In the dire months since Donald Trump’s return to power, you’ve no doubt read a version of the famous mea culpa “First They Came”—perhaps woven into the lines of an essay or op-ed, perhaps thumbed out on social media. Part warning, part exhortation, the short text (it’s often mistaken for a poem) comes to us as tragically earned wisdom from the rise of the Nazis, alas grimly relevant to the America of today. The variation considered the most authoritative (if not the most commonly cited) reads:

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

  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak   out—because I was not a trade unionist.

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—  because I was not a Jew.

  Then they came for me—and there was no one left who   could protest.

In the decades since these words were formulated, they’ve gradually eclipsed the man responsible for them, blocking his presence so thoroughly that they arrive on a page, in some instances, without so much as an attribution. But even on those occasions when Martin Niemöller does get his due, he tends to be credited only vaguely, as a German pastor who ran afoul of Hitler—his story shorn of its most arduous complexities.

Niemöller was indeed a German cleric, a man world-famous in his day as a defiant martyr for freedom of religion, imprisoned by the Führer for eight long years, until the very end of World War II. In the years after his release, Niemöller began offering piecemeal the lines of what would become his famed text, asserting them in remarks during sermons and speeches in the bombed-out ruins of the Third Reich. While the referents sometimes varied—some versions included people with disabilities or Jehovah’s Witnesses, while others omitted Communists—the theme remained constant.

And yet, if the text tolls the bitter cost of indifference and want of solidarity, it also doesn’t go far enough with regard to its author. For all its confessional eloquence, it is, in fact, an act of profound obfuscation: an attempt to confess guilt without really coming clean, to claim responsibility while obscuring what was a deep complicity.

Martin Niemöller had supported Hitler. Enthusiastically. Although he was hailed on the cover of Time as the “Martyr of 1940” and portrayed in a Hollywood film as having thundered at the Führer, “When you attack the Jews, you attack us all!,” 
the man himself was far from an anti-fascist freedom fighter. A proud World War I hero, he was also an imperialist, an ultranationalist, and an antisemite who only really objected to the aggressions of the Third Reich after the Nazis began intruding into the domain of the Protestant Church. Even then, his objections remained narrow. And while he did eventually undergo an extraordinary transformation into an indefatigable pacifist and devotee of Gandhi, that transformation came years after the war—a redemption wrenched from the contradictions of a very flawed protagonist.

The historian Benjamin Ziemann, one of the two recent biographers who have pierced through the hagiographic shimmer around Niemöller, regards his evolution with something close to a suspicion of hypocrisy, even duplicity. After marshaling troubling evidence of Niemöller’s longtime attitude toward Jews, Ziemann offers in his book Hitler’s Personal Prisoner that he would revise the iconic mea culpa as follows:

  First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak   out—because I resented the “Godless” Communists for   their attacks on Christianity.

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  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak   out—because I believed in the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft   [racially pure, united folk-nation].

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—  because I “disliked” the Jews and denied the legitimacy of   their faith.

  Then they came for me and detained me for eight long   years—yet when I was finally liberated, my views on  Communists and Jews had not substantially changed.

Niemöller’s other revisionist biographer, the historian Matthew Hockenos, takes a more forgiving approach. In Then They Came for Me, he calls Niemöller’s early views and actions repellent but commends his courage in later life to change his deeply held beliefs and act accordingly. “In this, Niemöller is to be admired,” Hockenos declares, “and his evolution celebrated.”

So what are we to make of him? And of the text whose words we quote in these desperate times?

For us, Niemöller’s story presents an abiding challenge. Seen in one light, his mea culpa is a compromised but still worthy text, its personal lesson urgent despite its misleading omissions. Seen in another, it’s an act of craven concealment hiding behind a show of rueful confession. But there is a third possibility as well: that the text that came to be known as “First They Came” is something difficult in an all too human way—a vital wisdom set within a moral failure. Its full meaning, its uneasy power, requires us to hold it in both lights together.

Long before Martin Niemöller became a renowned international figure—before life’s twists and turns would torque him from a fascist sympathizer into an ecumenical citizen of the world—he was, above all, a patriotic German and a nationalistic Lutheran.

Born in 1892 in Westphalia, in Prussia, he was the second-oldest son of a Lutheran pastor in an imperial Germany under the authoritarian Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was a grand Germany back then, a nation of Christian church and state, throne and altar. Obsessed with the Imperial Navy from an early age, by 1918 Niemöller was joyously commanding a U-boat—an especially dangerous posting—having won an Iron Cross First Class for the action he’d already seen. When the war ended with Germany’s defeat and the kaiser’s abdication, followed by the turmoil of the 1918–19 revolution that gave way to the Weimar Republic, the profoundly conservative Niemöller was appalled and resigned his commission.

