A “world famous German Protestant and leader of the World Council of Churches,” Martin Niemöller, excoriated himself immediately after WWII for his own cowardice — a cowardice he had earlier disguised as merely being his good politic (namely, his endorsement of Hitler’s National Socialist party’s ascendancy to power in 1933). In a July 3, 1946 speech in Stuttgart, published under the title "The Path to Freedom," Martin Niemöller spoke the following words:
“One day I drove by near Dachau in my car. My wife was with me and said, "Couldn't I see your cell, where you were imprisoned for the past four years?" I said, "I'll see what can be done." And drove there and was allowed to enter the cell block and show my wife the cell. Then something happened. When we came out the American officer accompanying us led us along a wall. I had often walked along it. There was a large gate in it. I had never seen it open. This time it was open. I knew what was behind it, but entered anyway. I stood with my wife in front of the crematorium in Dachau, and on a tree in front of this building there was a a white-painted board with black lettering. [...] There one could read: "Here in the years 1933-1945 238,756 people [see footnote 13 below] were cremated." While I read it, not aloud, I noticed that my wife fainted and sank trembling into my arms. I had to support her and noticed how at that moment a cold shudder ran down my spine. I think my wife fainted when she read the quarter-million number. That hadn't moved me. Because it didn't tell me anything new. What ran through me hot and cold at that moment was something else. That was the other two numbers: "1933-1945." I groped for my alibi and knew that the two numbers were the wanted poster of the living God for Pastor Niemöller. My alibi reached from July 1, 1937 to mid-1945. There stood: "1933-1945." Adam, where are you? Mensch, where were you? Yes, I know, from mid-1937 until the end you have an alibi. Here you're being asked: "Where were you from 1933 until July 1, 1937?" And I couldn't avoid this question any longer. In 1933 I was a free man.”
[Footnote 13: “ . . . this number from 1945 has long since proven to be incorrect. About 200,000 inmates were registered in Dachau; ca. 42,000 of them died during their imprisonment. The number cremated in the camp is probably around 15,000-20,000. See Harold Marcuse, "Dachau," in: John Merriman & Jay Winter (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction, vol. 2 (New York: Scribners, 2006), 763-766.”]
So, why had he not suffered martyrdom, which is what had befallen his fellow Churchman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was ardently anti-Nazi? Niemöller was a coward, but Bonhoeffer was not. Niemöller, in a print out of one of his speeches he made in 1946, confessed the following out of pangs of his post-WWII conscience, a conscience that had not bothered him from 1933-1937; he stated this:
“God didn't ask me where I was from 1937 to 1945, he asked me where I was from 1933 to 1937. From 1933 to 1937 I didn't have an answer. Should I perhaps have said: I was a brave pastor of the Confessing Church in those years, I risked speaking out [ein Wort riskiert] and thus risked freedom and my life? But God didn't ask me about all that. God asked: Where were you from 1933 to 1937, when human beings were being burned here? Those weren't my Christian brothers, who were burned there, those were Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. [ernste Bibelforscher usw.]. That's why I didn't care [mich nicht gekümmert].” — Martin Niemöller, Die Erneuerung unserer Kirche (Munich, 1946); reprinted in: Reden 1945-1954, p. 19.
But Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany did courageously speak out against the Hitler government’s persecution of them, in a letter sent by every congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany to officials of the government, on October 7, 1934. The letter warned the Nazis in these words: “If your government or officers do violence to us because we are obeying God, then our blood will be upon you and you will answer to Almighty God.” And in an open letter that was given wide distribution, the very names of those Gestapo officers who had fiendishly abused Jehovah's Witnesses were published in that very letter!
Also, Jehovah's Witnesses throughout the world on October 7, 1934 joined their German brothers by sending cablegrams that warned the Hitler government in these words: “Your ill-treatment of Jehovah’s witnesses shocks all good people on earth and dishonors God’s name. Refrain from further persecuting Jehovah’s witnesses; otherwise, God will destroy you and your national party.”
Calling attention of the Hitler government's crimes against Jehovah's Witnesses, and giving it fair warning, and calling for the attention of all German citizens to the Hitler government's crimes against Jehovah's Witnesses -- which crimes had outraged good people throughout the world -- was courageous, even though it more deeply infuriated Hitler against Jehovah's Witnesses.
Yes, there are dedicated Holocaust deniers, and neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists in Germany . . . enough of them having positioned themselves in the military and in the state's intelligence service so that an armed coup against the German government is not as preposterous an idea as it would have been a few decades ago. And here there is no surprise to us Jehovah's Witnesses that the world's powerful governments in recent years have become unusually plagued with chaos in their institutions so that results bode even worse evils for populaces that have heretofore put their faith in manmade government for assurance of rather high ideals (e.g., freedom of assembly, freedom of religion/worship, freedom of speech and solicitation, etc. constitutionally enshrined and supposedly protected by those governments). The Russian Federation under Putin is just one example of how dangerous a country's government can become for Jehovah's Witnesses and other groups, this because fascism is once again becoming quite the phenomenon as evidenced by the popularity that autocrats ("strong men") have among a sizable electorate in their respective countries, an electorate willing to engage in armed atacks for its cause. That is the very sort of thing that played a significant role in Hitler's rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s when he had the backing of a paramilitary organization, De Sturmabteilung ("The Storm Detachment," aka Braunhemden, that is to say, in English translation, "Brownshirts"). Hitler finally received the adulation and hero worship he wanted; it was given him by what had become, in the 1930s, a majority of Germans in support of him.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/15/inte-j15.html
