Remembered for leading his church’s opposition to Hitler, Evangelical Pastor Martin Niemöller still enjoys a reputation abroad as one of Germany’s most respected clerics. He was elected one of six co-presidents of the World Council of Churches in 1961, will help preside at the council’s meeting this week in Nigeria. But at home Niemöller is more and more regarded with the same kind of pained dismay that Anglican clerics reserved for the late “Red Dean” of Canterbury—and for a not wholly dissimilar reason. He is now a militant but myopic neutralist, whose angry blasts against “warmongering” always seem to be addressed to the West and never to the Communist world.
Inhumanity Personified. Niemöller, who was a U-boat commander during World War I, this month fired another of his political torpedoes. Writing in the fortnightly church magazine Stimme (Voice), Niemöller charged that West Germany’s militaristic policies are a danger to peace, and have earned his country a “general unpopularity” matching South Africa’s. He cited Transport Minister Hans-Christoph See-bohm and former Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss as “names behind which living humanity suspects inhumanity personified.” West German democracy, he said, “only shares the name with what one used to understand by it,” and the leading political parties are bent on creating a dictatorship that would make Hitler seem like “an orphan boy.” For that reason, Niemöller urged Christians to mock next September’s elections by turning in ballots invalidated by written expressions of scorn for the contending parties.
Niemöller, who spent eight years in concentration camps for his courageous opposition to the Third Reich, has been going left ever since the end of World War II. He has denounced the “war hysteria” of the U.S., and once he said that he would not blame the Russians for trying to drive American forces out of Europe. He has suggested that a reunited Germany under Communism might be better than the present division, and has implied that the Federal Republic’s army is a “high school for criminals.”
Realities & Fantasies. The pastor’s latest blastled a government spokesman to suggest that it would be wiser to ignore the thoughts of a man “who cannot always distinguish clearly between realities and fantasies.” Hannover’s Lutheran Bishop Hanns Lilje called ballot invalidation “a mistaken means of striving for peace.” Hamburg Theologian-Preacher Helmut Thielicke said: “Niemöller is a typical German, who has no sense for compromise.” But German church leaders, though embarrassed by Niemöller’s political views, have never moved to depose him because of his international prestige. At 73, he has retired from all his offices in the Evangelical Church; his fellow clerics hold some faint hope that eventually he will stop firing torpedoes without upping periscope.
More Must-Reads from TIME
- Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington
- Why Do More Young Adults Have Cancer?
- Colman Domingo Leads With Radical Love
- 11 New Books to Read in February
- How to Get Better at Doing Things Alone
- Cecily Strong on Goober the Clown
- Column: The Rise of America’s Broligarchy
- Introducing the 2025 Closers
Contact us at letters@time.com