including specific difficulties and disappointments experienced during that period. Hockenos tells us that, and it tends to put Niemöller and many of his colleagues on the wrong side of history. Hockenos also tells us, however, of the heroic Martin Niemöller, especially his courage and intransigence in the face of Nazi ideologues interfering with church government and his freedom of belief. Then Hockenos gives us four chapters devoted to Martin Niemöller after 1945.

I like this choice: three important chapters on Niemöller before 1933; three chapters on Niemöller’s struggle against and suffering under the Nazi state, for which he is rightly famous; and then four chapters on those nearly four full decades in which he was a world celebrity. Beginning with his release from Dachau, Niemöller was an important figure in helping the postwar German Protestant Church deal with its past. This began with the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt in 1945, followed by gradually facing up to the implications of the Holocaust and leading finally to a dramatically new theological stance on the relationship between Christians and Jews. Niemöller served as President of the Church in Hessen and Nassau from 1947 to 1964 and as President of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968. He was active in the international peace movement already in the 1950s, becoming friends with the Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, among others. He became known for his support of the 1968 generation and its liberalizing efforts, his opposition to America’s war in Vietnam, his visits to Hanoi, and his visits to Russia.

It is no surprise that Hockenos extends his examination of Niemöller into these postwar years and beyond. This was the time in which Christian churches began a dramatic reckoning with the past, spurred on, of course, by the reality that a Christian nation had murdered six million Jews. Hockenos shows respect for Martin Niemöller as he describes the nine tumultuous decades of his life, but he is right to say that this is no hagiographic treatment. It is rather, a clear-eyed, well-informed look into nine dramatic decades in German history and in the history of the German Protestant Church, nine decades that corresponded with and were impacted by Niemöller’s ninety-two years.

Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution (Wipf & Stock, 2017), 212 pp. ISBN 978-1-5326-1282-4.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

The origins of Roger Newell’s book lie in a study tour to the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig some years after the tumultuous events of 1989. But the book also represents a sensitive discussion of the many strands of argument and interpretation which have emerged across the English-speaking world in response to the tides of German history across the twentieth century. In such a meeting of personal and academic dimensions does Keine Gewalt! offer something of a personal odyssey as well as an exploration of the continuing themes of Church and State, theology and society, conformity and revolution in modern Europe and beyond. The fundamental question is never far from view: how might a church that was so effectively marginalised by a dictatorial power after 1945 become a focal point, and a catalyst, for a great movement of peaceful change across the whole of the German Democratic Republic?

This sense of observing and interpreting like a guest whose eyes are being opened by degrees to something new and unexpected is certainly one of the strengths of the book. It makes Newell himself something of a tourist – in the best sense – and equally an attractive introducer to readers coming to the same questions afresh. The vital presence at the heart of the story is the pastor of the Nikolaikirche himself, Christian Führer, who in 1989 opened the doors of the church to all people – and, in particular, to many who were disaffected by the Communist state – so that they could meet together, light candles, share what was important to them all and find new ways to insist upon these things in a world of repression and intimidation.

What were the roots of such a ministry and the historical and theological context in which such a moment lay? In a remark to Newell, mediated through his wife, Monika, Führer himself replied that much could be comprehended in the three names of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemöller, and Karl Barth. It was here that German Protestantism found an accumulating tradition of theological understanding which was rich enough to bear fruit in a new context and age. Was the Nikolaikirche at last a realisation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vision of a Church that existed for others? But, as Newell finds, this is no simple inheritance and there were others who played their part in this accumulating history of ideas and experiences, particularly Albrecht Schönherr, Helmut Thielicke, Heino Falcke and Barth’s protesting adversary, Emil Brunner. He views them squarely in turn, and often sympathetically, even where doubts are obvious. To be sure, there are few villains in this book and no grinding axes – and it is all the better for it. The eirenic tone never falters.

The structure of the book responds to this agenda, offering chapters first on Bonhoeffer and then Niemöller before concentrating much attention on Barth in successive phases of his life and thought. Barth, indeed, provides a cantus firmus for the whole study, moving restlessly through the foreground or background, first of National Socialism and the Barmen Declaration, then the post-war crisis and the Stuttgart Declaration and the Darmstadt conference of 1947, and then the deepening confrontations of the Cold War and the troubled (and troubling) search for a ‘third way’ between the worldly powers of Communism and Anti-Communism. It is the two final chapters which confront the peaceful revolution itself, an escalation of principled protest and public mobilization and a deterioration of political will culminating in the disastrously misfiring fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the GDR on 7 October 1989. If pastors like Führer had once brought the people from the street into the sanctuary, now they all took to the streets clasping their candles, returning violence with piety and securing an unexpected revolution which would transform a continent. ‘We were ready for everything except prayers and candles’, reflects a rueful President of the People’s Chamber, Horst Sindermann. The story still possesses the power to move, however much it may have been trimmed, qualified and modified by sober analysis and argument.

Newell’s discussion does much to show what long years of study by western historians and scholars have made possible for a creative Anglo-American minister reflecting on the place of theology in the world. The labours of John Conway, John Moses, Charles Maier, and Matthew Hockenos are particularly conspicuous. Other striking influences also show up in the words and ideas of Herbert Butterfield and of his own teacher, James Torrance. In a well-judged Epilogue, Newell challenges triumphalism and self-righteousness and observes what the world since 1989 has all too obviously become. Yet at the last he is not desolate, finding the figure of Karl Barth waiting for him with words of assurance, ‘When the great hope is present, small hopes must always arise for the immediate future.’

