Listen Up All You Flemish Fuckers Out There Who Think "It Won't Be That Bad." : Pastor Martin Niemöller, Nazi Victim (1892-1984)

"They came for the communists, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a communist;They came for the socialists, and I did not speak up because I was not a socialist;They came for the union leaders, and I did not speak up because I wasn't a union leader;They came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me ...."


Martin Niemoeller was a Protestant pastor born January 14, 1892, in Lippstadt, Westphalia. He was a submarine commander in World War I. He was anti-communist and initially supported the Nazis until the church was made subordinate to state authority. Although arrested by the Gestapo in 1937 for his open opposition to Hitler and incarcerated in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps, he nonetheless berated himself for not doing more, as in the quote above. This quotation is often cited incorrectly. The exact phrasing was supplied by Sibylle Sarah Niemoeller von Sell, Martin Niemoeller's wife. The remark was made in reply to a student's question, "How could it happen?"