Martin Niemöller

Martin Niemöller (1892 – 1984) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and outspoken opponent of Adolf Hitler. A decorated submarine commander during World War I, Niemöller initially held nationalist conservative views, but broke radically with the Nazi state in 1933 when Hitler sought to Nazify the Protestant Church under the 'German Christians' ideology.

Niemöller founded the Pastors' Emergency League and the Bekennende Kirche (Confessing Church), preaching openly against racial idolatry and totalitarian state control. Personally targeted by Hitler, he was arrested in 1937 and imprisoned for eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. After his liberation in 1945, he spearheaded the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, acknowledging the German church's complicity in Nazi crimes, and composed the immortal confession: 'First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist...'. In his later decades, he became a committed pacifist and anti-nuclear activist.