There are many fine qualities to admire in this book, but in its blending of undemonstrative curiosity, personal idealism and uncomplicated intellectual honesty it presents an admirable model of a kind.

Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

Review of Michael Heymel, Martin Niemöller: Vom Marineoffizier zum Friedenskämpfer (Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 2017), 321 pages, ISBN: 9783650401960.

Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. Victoria Barnett (Minneapolis: Augsburg fortress, 2016), 141 pages, ISBN: 9781506408446

By Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College

These two biographies by Christiane Tietz and Michael Heymel offer introductions to the life and thought of the two most celebrated leaders of the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) and Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). Trained as theologians, Tietz and Heymel add to our knowlege of Bonhoeffer and Niemöller’s intellectual development and theological orientation, although neither significantly alters our current understanding of their place in the history of the church struggle or (in the case of Niemöller) postwar German history. Tietz does a better job of avoiding hagiography but both authors give short shrift to anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in their subject’s life and thought.

Whereas a new biography of Martin Niemöller is long overdue, one might ask: do we need another on Bonhoeffer? Continue reading →

Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), Pp. xii + 212, ISBN: 9780802872272.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

In George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship, Andrew Chandler grapples with the ecumenical and political legacy of this influential bishop. Beginning with a description of the eclectic contents of one of Bell’s little blue notebooks, Chandler explains how it “captures a mind and a soul in perpetual motion in the world: attentive, enquiring, pursuing. It is a testament of Christian life in the middle twentieth century, wrought out of the turmoil of politics, war, persecution, calamity. It is a proof of one man’s decision to take his place in such a world, and to do so as a faithful Christian” (4).

George Bell was born in 1883 on the south coast of England, into a “secure, comfortable middle-class clerical home” (7). He attended Westminster School beginning in 1896, then Christ Church, Oxford, in 1901. Next he enrolled in theological college in Wells, in the West of England, where he was introduced to the student ecumenical movement and to Christian Socialism. Ordained as a deacon in Ripon Cathedral in 1907 and as a priest in Leeds in 1908, Bell returned to Oxford in 1910, where he combined a growing commitment to social justice with a vibrant personal faith. As he explained, “Christianity is a life before it is a system and to lay too much stress on the system destroys the life” (12).

After this overview of Bell’s formative years, Chandler breaks Bell’s ecclesiastical career into a series of chronological chapters which revolve around his positions and causes. Chandler begins with Bell’s time as domestic chaplain to Archbishop Randall Davidson of Canterbury (1914-1924), as dean of Canterbury (1924-1929), and as the newly appointed bishop of Chichester (1929-1932). From there the author examines Bell in his various roles as an interested observer and periodic participant in the German Church Struggle (1933-1937), as an ecumenical leader in a continent hurtling towards war (1937-1939), as a champion of peace in a time of war (1939-1942), as an active supporter of the German Resistance (1942-1945), as a leader in the postwar ecclesiastical reconstruction of Europe (1945-1948), as a key figure in the emergence World Council of Churches (1948-1954), and as an elderly bishop winding down his career (1954-1958).

Throughout these diverse phases of his career, the breadth and volume of Bell’s activities was formidable. Over a span of more than fifty years, he wrote, edited, and contributed to over two-dozen books, ranging from poetry and ecclesiastical biography to credal, incarnational, and pastoral theology, to Christian unity and the relationship between the church and modern politics. Along with his leadership in the Church of England, Bell was a force in numerous international ecumenical institutions, including the World Conference of Life and Work (particularly in Stockholm in 1925 and Oxford in 1937), other ecumenical meetings at Fanö in 1934 and Sigtuna in 1942, the postwar Treysa meeting with German church leaders, and the World Council of Churches, where Bell was elected moderator of the Central Committee at the first WCC assembly in Amsterdam, in 1948.

Bell’s activities were often centred on German affairs. Almost immediately after the rise of Hitler, Bell and his colleague A.S. Duncan-Jones, who was Dean of Chichester, monitored German politics and visited contacts in the German churches, in order to understand the nature of the German Church Struggle for themselves. Bell soon became a critic of the Nazi dictatorship, the pro-Nazi German Christian Faith Movement, and the policy of persecution against both non-Aryan Christians and Jews in general. Around this time, the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer was serving in a German congregation in London, and he and Bell began to develop a warm friendship.

Over the following years, Bell regularly spoke out against the Hitler regime and its supporters within the German churches. When the German delegation failed to appear at the 1937 Oxford Life and Work conference, Bell won support for a letter noting the absence of the German delegation and expressing concern over “the afflictions of many pastors and laymen who have stood firm from the first in the Confessional Church for the sovereignty of Christ, and for the freedom of the Church of Christ to preach His Gospel” (64). After Martin Niemöller’s incarceration in a concentration camp, Bell maintained close contact with the Niemöller family and wrote a stirring foreword for an anonymous biography of the Berlin pastor, in which Bell praised the faith of those standing for the Gospel in Germany. And when the Jewish refugee crisis began to grow acute in 1938, Bell spoke on behalf of refugees in his inaugural speech in the House of Lords, and also lectured publicly about the crisis, describing it as a “crisis of humanity” (69).

