First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
We can infer with some confidence that in the yet undocumented earliest poetic version(s), whether spoken by Niemöller himself or not, Communists came first, then Socialists/Social Democrats/trade unionists or Jews, perhaps depending on which language and which venue.
Niemöller's original argument was premised on naming groups he and his audience would instinctively not care about.
When his poem is invoked today it is usually to add one's own group to the list of persecuted (and omit the ones that they still wish to persecute?).
The version excluding Communists at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum--is definitely historically incorrect, and indeed distorts both Niemöller's politics and original meaning.
Niemöller, a decorated career naval officer in World War I, was a conservative German nationalist. He turned to theology in the early 1920s after the German navy had been disbanded under the terms of the Versailles treaty. He was the pastor of St. Ann's church in the wealthy Berlin district Dahlem from 1931 until his arrest in 1937. He welcomed Hitler's accession to power in 1933, objecting only to state encroachment on Church policy, in particular the exclusion of Christians with Jewish ancestry from serving as officers of the Church.
In September 1933, in protest against the official German Protestant Church's willingness to accept Nazi interference in church affairs, he formed the Pastor's Emergency League, which became the Confessing Church in October 1934.
Niemöller's continued
outspokenness against some Nazi rules finally
led to his arrest in July 1937 and trial in February 1938. Although his 7-month sentence was less than the 8 months he had served in Moabit prison, so that he should have been released, Hitler personally had him sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for "preventative detention." (deplatforming?)
(Kind of like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning?)
It is important to understand that, except for Nazi decrees regarding Church policy, Niemöller was an avid Hitler supporter. As he later readily admitted, he sent Hitler a personal telegram of congratulations after Germany's withdrawal from the League of Nations in October 1933. Witnesses say that Niemöller greeted his Dahlem congregation with the Hitler salute, and at his 1938 trial he boasted about his patriotic unwillingness to turn over his submarine to the British after the November 1918 armistice, about his leadership of a Freikorpsbattalion in putting down a left-wing insurgency in 1920, and that he had voted Nazi since 1924. He also testified in his defense that he found Jews "disagreeable and alien," which was typical of an"officer in the Kaiser's navy" from a "Westphalian family of peasants and clerics.
When Pastor Niemöller was put in a concentration camp we wrote the year 1937; when the concentration camp was opened we wrote the year 1933, and the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who bothered with 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?" Then they did away with the sick, the so-called incurables.
I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best all-around if they are taken out of the middle [of society]?
Only then did it start affecting the Church as such. Then we started making noise, until our public voices again fell silent.
Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible? The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, which were even written in the newspapers ...We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt, and I ask myself over and over again what would have happened if we had in 1933 or 1934--"And only after that did the attack on the Church itself begin. Then we did have our say, and did so until 'officially' silenced too.
Possibility--14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant congregations in Germany, if we had defended the truth with our lives. If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in concentration camps, to let them die. I can imagine that then perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have been made a head shorter, but can also imagine that we would have saved the lives of 30-40 million people, which is what it costs us now. "
Anyway ... there is a lot more to this than meets the eye with the first they came for refrain ...
Is it important to note that 1st they came for the Communist ... depends on your point of view I suppose.
In a March 1955 speech by African-American Communist activist Claude Lightfoot (1910-1991). Lightfoot, who had been convicted under the Smith Act for being a member of the Communist party, told his Los Angeles audience:
It was under the smokescreen of "anti-Communism" that Hitler led the German people and the rest of the world to the brink of disaster. What proof do we still need in America before we learn the lesson of Pastor Niemoller?-"When Communists were jailed, it was all right--we weren't Communists," said Niemoller. "When Jews were hounded, we didn't care. When the union leaders were arrested, we preferred to keep quiet .... When I was jailed--it was too late."Here the groups are Communists, Jews and union leaders, and the actions are more varied, namely jailed/hounded/arrested, and all right/didn't care/keep quiet. This not only indicates that Lightfoot had heard or read this from a different source than the teacher interviewed by Mayer, but also that he had a model with very precise actions. Interestingly, in a related pamphlet published about Lightfootthat same year, the poetic version is rendered in bold and block form as a direct quotation of Niemöller: For those who still feel that what happens to the Communists won't affect them, let them think over the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, world famous German Protestant and leader of the World Council of Churches:
"When the Communists were jailed, it was all right, we weren't Communists.
"When the Jews were hounded, we didn't care.
"When the union leaders were arrested --we preferred to keep quiet; we were not union members.
"When I was jailed --it was too late to do anything."
