Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis

History professor Hockenos (A Church Divided: German Protestants Confront the Nazi Past) provides a “revisionist” biography of Martin Niemöller (1892–1984), the dissident German Lutheran pastor best known for his postwar confession from which the book’s title is taken. He shows Niemöller as a staunch German nationalist up to and during the Third Reich—he voted for the Nazis in three elections, offered to serve in the German navy in 1939, and “showed contempt for groups he deemed anti-Christian and anti-German”—who also paid a heavy price for courageously resisting attempts to Aryanize the church: he was “Hitler’s prisoner” from 1937 to 1945 in two concentration camps, including years of solitary confinement. Still, the Confessing Church, the dissident wing of the Lutherans that Niemöller helped lead, was concerned only with the persecution of the churches and had little to say about the increasingly lethal persecution of the Jews. Hockenos shows that, after the war, Niemöller came to renounce German nationalism, slowly becoming a pacifist and acknowledging the Protestant Church’s history of anti-Semitism and silence during the Holocaust. But his credibility in the last decades of his life was undermined by his naïveté about the evils of Soviet communism. Hockenos’s impressively nuanced study captures a major 20th-century religious leader and his contradictions. [em]Agent: Rob McQuilkin, MMQLIT Agency. (Sept.) [/em]