Religion: Oil for Hinges

Pastor Martin Niemöller was packing his bags again. Since U.S. troops ended his eight-year imprisonment in concentration camps for defying Hitler, the lean, 57-year-old evangelical clergyman and ex-U-boat commander (World War I) has been known in Europe and the U.S. as German Protestantism’s most dramatic spokesman. This week he is off to Australia, via the U.S.

An invitation had come 18 months ago from the “Open-Air Campaigners,” an Australian revivalist group; at the time the Campaigners were not prosperous enough to advance travel expenses. Australia’s Anglican Archbishop Howard W. K. Mowll at last raised the necessary funds, and Niemöller has laid out an extensive three-month speaking tour.

Niemöller expects Australians to be less complicated than Europeans. Said he last week: “It will be necessary, I think, to speak to them in simple, sincere, readily understandable terms. All I will try to do is to put before them a picture, in solid, simple lines like a woodcut, of the nature of the extreme tests to which Christianity has been subjected in Germany for so many years. My aim is to get our story across, not just to an intellectual few, but to all.”

He also plans to direct attention to Germany’s ten million refugees from behind the Iron Curtain in the hope that underpopulated Australia may consider them for immigration. “I consider it the task of the church,” he says, “to oil the hinges on the doors between countries so that these doors may open more easily.”