Chandler’s description of George Bell’s wartime activities illustrates both the breadth of Bell’s concern and the regularity with which his principled participation in continental political and ecclesiastical affairs pushed him out of step with his peers in the Church of England and British House of Lords. First of all, Bell argued that the church’s role in war was distinct from that of the state. The church was to be a universal body, “charged with a gospel of God’s redeeming love” and tasked with “creating a community founded on love” which would outcast the changes brought about by war (75). Whether in war or in peace, the church, declared Bell, should stand for principles like “the dignity of all men, respect for human life, the acknowledgment of the solidarity for good and evil of all nations and races of the earth, fidelity to the plighted word, and the appreciation of the fact that any power of any kind, political or economic, must be coextensive with responsibility” (75).

Second, Bell worked for peace, championing the vision of a federal union of European states and arguing for negotiation with the German state, even in the midst of the war, in hopes that the Germans would remove Hitler from power. His position was shared by few. Karl Barth felt Bell was “too much a British gentleman and thus unable to understand the phenomenon of Hitler,” while Archbishop Cosmo Lang wrote Bell: “You are an optimist and I am a realist” (81, 82).

In the same way, Chandler shows how Bell’s views on the morality of war were at odds with his contemporaries. When Bell opposed the internment of German and Austrian refugees as enemy aliens in the House of Lords, a fellow member wondered whether the bishop realized England and Germany were at war. When Bell tried to distinguish between Germans and Nazis, he was vigorously opposed in parliament and harangued by a Chichester parishioner. When he protested in the Convocation of Canterbury against the area bombing of German cities, he was shouted down. Worse still, at home in his diocese, he had become so unpopular that Duncan-Jones suggested he not attend a military service at the Chichester Cathedral.

Chandler does an admirable job of explaining the role for which Bell is often best known in German history circles—his activity as secret intermediary between the German Resistance and the British government. In late May 1942, in the city of Stockholm, Bell met with German Pastor Hans Schönfeld of the International Christian Social Institute in Geneva, whom he had known for over a decade. Schönfeld explained that there was a growing opposition movement within Germany, determined to topple Hitler from power and restore the German government to a Christian basis. A few days later, he provided Bell with a list of the names of important conspirators. Just after that, Bell met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Sigtuna, Sweden. Bonhoeffer also outlined the nature of the German Resistance, urging Bell to ask the British government for assurances that the Allies would negotiate with the German opposition, if it could seize power. This Bell did, meeting with Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, but to no avail. Chandler explains not only the government’s skepticism about such “peace feelers,” but also the way in which Bell’s continued lobbying made him suspect and undermined his mission further (100).

After explaining Bell’s determined efforts towards postwar reconciliation and the establishment of the World Council of Churches, Chandler assesses Bell’s legacy in a concluding chapter. There he paints the image of Bell as a man of many interests, causes, and campaigns—indeed, as a man of paradoxes. A member of the Establishment who “did not quite belong to it,” Bell “so often refused to conform to categorical expectations” (166, 170). He was an Anglican with an ecumenical orientation, an Englishman who cared as much or more about international affairs as English matters, and a man of deep devotion who lived large parts of his life in the world of politics. Influenced by high-church incarnational theology, Bell worked to bring art and artists into the life of the church, even as he also exerted himself on behalf of social justice for the working classes and hospitality for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution (170-171). Most especially, perhaps, he stood for principled and often unpopular positions, such as ecumenical unity and international peace in a time of nationalism and war.

Sadly, no new biography of Bishop George Bell can avoid dealing with the October 2015 allegation that Bell “had committed sexual offenses against an individual who was at the time a young child” (170). Chandler laments the fact that almost everyone associated with this time has passed away, making it virtually impossible to consider the charges in a normal judicial process. He does not in any way deny that these offenses could have occurred, but does the only thing a historian can do, which is to attempt to place the allegations in their historical context. In an appendix devoted to the controversy, Chandler notes that Bell’s 368 volume archive contains his personal notebooks and pocket diaries from 1919 to 1957, in which he kept track of all his appointments and engagements. He notes Bell’s “conspicuously high view of the standards required by his office,” and adds that Bell was almost constantly observed, that he participated in many disciplinary processes for clergy, that he maintained what seemed like a happy marriage, and that he worked almost continually in the presence of his wife, secretary, domestic chaplain, or driver. Chandler interviewed the only member of Bell’s circle still alive, his domestic chaplain from the early 1950s. This man “is firm, indeed emphatic, that ‘no child or young teenager ever entered during my two years as Chaplain, except on the day in January chosen for the parish Christmas party which he and Mrs Bell laid on every year for the children of the clergy’” (198) Add to this that Bell tended to work with his door open and often held private conversations outdoors in the garden and it leads Chandler to describe the 2015 allegation as “anomalous” and seeming to exist “in its own world, evidently uncorroborated by any other independent source” (199).

Andrew Chandler has published widely on the life and ministry of Bishop George Bell, and is the current acknowledged expert on him. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester is a concise, accessible overview of Bell’s engagement in the world of ecumenism and international politics during the turbulent times in which he lived and worked. It deserves a wide readership, especially among those who only know Bell as Bonhoeffer’s friend and English contact on behalf of the German Resistance.

