Wikipedia Deep Dive

First They Came

11 min read

The Confession That Haunts History

In January 1946, a German pastor stood before his congregation in Frankfurt and said something that would echo through generations. Martin Niemöller was not delivering a sermon about hope or redemption. He was confessing to one of history's greatest moral failures—his own silence.

"First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist."

You've probably heard some version of these words. They appear on the walls of Holocaust museums from Washington to Jerusalem. They've been quoted by civil rights leaders, politicians, and activists across the political spectrum for nearly eighty years. But the story behind them is more complicated, more troubling, and ultimately more instructive than most people realize.

Because Martin Niemöller wasn't always the conscience of post-war Germany. Before he became the author of history's most famous warning about moral cowardice, he was himself a moral coward. And that's precisely what makes his words so powerful.

The Man Who Welcomed Hitler

To understand the confession, you have to understand the man who made it—and he was not the figure you might expect.

Niemöller was born in 1892 in Lippstadt, a small town in northwestern Germany. He served as a U-boat commander during the First World War, earning the Iron Cross and sinking Allied ships in the waters around the Mediterranean. After the war, like many German veterans, he despised the Weimar Republic—the democratic government that had signed the armistice and accepted the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

He became a Lutheran pastor, but his politics remained those of a nationalist conservative. He was anti-Communist. He was, by his own later admission, anti-Semitic—not in the violent, eliminationist way of the Nazi true believers, but in the casual, culturally acceptable way of many German Christians of his era. He blamed Jews for the death of Christ. He saw them as spiritually cursed.

So when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, Niemöller welcomed it. A national revival, finally. A return to order and strength. A repudiation of the weak democracy that had humiliated Germany.

This is the part of the story that people tend to skip over, but it's essential. Niemöller wasn't a hidden resistor who saw through Hitler from the beginning. He was a supporter who slowly, painfully, incompletely came to recognize his error.

The Slow Turn

The break didn't come over the persecution of Communists. It didn't come over the persecution of Jews. It came when Hitler demanded supremacy over the church itself.

The Nazi regime wanted to unify Germany's Protestant churches under state control, creating what they called the "Reich Church" and implementing the "Aryan paragraph"—a rule that would bar Christians of Jewish ancestry from serving as clergy. For Niemöller, this was a bridge too far. Not because he had suddenly become a champion of Jewish rights, but because he saw it as the state interfering in matters of faith.

In 1934, Niemöller helped found the Confessing Church, a movement of Protestant clergy who opposed the Nazification of German Christianity. His allies included Karl Barth, one of the twentieth century's most influential theologians, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who would later be executed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

But even as Niemöller opposed Nazi interference in the church, his transformation was incomplete. In a sermon from 1935—a full two years after Hitler's rise to power—he said of the Jewish people: "What is the reason for their obvious punishment, which has lasted for thousands of years? Dear brethren, the reason is easily given: the Jews brought the Christ of God to the cross!"

He protected Jewish converts to Christianity in his own congregation. But Jews who remained Jews? That was a different matter.

This is uncomfortable to reckon with. The man who would become synonymous with speaking out against persecution was himself, for years, a participant in the culture that made persecution possible.

Arrest and Imprisonment

In 1937, the Nazis had had enough of Niemöller's opposition. He was arrested and charged with "abuse of pulpit" and other offenses against the state. After a trial, he was initially given a sentence of time served—the court had been relatively lenient.

But Hitler personally intervened. Niemöller was rearrested immediately upon leaving the courthouse and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp as a "personal prisoner of the Führer." He would later be transferred to Dachau, where he remained until American forces liberated the camp in 1945.

Eight years in concentration camps. Eight years to think about what he had failed to do, failed to say, failed to see.

Here's a detail that complicates the picture further: while imprisoned, Niemöller actually volunteered to serve again as a U-boat commander. The war had begun, and he wanted to fight for Germany—even a Germany run by the regime that had imprisoned him. The Nazi authorities rejected his offer. They didn't trust him, and perhaps they understood something about the nature of his resistance that he didn't fully understand himself.

The Confession

When the war ended, Niemöller emerged as one of the few German church leaders with genuine credibility to speak about what had happened. He had opposed the regime. He had suffered for it. He had survived.

But rather than claim the mantle of resistance hero, he did something more remarkable. He confessed.

On January 6, 1946, speaking to members of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt, Niemöller delivered the speech that would become the foundation of "First They Came." The original was not the clean, poetic version we know today. It was messier, more specific, more personal. He spoke in prose, working through his own guilt:

"The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—'should I be my brother's keeper?'"

