First They Came

'I did not speak out'), is the poetic form of a 1946 post-war confessional prose by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).

It is about the silent complicity of German intellectuals and clergy following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets.

He continued his career in Germany as a cleric and as a leading voice of penance and reconciliation for the German people after World War II.

The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers.

If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die.

A representative in America made a similar speech in 1968, omitting Communists but including industrialists who were only targeted by the Nazis on an individual basis.

[citation needed] Niemöller is quoted as having used many versions of the text during his career, but evidence identified by professor Harold Marcuse at the University of California Santa Barbara indicates that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum version is inaccurate because Niemöller frequently used the word "communists" and not "socialists.

"[1] The substitution of "socialists" for "communists" is an effect of anti-communism, and most common in the version that has proliferated in the United States.

According to Marcuse, "Niemöller's original argument was premised on naming groups he and his audience would instinctively not care about.

Still in 1935, Niemöller made pejorative remarks about Jews, while protecting those of Jewish descent who had been baptised in his own church, but were persecuted by the Nazis due to their racial origins.

Niemöller signed the petition of a group of Protestant churchmen which sharply criticized Nazi policies and declared the Aryan Paragraph incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity.

[9] After his imprisonment he volunteered to act as a U-Boat commander, reprising his role in WWI, but this offer was rejected by the Nazi authorities.