Conference Paper: “Martin Niemöller in America, 1946-1947: ‘A Hero with Limitations’”

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ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Conference Paper: “Martin Niemöller in America, 1946-1947: ‘A Hero with Limitations’”

Plenary Session: Disputed Memories of Complicity and Righteousness, 42^nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, May 12-14, 2012.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

From the mid-1930s to the early 1980s Martin Niemöller was a cause célèbre in the United States. He is best known in America as the pugnacious Prussian minister who Hitler imprisoned in a concentration camp for eight years and after his liberation made the famous postwar confession:

First they came for the Socialists, 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 to speak for me.^{^[1]}

From 1946 until his death in 1984 Niemöller visited the United States regularly. None of his visits was as wrought with controversy as his very first. Niemöller first set foot in the U.S. in late 1946 to embark on a speaking tour sponsored by the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). For the next five months his every move was followed closely in the local and national media including the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time magazine as well as in religious publications like The Christian Century. The average American was more likely to know more about Martin Niemöller than about any other German living in the immediate postwar era. When Hitler locked him up in the notorious Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938 as his own private prisoner, churches across America and the world prayed for his release. When he toured the United States after gaining his freedom, many American Protestants greeted him like a rock star. Tens of thousands of enraptured fans attended his addresses and listen to him on the radio. But many other Americans, including some very prominent ones, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Rabbi Stephen Wise, called into question Niemöller’s resistance credentials and voiced their adamant opposition to his visit.

In the1930s Niemöller became a hero in the U.S. almost overnight as word spread about his leadership of the Confessing Church and his defiance of Hitler. Under sensational headlines declaring “Protestants Push Fight Upon the Nazis” and “Insurgent Pastors Disobey the Reich Bishop’s Orders” the print media followed the dramatic events of the German Church Struggle and its increasingly famous personality. Although much of the early reporting was misinformed and often hagiographic, Americans were inundated with news about Niemöller’s plight and the Church’s “resistance.”

On July 1, 1937 the Gestapo arrested Niemöller and held him for eight months in Moabit prison. He was tried in early 1938 for “causing unrest among the people” among other things. Although exonerated of the charges later that month, Hitler ordered him re-arrested in March 1938 and imprisoned him in Sachsenhausen as his own private prisoner. The Federal Council of Churches of Christ reacted to Niemöller’s imprisonment by calling on the churches of America to hold special prayer vigils and ring the church bells. Throughout his years of captivity American Protestants commemorated various Niemöller anniversaries: his birthday, the original date of his arrest, the day Hitler declared that Niemöller was his private prisoner, etc. Henry Smith Leiper, executive secretary for church relations in the FCC, exhorted Protestant ministers to “preach sermons on the modern Luther.”^{^[2]} On Sunday March 5, 1939, the second anniversary of Niemöller’s imprisonment in Sachsenhausen, Presbyterian Rev. John Paul Jones of the Union Church in Bay Ridge Brooklyn took it one step further by re-enacting Niemöller’s arrest. When pastor Jones mounted his pulpit that Sunday morning he appeared to be seized and dragged away by two men wearing Nazi uniforms. He then proceeded to give his sermon from behind a replica of a prison door with a barred window and “Sachsenhausen” inscribed over the door.^{^[3]}

Although there seemed to be no limit to the exaltation bestowed on Niemöller’s acts of defiance, there were, to be sure, some critics who pointed to his ardent love for his Fatherland and his enthusiastic participation in the unrestricted submarine warfare in World War One, for which he received an Iron Cross. Samuel Volkman, a rabbi in Chicago, however, took aim at Niemöller’s antisemitism, a topic rarely discussed in the American press. In a letter to The Christian Century Rabbi Volkman wrote:

I note from your issue of March 1, 1939, that the Federal Council of Churches is inviting the churches across America to give special recognition to Pastor Martin Niemöller and the cause for which he stands. As a rabbi, nothing would give the writer greater pleasure than to join Christian brethren in honoring one of the few exemplars of true religious heroism in our day. But in thumbing through the sermons of Niemöller [collected in the book Here I Stand], I came upon this passage “We speak of the ‘eternal Jew’ and conjure up the picture of a restless wanderer who has no home and can find no peace. We find a highly gifted people which produces idea after idea for the benefit of the world, but whatever it takes up becomes poisoned, and all that it ever reaps is contempt and hatred because ever and anon the world notices the deception and avenges itself in its own way.” (Here I Stand, p. 195) . . . [Rabbi Volkman then goes on to ask] Is the spiritual heritage of Israel a well of poison? . . . Who but the bigot will deny that [this] is as malevolent as it is unjust? Nor is this the only passage of its kind in the book. It is hoped that when the churches of America unite to do honor to the spirit of Niemöller, they will dissociate themselves from what can be regarded as nothing less than a particularly obnoxious kind of sanctimonious froth.^{^[4]}

What many Americans found more distressing than Niemöller’s antisemitism was his decision at the outbreak of the Second World War to volunteer his services to the German Navy to fight for his Fatherland. The editors of The Christian Century and Karl Barth in The Watchman Examiner tried to explain to their readers that Niemöller was, in fact, not an out-and-out anti-Nazi but rather a critic of Hitler’s church policy and that his offer to enlist in the Navy was simply proof of this.

If the American public was troubled by Niemöller’s “latest adventure,” as Karl Barth put it, it didn’t seem to dampen their overall enthusiasm for him. On December 23, 1940, Niemöller’s image appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline: “Martyr of 1940: In Germany only the cross has not bowed to the swastika.” The accompanying article quoted Niemöller’s famous challenge to Hitler, ”Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Führer.”

