Martin Niemöller was born in Lippstadt on January 14, 1892.

After a successful career in the Imperial Navy, which he ended as a submarine commander after the First World War, he began studying Protestant theology in Münster in 1919. As a clergyman during the Weimar Republic, he worked to restore meaning to a seemingly disoriented society through the Christian message and order through church structures.

After initially supporting the National Socialists' rise to power, Niemöller became a critic of the regime once he became aware of its inhuman ideology. After several arrests and trials, he was finally interned in various concentration camps from 1937 to 1945.

As a member of the Council of the Protestant Church of Germany and Church President of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau, he was involved in the reconstruction of the church. In 1947, he became church president, an office he held until 1965. As an opponent of the rearmament and nuclear armament of West Germany, he was also politically active in the 1950s. In the 1960s, he was committed to ecumenism.

On December 17, 1975, his adopted hometown of Wiesbaden honored him by awarding him honorary citizenship. At the ceremony, Niemöller also signed the city's Golden Book.

He died in the Hessian state capital on March 6, 1984. In 1987, on the initiative of the pupils, the upper secondary school at Moltkering was named after the former church president.