Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (
14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a prominent German
anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the poem
First they came....
Although he was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, he became one
of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the nazification of German Protestant churches.
He vehemently opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph, but made remarks about Jews that some scholars
have called antisemitic. For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller
was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945.
He narrowly
escaped execution and survived imprisonment. After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret
about not having done enough to help the victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier
nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. From the
1950s on, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, and vice-chair of War Resisters' International
from 1966 to 1972. He met with Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and was a committed campaigner
for nuclear disarmament.
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