A flurry of books on Niemöller appeared in U.S. bookstores in the early 1940s. Popular biographies such as Basil Miller’s Martin Niemoeller: Hero of the Concentration Camp (1942) and Leo Stein’s fabrication I Was in Hell with Martin Niemoeller (1942) exalted his piety and courage. “Hitler may break his body, but never his soul,” Miller proclaimed to her enthusiastic readers. Ads appeared in newspapers proclaiming: “He Wouldn’t ‘Heil Hitler’ so Rev. Martin Niemoller begins his 7^th year in a German Prison Camp – Remember Martin Niemoller!!” Films, such as Pastor Hall, and plays, such as God is my Fuehrer depicted his heroic struggle.

Churches across America breathed a collective sigh of relief when they learned that Niemöller had survived Dachau and had been taken into American custody after nearly being executed by the SS in northern Italy. The Washington Post reported that “When Americans read that their own troops . . . had found the celebrated Pastor Martin Niemöller, it was as though a grave had opened.” The Post predicted Niemöller would become “the advocate of his people in their hour of disillusion and despair, a witness to the world that, if German human nature is capable of the most bestial evil, it is also capable of great moral heroism.”^{^[5]}

On June 5, 1945 Niemöller granted an interview to dozens of British and American war correspondents gathered at a hotel in Naples, Italy, where Niemöller was awaiting authorization by the Americans to return to his family in Germany. In the interview he acknowledged that prior to the Nazis coming to power he “had nourished the hope that National Socialism, if it had gone the right way, might have developed into a system for creating good for the German people.”^{^[6]} He told the reporters that Hitler had deceived him. He insisted that most Germans, including himself, were ignorant of the scale of the atrocities that the Nazis had carried out and shocked by what they saw when the Allies liberated the camps. And because most Germans were ignorant of the atrocities, Niemöller explained, they don’t feel guilty. He declared that his own objections to Nazism were religious and not political. He claimed that he was not interested in politics but opposed the state’s encroachment in the affairs of the church. He admitted that from his cell in Dachau he offered his services to the German Navy when the war began. “If there is a war,” Niemöller declared, “a German doesn’t ask is it just or unjust, but he feels bound to join the ranks.” He claimed that the German people were ill suited to live under a Western form of democracy and even suggested that Germans preferred authoritarian rule. And finally, he said that what Germans needed now was help, not punishment, and that he hoped to visit England and the United States to enlist Brits and Americans in his efforts to secure food and proper clothing for Germans. He concluded, “The world will be astonished when it sees how many good people are left in Germany.”^{^[7]}

Although many of Niemöller’s devotees remained faithful to him despite the interview, the new Niemöller had his share of critics now, and some in very influential positions. Marshall Knappen, Director of the Education & Religious Affairs Branch of the American Occupation Forces, had a sit down with Niemöller on June 18 and concluded that “Niemöller, the religious leader and Confessional martyr is to be clearly distinguished from Niemöller the politically-minded retired naval officer. The one is to be accorded the freedom and respect which is due. The other . . . is to be watched carefully.”^{^[8]} Sylvester C. Michelfelder, President of the Council of Lutheran Churches in the United States, recorded in his diary on July 26, 1945, “Niemöller has come into disfavor pretty much because of his unfortunate interview with the Press in Italy. There he said, ‘My Soul belongs to God but my body to the State.’ This in America and Britain has caused much offense.”^{^[9]} General Lucius Clay, the American military governor, expressed reservations in September 1945 about Niemöller’s politics, stating: “While permitting Niemöller to take active leadership in religious affairs, we have not felt it is advisable to utilize his services in other fields as yet. While his anti-Nazi stand was demonstrated fully by his own actions, it is still too early to predict as to his wholehearted rejection of the militaristic and nationalistic concepts of the former German state.”^{^[10]}

Ewart E. Turner, an American Methodist pastor who had served as minister of the American Church in Berlin from 1930-34, visited the Niemöllers in Germany after the interview and found him to be deeply depressed. His wife, Else, said that “He sees everything black.”^{^[11]} There were several reasons for his despair, including the harsh treatment of the U.S. Occupational Forces, the unrepentant nature of the clergy and the German population in general, the death of one son and the unknown status of another in a Soviet POW camp.

The reaction of the American was scathing. The debacle of Naples interview severely tarnished Niemöller’s reputation and led some to conclude, along with the New York Times, that he was not suited “to be a leader in the moral reconstruction of his country.”^{^[12]} His assertion that Germany was unsuited for democracy caused the greatest concern. “If a democratic system cannot be erected in Germany Europe will be right back where it started from, and Germany must be continuously policed or periodically chastened by war.”^{^[13]} He was, as the New York Times article concluded, a hero but “a hero with limitations.”^{^[14]} Time magazine opened its article on the interview with the following: “Pastor Martin Niemöller, the one German whom Christians everywhere had respected, shocked a lot of people last week” (emphasis added). The editors of the San Jose News concluded, “We think that Rev. Niemöller is correct in saying that the Germans are not repentant and have learned little or nothing from their defeat. He may be correct in saying they are incapable of democracy. If they are thus unrepentant and incapable of democracy, then it is up to the Allies to provide them for a long time with the authority and leadership for which Rev. Niemöller says they yearn-an authority and leadership that will keep them out of further mischief.”^{^[15]} Niemöller’s disastrous interview led many Americans to conclude that if Niemöller was the best that Germany had to offer then a long and severe occupation of the country would be necessary.

