Monday, Jun. 18, 1945
"For What I Am"
Pastor Martin Niemoller, the one German whom Christians everywhere had respected, shocked a lot of people last week by saying that he had volunteered to serve in Hitler's U-boat fleet. This admission, made to hostile British and U.S. correspondents in Naples, should have surprised nobody. Niemoller was an ace submarine officer in World War I, he was already a privileged but jealously guarded prisoner of the Nazis when World War II began, and his offer to serve again had been reported in the U.S. in 1939.
The pale, intense Pastor Niemoller who confronted newsmen last week was still "a good German." What he had to say for himself and for Germans as a people was therefore all the more revealing:
"You must take me for what I am. I had nourished the hope that National Socialism, if it had gone the right way, might have developed into a system for creating good for the German people. I must say that I had been deceived. . . .
"If there is a war a German doesn't ask is it just or unjust, but he feels bound to join the ranks. ... I think the German people will be a little more cautious in the future, but more than this I cannot promise. . . .
"It may be that Germany can become democratic, but you have got to face the fact that the German people are not adapted to the sort of democracy which exists in Britain and the United States. The German people are different. . . they like to be governed; they like to feel authority."
The Misled. Niemoller said that even he, a Nazi captive for eight years and a veteran of Dachau, had not known what went on in the horror camps, and his belated realization "shocked and shattered" him. "But," he added, "you are mistaken if you think any honest person in Germany will feel personally responsible for things like Dachau, Belsen and Buchenwald. He will feel only that he was misled into believing in a regime that was led by criminals and murderers."
"The world will be astonished," said Pastor Niemoller, "when it sees how many good people are left in Germany."
Of all people, Austria's betrayed and long imprisoned ex-Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg also came to the German people's defense. Said he: "I am convinced that the great majority of the German people hated war. ... I believe Hitler caused the war, and Hitler alone."
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