Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 18

14 January, 1892—6 March 1984

A Life Changed for Peace

Martin Niemöller’s early career was theologically distant from the Christian pacifism he later advocated. Born in Lippstadt, Germany, the second son of a Lutheran Pastor, Niemöller grew up in a traditional and perhaps anti-Semitic home. Devotion to his country led him to a career in the Kaiser’s navy during World War I. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming captain of a U-boat and receiving the Iron Cross for his success in sinking allied ships.

A religious turning point came in 1918 as he navigated through the Straits of Otranto. Niemöller wondered, “Will peace come to us—or shall we, like the Flying Dutchman, spend year after year without rest or respite?” He felt “instinctively conscious of a further mission of some kind awaiting me. Why, otherwise, should God Himself have directed our helm now?”

After the war, Niemöller resigned his commission and, as he later wrote in his memoir From U-Boat to Pulpit, began the transition from German nationalist to Lutheran pastor. Initially supportive of Hitler’s ideals, Niemöller soon saw the dangerous way the Führer conflated German nationalism with “German” Christianity to further Nazi propaganda. In an attempt to stem the Nazi tyranny over the churches and to “obey God and not men,” Niemöller and other dissenting theologians such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer formed the Confessing Church.

For his activism, Niemöller spent eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps as Hitler’s “personal prisoner.” His wife, Else, whom he married in 1919, was left to raise their children alone and was allowed only infrequent visits.

At the end of the war, critics called Niemöller to task for his early anti-Semitic stance, a charge that a repentant Niemöller did not deny. In 1959, he wrote that his years in prison were another religious turning point in his life. He initiated the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, which confessed that the German Protestant churches had not done enough to stem Nazi crimes.

Near the end of his life, Niemöller became a proponent of nuclear disarmament and an ardent pacifist. He visited communist leader Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War, remarking, “One thing is clear: the president of North Vietnam is not a fanatic. He is a very strong and determined man, but capable of listening, rare in a person of his position.” Niemöller became president of the World Council of Churches in 1961 and earned the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966.

Looking back on his career on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, Niemöller said he began as “an ultra-conservative who wanted the Kaiser to come back; and now I am a revolutionary. If I live to be one hundred, I shall maybe be an anarchist.”