He went on to describe how the Nazis then targeted the sick and disabled—the so-called "incurables"—and how even Christians rationalized their murder. Only then, he said, did the church begin to take notice. Only when it affected them directly.

And then came his most devastating admission:

"I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? 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. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40 million people, because that is what it is costing us now."

Thirty to forty thousand deaths to prevent thirty to forty million. The mathematics of moral courage.

The Poem That Isn't Quite a Poem

The version you know—the clean, repetitive, liturgical version—emerged gradually over the following decades. Niemöller gave variations of the speech many times throughout his career, and each time the details shifted slightly. Different audiences heard different versions. Communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jews, Catholics, Jehovah's Witnesses—the list of targeted groups varied depending on when and where he was speaking.

By the 1950s, others had begun editing and shaping his words into the poetic form that would become famous. The repetition. The parallel structure. The devastating final line: "Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

Niemöller himself seems to have been somewhat bemused by this process. In 1976, when asked about the origins of the poem, he said:

"There were no minutes or copy of what I said, and it may be that I formulated it differently. But the idea was anyhow: The Communists, we still let that happen calmly; and the trade unions, we also let that happen; and we even let the Social Democrats happen. All of that was not our affair."

The idea. That was what mattered to him. Not the exact words, but the principle they expressed.

The Politics of Memory

But here's where things get complicated—and where the history of "First They Came" becomes a lesson in how memory itself can be contested and shaped.

Harold Marcuse, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has spent years tracing the various versions of Niemöller's confession. What he found is revealing.

In the original German versions, Communists almost always came first. This wasn't an accident. Niemöller's whole point was that the persecution began with people he and his audience didn't care about—people they actually disliked. That's what made the confession so powerful. He wasn't saying "we failed to protect people we loved." He was saying "we failed to protect people we despised, and that failure made everything else possible."

But as the confession traveled to the United States, something interesting happened. Communists started disappearing from the text. In their place: socialists. Or sometimes, the Communists were simply omitted entirely.

Why? Anti-communism. During the Cold War, American institutions were uncomfortable with any text that might seem sympathetic to Communists—even a text about the importance of defending everyone's rights. The lesson "we should have protected Communists from persecution" didn't fit neatly into the ideological framework of McCarthy-era America.

As Marcuse notes: "Niemöller's original argument was premised on naming groups he and his audience would instinctively not care about. The omission of Communists in Washington, and of Jews in Germany, distorts that meaning and should be corrected."

The irony is sharp. A confession about the dangers of failing to speak up for unpopular groups was itself edited to remove an unpopular group.

Why It Still Matters

So what are we left with? A flawed man who made a powerful confession that was then edited and simplified and sometimes distorted as it passed through history.

And yet the core insight remains as vital as ever.

Persecution rarely begins with the majority. It begins at the margins, with the people nobody will defend. It tests the waters. It establishes precedents. It normalizes the machinery of exclusion and violence before turning that machinery toward larger targets.

The genius of Niemöller's confession—in all its versions—is that it doesn't let anyone off the hook. It doesn't say "the Nazis did terrible things." It says "we let them do terrible things." It places the responsibility not on the perpetrators but on the bystanders. On the people who knew and didn't speak. On the people who were safe and didn't risk that safety for others.

And it implicates the listener directly. Because the structure of the confession is designed to make you ask yourself: Who are the groups I wouldn't speak up for? Who are the people I've convinced myself don't deserve my concern?

Niemöller's answer to those questions—his honest answer, based on his own experience—was that everybody deserves your concern. Not because they're good, or right, or sympathetic. But because the alternative is to become complicit in a system that will eventually come for you too.

The Monuments

Today, versions of "First They Came" are inscribed on the walls of Holocaust museums around the world. At the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, it appears as the final display of the permanent exhibition—the last thing visitors see before they exit into the world.

It's at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The Virginia Holocaust Museum in Richmond. The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. The Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg. The Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie.

These institutions chose Niemöller's words for their final message for a reason. Not because they offer comfort or resolution. But because they issue a challenge.

The Holocaust happened because millions of people made small moral compromises. They looked away. They told themselves it wasn't their concern. They protected their own and abandoned everyone else. And by the time they realized their error—if they ever did—it was too late.

Niemöller spent the rest of his life as a voice for penance and reconciliation. He died in 1984, having lived long enough to see his confession become one of the most quoted texts of the twentieth century. Whether he would have approved of all the versions that circulate in his name is impossible to know.

But the question his words pose remains unchanged, and unanswerable by anyone but the person who hears them:

When they come for the people you don't care about, what will you do?