When They Came for Me

The middle-aged pastor stared at the placard: "Here in the years 1933 to 1945, 238,756 persons were incinerated."

At the gates of the Dachau concentration camp, he sought to understand the horror of the holocaust. The war had concluded only a few months earlier, but this wasn't the pastor's first visit to Dachau. He had spent seven years there—inside the fences. Yet the message in front of him was a shock.

There is no doubt that Pastor Martin Niemöller had lived a full and active life. During the First World War, he was in active service with the German Navy, eventually becoming a U-boat captain. His ship was responsible for sinking the Britannic, sister ship to the well known Titanic.

Deeply disappointed by the capitulation of Germany in November 1918, he left the Navy and entered the ministry, eventually becoming a Lutheran pastor of a church in Berlin. Worried by the increasingly liberal and permissive nature of the Weimar Republic, Pastor Niemöller became an early supporter of Hitler, believing that the Nazi party would restore national pride, create work for the unemployed, and bring stability to a nation in chaos.

But by 1934, Niemöller's hopes were dashed. He realized that Hitler was seeking to Nazify the church and crush any philosophy that questioned the coming of the thousand-year Reich.

Soon pastors were being imprisoned, and Niemöller became a central player in resisting State interference in church affairs. Boldly he preached against Nazi doctrine and Aryan supremacy. He sought to guard the churches against Hitlerian propaganda, declaring in one sermon, "God is my Führer."

The inevitable happened in 1937. Niemöller was arrested and spent the next seven years in two concentration camps, Sachsenhausen and Dachau.

Soon Niemöller's stand became a visible embodiment of the church's resistance to Hitler. Although silenced, his story became an inspiration to thousands who sought to resist the Nazi machine. Narrowly escaping execution by the Nazis as the war ended, he returned to church work in a now devastated Germany.

But what of forgiveness? Like the Dutch concentration camp survivor Corrie ten Boom, Niemöller needed to forgive his enemies. Yet on his return to Dachau, it was not the struggle to forgive them that was foremost on his mind. Rather, it was the need to be forgiven himself.

You see, due to his confinement with high-profile prisoners, Niemöller knew nothing of the mass murder occurring at his camp-not until he stood outside the gates, staring at that horrible memoir: 238,756 deaths. In that moment he realized that he was at least partially responsible for the destruction of these lives. Although he had spoken against the Nazi persecution of the church, he hadn't spoken much about the prevailing anti-Semitism and the increasing attacks on the Jews in Germany.

Seeking to silence his conscience, he reminded himself that he had been under arrest since 1937. What could he have done? Yet the sign said these atrocities began in 1933, not 1937. For those four years before his arrest, he had no alibi for his silence.

Though he had been sinned against, he too needed forgiveness. And at a time when it would have been easy to pass the responsibility on to others, or to excuse his failings on the basis of the great injustices done to him, Pastor Niemöller refused. Confession, repentance, and forgiveness needed to begin with him. He wrote of those years:

When the Nazis came for the Communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a Communist.
When they locked up the Social Democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a Social Democrat.
When they came for the Trade Unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Trade Unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Kevin Adams was born in South Wales and has authored two books and a film on Welsh revival history. He is the senior pastor of East Baptist Church in Lynn, MA.