First They Came . . .

To the Editor:

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of being a close friend of Sibylle Niemöller-von Sell, the second wife of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who shared his life in his final years and who continued his work after his death in 1984. Sibylle mentioned that her husband’s most famous pronouncement — “First they came for the Communists, and I said nothing because I was not a Communist. . . .” — was frequently misquoted and mischaracterized. And indeed, the quotation can be found in many different forms.

I thought about Sibylle’s comment when I saw it mentioned in Peter Fritzsche’s review of “The Gestapo,” by Frank McDonough (March 12). To begin with, the proper declension of the passage is “Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, Jews.” (Catholics are sometimes included, which is not only a misquotation but historically inaccurate; the Nazis never “came for” German Catholics in anything like the sense that they did for these other groups.) Niemöller was referring specifically to the events of the year 1933, when Hitler — aided and abetted by the Reichstag fire — concentrated on eliminating all organized political opposition to his regime before he got down to the work of so-called “racial purification.”

Also, the quotation is not originally from a sermon (as many people believe) or, as the review has it, a poem (although these days it is often presented as a poem). It was tossed off almost casually one evening in Niemöller’s living room, as he led an informal discussion group of divinity students on the theme of what it means to be a practical Christian in modern times.

Niemöller cast the statement in the first person, at least in part, out of a sense of guilt. As a former U-boat commander in World War I, Niemöller’s pre-Nazi politics tended strongly toward the nationalistic and the conservative, and he was a critic of the Weimar regime. As Sibylle said ruefully: “My parents saw the evil of National Socialism right from the start. My husband did not; he had to learn the hard way.”