Still, his myth swelled. In 1944, Paramount Pictures made The Hitler Gang, a taut, noirish portrayal of the Nazis’ rise, using real names, told as if Hitler and his henchmen were gangsters. The film was directed by John Farrow (Mia’s father) and written principally by the Oscar-nominated team behind The Thin Man. It featured the one-on-one confrontation scene mentioned earlier, with Niemöller now upbraiding the foaming Hitler about the Jews, after having excoriated him: “Do you think we’re really so contemptible that we would surrender the sacred faith given to us by God and accept a political program in its place?” More invention.

Between these two films, a book appeared: I Was in Hell With Niemöller, by “Leo Stein,” who claimed to have shared a Sachsenhausen cell with the pastor and recorded his humane bravery and his regrets about Hitler. It’s still cited today; it was a fake, from cover to cover.

Niemöller was actually in solitary at Sachsenhausen, though he was allowed occasional brief, heavily monitored visits by his wife. In Dachau, he also received visits. He was housed there with three German Catholic priests in a separate facility for “special and honorable” prisoners, along with foreign inmates with whom he could mingle and share meals. On Christmas Eve 1944, he conducted a profoundly poignant service in a makeshift cell chapel for six fellow Protestants whose countries Germany was besieging or occupying. In the war’s chaotic final days—shortly after Bonhoeffer was stripped naked and gruesomely hanged at Flossenbürg camp for his connection to the plot to kill Hitler—Niemöller was rushed away with select others into northern Italy by SS troops, according to Ziemann to be either murdered or held as a bargaining chip. Hockenos argues for the latter. Niemöller was at last liberated on May 4, 1945, to international jubilation.

Did the years of internment change him? In the immediate aftermath of his liberation, it was not entirely clear that they had.

At a press conference arranged by US occupation forces, the celebrated symbol of Nazi resistance defended his newly revealed attempt to volunteer for military service from Sachsenhausen: “If there is a war, a German doesn’t ask, is it just or unjust, but he feels bound to join the ranks.” He declared—not as a critique—that the German people weren’t suited for democracy, longed rather for authority. He did not say he opposed Hitler’s political programs, averring that as a cleric he hadn’t been “interested” in politics. The New York Times grimly assessed that, though admirable in certain ways, the fighting pastor was a “singularly ineffectual figure in a country and a world crying out for justice.” An appalled Eleanor Roosevelt, Hockenos notes, wrote in her newspaper column that Niemöller’s remarks were “almost like a speech from Mr. Hitler.”

But then, another turn: Hitler’s “personal prisoner” was “stunned,” he told an Allied interrogator, after learning from American newspapers what had “really happened” with the slaughter of Jews. That October, at an Evangelical Church conference in devastated Stuttgart (in Germany, evangelical just means Protestant), Niemöller helped formulate the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. German Protestants, he sermonized, were guiltier than the Nazis for not having spoken out. “We are responsible,” the Stuttgart Declaration confessed, “for millions and millions of people being murdered, slaughtered, destroyed, thrown into hardship and chased out to foreign lands, poor human beings, brothers and sisters in all countries of Europe.” Even so, Ziemann notes, there was no specific mention here of Jews.

A few weeks later came the moment that Hockenos credits for instigating the extraordinary evolution that Niemöller would undergo.

It was at Dachau, where he stopped to show his wife his old cell. There was a plaque commemorating the many thousands who perished at the camp (despite its not being a dedicated extermination facility)—starting back in 1933. The two visitors were shaken to the core. As Niemöller would go on to repeat to audiences, 1933 was four years before he was compelled to silence and ignorance by imprisonment. Four years when he should have spoken out.

Niemöller didn’t resume his pastoral duties at the Dahlem parish. Instead, he toured the country, expressing guilt for not speaking out. Such expressions of guilt were not well received by his countrymen. Especially when he pressed the matter further, calling on Germans now to collectively take responsibility for the Holocaust, declaring in a May 1946 sermon, according to Hockenos: “Six million Jews, an entire people, were cold-bloodedly murdered in our midst and in our name…. We have to accept the burden of that legacy.” It was during this time that Niemöller’s famous credo began to emerge in bits and pieces.

All the while, more Niemöller contradictions. He railed about the treatment of the German people by the occupation forces. He fiercely opposed denazification as far too blunt and punitive an instrument, insisting it would only further victimize suffering Germans. “There is a new antisemitism in Germany,” he contended in a statement quoted by Ziemann. “It is caused by the Americans letting Jews carry out the denazification.” There were other such ugly outbursts.

Even so, America was clamoring—over the objections of some prominent figures—for him to visit. In late 1946, despite vehement disapproval from Eleanor Roosevelt, leading rabbi Stephen Wise, and others, Niemöller and his wife arrived for an American tour—the first prominent German civilians to be granted US visas after the war. For five months, Niemöller barnstormed the country, addressing overflow audiences in English. In New York, he met Reinhold Niebuhr; in Hollywood, John Farrow, the director of The Hitler Gang, and Bing Crosby, whose priestly turn in Going My Way he admired. He was often on the radio. He recited “First They Came” only once, at his lone appearance before a German-speaking audience. His overriding concern was to lobby for American aid to his shattered, starving homeland. His tour was a great success personally, as well as financially for Germany.

