Niemöller, Emil Gustav Friedrich Martin

Protestant clergyman, church president

Born: 14.01.1892 in Lippstadt

Died: 06.03.1984 in Wiesbaden

Niemöller was an officer and submarine commander of UC 67 from 1912-18. He studied Protestant theology in Münster from 1920-24 and was managing director of the Inner Mission in Westphalia until 1931, before becoming pastor of St. Annen in Berlin-Dahlem.

From September 1933 he headed the Pastors' Emergency Association; he was arrested on 01.07.1937. Prior to this, he had spoken three times in Wiesbaden on June 29, 1937: at 5 p.m. in the Marktkirche, at 7.30 p.m. in the Ringkirche and again at 8.30 p.m. in the Marktkirche. After being acquitted in court, he was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps in 1938. In 1945, he was deported by the SS and finally liberated by the American military. He was then taken to Naples and released in Wiesbaden, where he was held in the American Interrogation Center, Parkstraße 2, initially behind barbed wire again. The only person he knew was Pastor Franz von Bernus from the Bergkirche, whom he recognized through the wire fence during a tour of the courtyard and whom he informed about his prolonged internment. He was released on June 24, 1945, only after a four-day hunger strike.

In August 1945, Niemöller took part in the church leaders' conference in Treysa near Ziegenhain and became President of the Church Foreign Office of the Evangelical Church in Germany, EKD. In 1947, he was elected President of the re-established Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau (EKHN). Niemöller traveled to Moscow in 1952. On his return to Brentanostrasse 3 in Wiesbaden, where he lived from 1948-84, he was greeted with the banner "Back to Moscow - Towaritsch Niemöller! dawaj, dawaj, dawaj!". In 1954, he became president of the German Peace Society. From 1961-68 he was one of the six presidents of the World Council of Churches.

Niemöller received numerous awards, including the Lenin Prize in 1967 and the Lenin Gold Medal in 1971, as well as the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Wilhelm Leuschner Medal of the State of Hesse in 1977 and the Golden Peace Medal of the GDR. In 1975, Niemöller was made an honorary citizen of Wiesbaden and received the Carl von Ossietzky Medal in 1983. He was awarded numerous honorary doctorates in East and West Germany. Niemöller's path from a naval officer loyal to the Kaiser to a fighter against the rearmament of the Federal Republic, to an opponent of nuclear weapons and a staunch pacifist also led him from a pastor, as he liked to be called, far removed from politics to a committed churchman for the cause of peace. The Martin Niemöller Foundation is based in Wiesbaden, and a school is also named after him. A memorial plaque on his former home commemorates him.