Eleanor Roosevelt went so far as to describe Niemöller’s statements as “almost like a speech by Mr. Hitler.” And she went on to say, “Pastor Niemöller sounds to me like a gentleman who believes in the German doctrine of the superiority of race.”^{^[16]}

Amid the controversy over the interview, Niemöller and his wife accepted an invitation to visit the United States in late 1946 and early 1947 under the auspices of the Federal Council of Churches. During the lecture tour the Niemöllers spoke to enraptured church groups in more than a dozen states from the Northwest to the Southeast. Ewart E. Turner accompanied the Niemöllers on their American tour and described the Niemöller’s visit as “a spiritual atomic eruption.” Turner advised local church leaders scheduled to host a Niemöller visit, “Don’t let this spirit of Pentecost take you by surprise. Prepare for it with all the traditional ingenuity and foresight of American church life at its best.”^{^[17]}

Although the Federal Council of Churches received hundreds of requests for Niemöller to speak in various cities and churches across the United States, the visit was laden with controversy. Even before he arrived, opinion about his impending visit was polarized. Despite the flood of protests received by the Secretary of State, the Niemöllers were the first German civilians to be allowed entrance into the U.S. under auspices other than U.S. Armed Forces. Niemöller came to the United States as the vice-president of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany and the head of its department for relations with foreign churches. The stated purpose was to thank American churches for their support and assistance during Hitler’s reign and in the immediate postwar years. But attacks by such prominent figures as Eleanor Roosevelt resulted in a widely publicized debate over Niemöller and the purpose of his trip. On the day of Niemöller’s first public address in the U.S. Mrs. Roosevelt again raised her voice in protest. “One may applaud his bravery and his devotion to his church, but one can hardly applaud his attitude on the Nazi politics, and I cannot quite see why we should be asked to listen to his lectures. I am sure he is a good man according to his lights, but his lights are not those of the people of the United States who did not like the Hitler political doctrines.”^{^[18]}

Abundantly aware of the need to win over the American people, Niemöller did his best to avoid the mistakes he made in Naples. First, he refused to partake in any impromptu interviews where he might go off message. Second, all of his lectures and sermons were written down in advance and read virtually verbatim rather than ad-libbed. And finally, in the dozens of lectures, speeches, and sermons he gave in cities across the United States he continually returned to several themes that American churchgoers would likely find reassuring. That is not to say that his addresses lacked any fire or controversy, but rather that he tried to steer clear of any overtly political message that might offend his audience.

So what did Niemöller say to his American audiences? From his very first address at the biennial meeting of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America in early December 1946 to his last in May 1947, he typically began by thanking Americans for their prayers of support during his period of imprisonment and thanking the FCC for inviting him to United States. He emphasized that it was a combination of the prayers from abroad and his faith in God that sustained him during his years of imprisonment. He described how Hitler’s persecution of the German churches sparked an opposition movement within the churches and a new sense of faith in the Word of God. He highlighted the resistance mounted by the Confessing Church against the Nazi state while acknowledging that it was a minority of pastors and congregations that took part in the opposition; he drew attention to the 1934 Barmen Declaration and its proclamation of the absolute sovereignty of Christ as the backbone of the Confessing Church. He often told audiences of his own personal acts of defiance like preaching the Word of God to fellow inmates in the concentration camps or how he directly confronted Hitler at a 1934 meeting, telling him, “Mr. Chancellor, God himself has entrusted us with the responsibility for our nation, and no power and no authority in the world is entitled to take it from us.”^{^[19]} To his audience in Davenport Iowa he declared that despite Hitler’s attempt to destroy the churches, “the Word of God can’t be bound and can’t be murdered.”^{^[20]}

Although he devoted greater space to the Church opposition than to its complicity in Nazism, he frequently acknowledged his share of guilt and the guilt of his church and the German nation for the devastation in Europe; he pointed to the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt of October 1945 as evidence that the leaders of the Protestant Church recognized their share of guilt. He emphasized the importance of reconciliation between God and man, between nations that had recently been at war, and between German and foreign churches. One important reason for his trip to the United States was to demonstrate that “God’s plan for Christian brotherhood doesn’t stop short at the boundaries of nations nor at the borders of continents.”^{^[21]} In addition to the ecumenical vitality of the universal church, he commended the non-denominational character of the Confessing Church and criticized the barriers set up that divide denominations.

When he met with groups of pastors or other churchmen and women, a prominent message was the need for the church to play a role in public affairs. Over and over he lamented that since the French Revolution religion had become a private affair resulting in an absence of moral and ethical responsibility in public matters. The absence of the commandments in public life, Niemöller explained, left people without any sense of direction leading them to embrace demagogues, who seemed to have all the answers. In his address to pastors in Rochester, N.Y. on February 25, 1947, he exclaimed that, “Because the commandments, the moral commandments and ethical commandments of God, were no longer acknowledged as valid for public life, humanity tried in a last decisive step to establish a new moral basis for public life in installing one person, Adolph Hitler.” The church, he went on, was particularly to blame for allowing this state of affairs to develop. Christianity, he insisted, was responsible for the disaster in central Europe because it did not carry out its duties to remind the world about the commandments.^{^[22]}

