First they came...

We all know it, don't we?

I looked up its history today and was surprised. (Forgive me if you already know all this.) Apparently the 'poem' we all know is based on, but is not a translation of, what Pastor Martin Niemöller said in a speech for the Confessing Church in Frankfurt on 6 January 1946. A partial translation of that, published in English in 1947 is:

The people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians — "should I be my brother's keeper?"

Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? Only then did the church as such take note.

Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible?

The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. ... I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934 — there must have been a possibility — 14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40 million people, because that is what it is costing us now.

He used many versions of the text during his career. A representative in America made a similar speech in 1968, omitting communists but including industrialists. wtf?!

The poetic version in English that has circulated since the 1950s on my side of the Atlantic is:

  First they came for the Communists
  And I did not speak out
  Because I was not a Communist

  Then they came for the Socialists
  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
  To speak out for me

It seems that 'socialists' were not included by Niemöller himself but inserted for the version that now circulates in the USA, to replace the stanza about communists.

Pause to consider the implications of that...


One of the speakers at the Stand Up to Racism rally in Oxford today used to manage the Close Campsfield Campaign (Campsfield House was an immigration detention centre near Oxford) for the 25 years until it was closed in 2018. In its death throes a few weeks ago, the Tory government awarded a contract to refurbish Campsfield to house more than double the number of "foreign nationals liable for removal from the UK" as were there before, a contract that our new Labour government has not cancelled.

There have been jokes locally that it should be used to imprison the racists instead but truly, that will not help. The best speech this morning was not from those who want to 'smash racism by any means necessary' (SWP) but from a local councillor who said we need to end the injustices that lead to children, who are never born racist, becoming racist.