Back in the misery of his homeland—where he found himself denied victim status by the German Association of the Victims of the Nazi Regime, in large part for his statements following his 1937 arrest—Niemöller became the first president of the newly formed Evangelical Church of Hesse and Nassau, which included Frankfurt. There, he fought ferociously against denazification. At the same time, as the chairman of the Evangelical Church’s foreign office, he began to travel widely, then more widely, trying to reestablish to the world the religious legitimacy of the German Protestant Church after the horrors of Nazism.

For this writer, Niemöller’s globe-spanning travels were a major factor in his evolution. From here on, the compass of the last four decades of his long life would swing by degrees in an increasingly radical—one might even say miraculous—direction. Perhaps the committed nationalist was finally changed by his contact with the wide, multi-faith, multifaceted world (an exposure that built on his ecumenical fellowship behind the barbed wire of Dachau, which Hockenos sees as a deeply affecting experience). Or perhaps, once the gears of self-reflection and regret began to turn, especially after his visit to Dachau, he did what few people do: He let them turn and keep turning, pushing him ever harder in the direction of justice.

Bitterly opposed to the 1949 partition of Germany, Niemöller visited churches in the Communist GDR, and then even Orthodox ones in Russia, for which he drew harsh criticism not just in West Germany but in the US, and which led to his ousting from the church foreign office in 1965. Still, he continued. He traveled throughout Asia and Africa, coming to regard the Global South as true Christianity’s future. He became a copresident of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968, resigning midway as president of the Hesse and Nassau church and eventually turning away from institutional Christianity. He attempted, he said, to act in imitation of Christ in the world—declaring in 1975, “Like my Lord and Savior Jesus I stand by those who have been abandoned by everyone—including the communists—the outcasts, the wretched, the famishing, and the starving.” (He even said at one point that pastors could be Communists.)

He became celebrated as a global “ambassador of God,” one who openly intruded now into the realm of the state, an Iron Cross hero turned high-profile pacifist (after a harrowing 1954 conversation about the hydrogen bomb with the Nobel Prize–winning nuclear chemist Otto Hahn) and Gandhi admirer—a vocal exponent of social justice, anti-nationalism, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism and an opponent of apartheid. He shared a stage with Martin Luther King Jr., met with and praised Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War. He became a prominent fixture of the international anti-nuclear movement and accepted the Lenin Peace Prize. A constant critic of West Germany and its rearmament, he backed the country’s youthful upheaval of 1968.

“Aged 90, I am now a revolutionary,” he told Stern magazine in 1982, two years before his death. “If I live to be a hundred, maybe I’ll be an anarchist.”

While Hockenos salutes the extraordinary transformation of this German ultra-conservative, with his “repellent” early views, into someone with the courage to change deeply held beliefs, Ziemann is not so forgiving. He traces unsettling continuities, with particularly acute sensitivity to Niemöller’s behavior regarding Jews. In all his globe-trotting, for instance, the ambassador of God somehow never set foot in Israel. Ziemann indicts Niemöller for remarks such as saying in 1963 that he couldn’t hold it against Arabs if they felt “threatened and under attack” by the Jewish state. Or, in 1967, privately expressing that if he were an Arab, he’d be “antisemitic” about an “alien people founding a state on his soil.”

One might agree with the gist of Niemöller’s remarks (though Ziemann doesn’t), but given his history, there remains a lingering odor of antisemitism.

How, then, do we weigh the case of Martin Niemöller? Certainly he remains… “complicated.” Contradictions unresolved. For all the bravery he showed and the good he promoted, for all the ways he evolved, he remains flawed. A challenge.

And yet this challenge is instructive.

When the current age of cruelty finally comes to an end, some of its enablers will no doubt proclaim their regrets. Perhaps they’ll lament that they didn’t understand the full import of Trump’s actions. Or that they failed to resist because they didn’t see themselves reflected in MAGA’s victims. Or were afraid they’d be next. But whatever their explanations, we would do well to remember Niemöller’s example and attend not only to their words but to what’s left unsaid and unacknowledged. To what, we should ask, are they actually confessing? For what are they apologizing? And, most crucial of all, what will they then do about it?

Nor should we stop there. Martin Niemöller’s story also demands something of us—we who nod righteously as we read his mea culpa, satisfied in the knowledge that we are not silent, that we understand. As we now know, Niemöller’s story is a warning not merely about indifference but about the sneaky, self-deluding power of complicity. It is a reminder to question the real strength of our empathy, and to resist the lure of complacency. Most of all, perhaps, it is a prod, a spur to do the explicit thing the German pastor mentions only figuratively when he laments his failure to “speak out.” We must act.