Martin Niemöller

Nationality

Germany

Date of Birth

1892

Date of Death

1984

Political
Preference

National conservative

Friedrich Gustav Martin Niemöller was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. Born in Lippstadt, he began his career in the Imperial Navy of the German Empire in 1915 and worked on several U-boats. He was ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1924 and appointed curate of Münster’s Church of the Redeemer.

As a national conservative, Niemöller first welcomed Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, hoping for a German national revival. However, he opposed the so-called “Aryan Paragraph”, which forbade Jewish converts to Lutheranism to serve as pastors and signed a petition of Protestant churchmen criticising Nazi policies on the grounds of the Aryan Paragraph being incompatible with Christian values. Niemöller also founded the “Pfarrernotbund”, an organisation of Pastors with the mission to combat the discrimination of Christians with Jewish backgrounds. In 1934, he co-founded the German Protestant faction of the Confessional Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant Churches.

Niemöller was arrested in 1937 and sent to the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps for ‘activities against the State’ from 1938 until the end of the war. After the war, he was President of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau from 1947 to 1961 and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, a declaration by the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany confessing guilt for its inadequate opposition to Nazi Germany. Niemöller became a pacifist and proponent of nuclear disarmament. In this, he frequently worked side-by-side with Gustav Heinemann.

In 1961, Niemöller was appointed president of the World Council of Churches and participated in the international ecumenical movement of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs (CCIA).