The German Hitler Feared

The man whom Adolf Hitler dared not kill stood in the chancel of a little church in the Alpine village of Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. Only a few hours before, Pastor Martin Niem&2461ler, leader of Germany's Confessional Church--and one of Christianity's most effective anti-Nazi weapons--had been liberated by the U.S. Fifth Army. His first public act after eight years of imprisonment was to conduct a religious service, based on a text he had long since chosen for this moment:

Behold, the hour cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me. . . . In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world--St. John 16: 32-33 (King James version).

Pastor Niem&2461ler became an anti-Nazi the hard way. He was a staunch early-Party member. But when he saw how the wind was blowing, he stood up in his Dahlem pulpit and denounced Hitler's mumbo-jumbo racial theories. He also refused to put the will of Der F&252hrer above the will of God.

Last week Niem&2461ler said that his defiance had cost, him four years of solitary confinement at Sachsenhausen and Dachau. But unlike most other concentration-camp prisoners, he was given permission ("without begging for it") to have books. He had read 300 volumes of English literature. His wife was allowed half-hour visits with him twice a month--always in the presence of the Gestapo.

In the fifth year, the Gestapo relaxed a bit, locked him up with three Catholic priests. Last December he was permitted to hold weekly services at Dachau. During his entire imprisonment, he said, the guards treated him "correctly"--but "I can't say why I was allowed to survive." One likely reason: an ex-U-boat commander in World War I, Niem&2461ler was known to Germans as a good German.

His worst hardship was worrying about his seven children. One daughter died last fall; a son was killed in battle on Feb. 28; two other sons were reported missing in

Russia. All he knows now is that the rest are somewhere east of Berlin.

Now Pastor Niem&2461ler is anxious to get back to work. He is certain that the church holds Germany's only hope for the future: "Our people now know that all false idealisms are worthless. . . . There is only one way in the future. . . . It is a tremendous challenge both to Catholicism and Protestantism not to let our people down at this moment."

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