Niemöller tried to reassure his audiences that the German churches – at least those associated with the Confessing Church – had learned this lesson but he was worried about whether or not the average German was really learning any lessons from the past. The reason for this concern was that Germans were suffering horribly and that the danger existed that in their wretchedness they might easily fall pray to this or that ideology or person who claimed to have easy solutions to their problems. Or they may simply lose all hope and fall into despair. They wanted food on their plates and coal to heat their apartment. The church, however, could not offer easy solutions to their empty cupboards and unheated homes and so he worried about the appeal of the churches over time. He urged his American audiences to help mitigate this situation and to show Germans that Christians abroad cared about their plight by sending relief packages. And he urged American pastors to consider travelling to Germany to see for themselves the situation and to preach in a German church.^{^[23]}

On some occasions Niemöller would briefly address Nazi racial persecution and the state sponsored mass murder of Jews. He usually presented the church (and sometimes the German people) as opposed to the Nazis’ racial program. For instance, in a radio address over WMCA in New York in January 1947, he said, “When Hitler tried to extinguish the Jews, the Church had to pronounce and proclaim, ‘Thou shalt not Kill.’” In a speech delivered in New York, Niemöller reassured his audience that antisemitism was at its end in Germany and would never recur. On another occasion he described German suffering in the immediate postwar years as revenge for Jewish suffering. In his address to the FCC he exclaimed, “We saw guilt accumulate through twelve years [of Nazi rule] and culminate in the planned murder of millions of Jews – a guilt now being revenged according to the rule of human punishment “eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”

So how did Americans, especially his critics, respond to his speaking tour and his multi-faceted message? The outgoing president of the FCC, Bishop Oxnam, with the unanimous and enthusiastic support of the FCC, sent a telegram to Mrs. Roosevelt the day after Niemöller’s first address. The telegram stated that the FCC deeply regretted her remarks that Niemöller’s opposition to the Nazis was not political. “The record clearly shows,” the telegram read, “that he repeatedly spoke against political aims of the Nazis as early as 1933. He was forbidden to preach as [a] result of his speaking against Hitler’s racialistic program.”^{^[24]} The FCC went on to urge Mrs. Roosevelt to correct the erroneous impression of Niemöller she had created. The telegram as well as a subsequent letter from Bishop Oxnam did not sway Mrs. Roosevelt. She wrote back that bringing Niemöller to the United States and allowing him to speak to huge audiences would only create sympathy for Germany and mask the threat that Germany poses to world peace. She concluded her letter to Oxnam stating, “I want us to be vividly aware of the fact that the German people are to blame, that they committed horrible crimes. Therefore, I think you are doing something which is stupid beyond words in bringing this gentleman here and having him touring the country, no matter how much you like him.”^{^[25]}

Mrs. Roosevelt was not alone in holding these views. Several prominent rabbis voiced similar concerns. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver of The Temple in Cleveland, Ohio, and a key figure in the mobilization of American support for the founding of the State of Israel, called Niemöller unfit to lead postwar Germany because he did not oppose Nazi racism but only the Nazi persecution of the church. He agreed with Mrs. Roosevelt that Niemöller’s speaking tour “may be used to allay the fears held by many American people that Germany will be rebuilt without a real moral regeneration of the German people.”^{^[26]}

Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, told the FCC that he deplored its sponsorship of Niemöller’s speaking tour and considered it a great disservice to the country. Rabbi Wise criticized Niemöller’s “lamentable past of unequivocal support of Hitler until his own church was hurt. … The record is that neither before nor during his incarceration in a concentration camp did Niemöller speak one word of protest against one of the foulest crimes in history.” He expressed concern that Niemöller’s visit would only lead to a further softening of American occupation policy and that Germans would regard this as a sign of forgiveness and acceptance of their anti-democratic and antisemitic outlook.^{^[27]}

Responses to these and similar criticisms by leading representatives of the FCC such as Dr. Samuel McCrea Cavert, Dr. Henry Smith Leiper, Bishop Oxnam and others did not always fall on deaf ears. Estelle Sternberger, a well-known radio commentator in NYC and outspoken critic of the Niemöller visit, changed her mind about Niemöller after she was inundated with materials from the FCC providing “proof” of Niemöller’s anti-Nazi credentials. She went on the airwaves to tell her listeners about the abundant evidence “that the German pastor did do whatever he could to mobilize public opinion against the racial policies of the Nazis.”^{^[28]}

Although there most certainly were others like Sternberger who changed their minds, Niemöller’s visit seems to have done very little to overcome the disputed memories of complicity and righteousness. Both sides in this dispute inflated and distorted their evidence. Niemöller’s support for the Nazis in the 1924 and 1933 elections was inflated by his critics to the accusation that he had been a member of the Nazi Party and an unequivocal supporter of Hitler and his racial policy. Likewise, that Niemöller defied Hitler, opposed the introduction of the Aryan paragraph into the Church, and was imprisoned by Hitler was inflated by his supporters to suggest that Niemöller opposed not just Hitler’s church policy but also his political and racial policies from day one. These misconceptions and misrepresentations of Niemöller can be traced to the dual lgacy of the Church Struggle – a legacy that included both courageous opposition to the Nazi assault on the churches and the attempt to Nazify all facets of German society, and at the same time an acceptance of aspects of the Nazi political and racial program.

Niemöller’s subsequent visits to the United States were less fraught with controversy. But Niemöller still managed to stimulate lively debate through his criticisms of American occupation policy in Germany and the rearmament of West Germany under the pro-American Adenauer government. Charges and counter-charges were made that he was an unrepentant ultra-nationalist on the one hand and a communist sympathizer on the other. His advocacy of a “third way” during the Cold War led the U.S. State Department to consider him a man to be watched. Later he would support the civil rights movement in the U.S. and would meet with Ho Chi Mihn in North Vietnam to express his opposition to the war and Western imperialism. In the 1970s and 80s he was a leading voice in the nuclear disarmament movement. Long after Niemöller died, his name and, in particular, his poetic confession “First they came for” has been appropriated by American activists of every political persuasion for just about every political cause.

[1] This is the version insisted upon by Sybil Niemöller von Sell, Martin Niemöller’s wife.

[2] “Niemoeller of I,” Time (July 10, 1939).

[3] “For Niemoller,” Time (March 20, 1939).

[4] “Letters,” The Christian Century (March 15, 1939), 355.

[5] “Niemoeller,” The Washington Post (May 13, 1945), B4.

[6] George Palmer, “Niemoeller Tried to Join the Navy in 1939,” The Lewiston Daily Sun (June 6, 1945), 9.

[7] “For What I am,” Time (June 18, 1945).

[8] Clemens Vollnhals, Die evangelische Kirche nach dem Zusammenbruch: Berichte ausländischer Beobachter aus dem Jahre 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 21.

[9] Vollnhals, XXV.

[10] Vollnhals, XXVI.

[11] Ewart Turner, Christian Century (April 25, 1984), 445.

[12] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[13] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[14] “A Hero with Limitations,” New York Times (June 7, 1945), 18.

[15] San Jose Times (June 11, 1945), 12.

[16] Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (August 7, 1945).

[17] Ewart Turner, WCC Archives WWII Era.

[18] Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day” (December 4, 1946).

[19] Martin Niemöller, radio address, Seattle, (Dec. 5, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[20] Martin Niemöller, address in Davenport, Iowa, (Dec. 22, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[21] Martin Niemöller, address to FCC in Seattle (Dec. 5, 1946) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[22] Martin Niemöller, address in Rochester (Feb. 25, 1947) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[23] Martin Niemöller, address in Rochester (Feb. 25, 1947) WCC Archives WWII Era.

[24] “Message Sent on Niemoeller,” New York Times (Dec. 6, 1946).

[25] Eleanor Roosevelt to Bishop Oxnam in The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers edited by Allida M. Black (Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2006), 419.

[26] “Niemoeller Called ‘Unfit’ as a Leader,” New York Times (Feb, 3, 1947).

[27] “Rabbi Wise Deplores Niemoeller Favor,” New York Post (Jan. 25, 1947).

[28] “Sternberger Reverses Position on Niemoeller in Light of Evidence” in WCC Archives WWII Era.

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of James D. Strasburg, God’s Marshall Plan: American Protestants and the Struggle for the Soul of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021). Pp . 313 + ix. ISBN: 9780197516447

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Conference Report: Martin Niemöller und seine internationale Rezeption – Martin Niemöller and his international reception, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, April 27-28, 2021

By Michael Heymel, Independent Scholar and Central Archives of the Protestant Church in Hessen and Nassau (retired)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Benjamin Ziemann, Martin Niemöller. Ein Leben in Opposition (Munich: DVA, 2019). 640 pages. ISBN: 978-3-421-04712-0.

By Hansjörg Buss, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; translated by Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 26, Number 1/2 (June 2020)

Review of Martin Niemöller, Gedanken über den Weg der christlichen Kirche, eds. Alf Christophersen and Benjamin Ziemann (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2019). 268 pages. ISBN: 9783579085449.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen, Pacific Lutheran University (Retired)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Matthew D. Hockenos, Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor who Defied the Nazis (New York: Basic Books, 2018). 322 pp. ISBN: 978-0-465-09786-9.

Reviewed by Robert P. Ericksen

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 25, Number 1 (March 2019)

Review of Roger J. Newell, Keine Gewalt! No Violence! How the Church Gave Birth to Germany’s Only Peaceful Revolution (Wipf & Stock, 2017), 212 pp. ISBN 978-1-5326-1282-4.

By Andrew Chandler, University of Chichester

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Review Article: Confessing Church Biographies

Review of Michael Heymel, Martin Niemöller: Vom Marineoffizier zum Friedenskämpfer (Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 2017), 321 pages, ISBN: 9783650401960.

Christiane Tietz, Theologian of Resistance: The Life and Thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, trans. Victoria Barnett (Minneapolis: Augsburg fortress, 2016), 141 pages, ISBN: 9781506408446

By Matthew Hockenos, Skidmore College

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 22, Number 4 (December 2016)

Review of Andrew Chandler, George Bell, Bishop of Chichester: Church, State, and Resistance in the Age of Dictatorship (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016), Pp. xii + 212, ISBN: 9780802872272.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

ACCH Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2, June 2012

Conference Paper: “Martin Niemöller in America, 1946-1947: ‘A Hero with Limitations’”

Plenary Session: Disputed Memories of Complicity and Righteousness, 42nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, May 12-14, 2012.

By Matthew D. Hockenos, Skidmore College

Plenary Session: Disputed Memories of Complicity and Righteousness, 42^nd Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, May 12-14, 2012.