First, they came for the socialists, and I did
not speak out because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I
did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak
out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for
me, and there was no one left to speak for me.
It really creates a visceral reaction, doesn't
it? Every single time. It really does. It's just
haunting. Yeah, it's one of those few pieces
of tech that feels like it's just... etch into
the global hard drive. You see it on museum walls.
You see it on protest signs. People quote it
on social media constantly. Everywhere. Right.
It's the ultimate shorthand for, you know, don't
be a bystander. It's concise. It's poetic. And
the structure is just perfect. But, and this
is exactly why I love doing these deep dives
with you. Here we go. I have a massive stack
of notes here based on historical records and
Wikipedia entries that suggests the version I
just read, which is arguably the most famous
version in the English speaking world is, well,
it's basically a cover song. A cover song. That
is a very, very charitable way to put it. Really?
Yes. It's a cover song where the lyrics have
been changed to make it more radio friendly.
Radio -friendly. We're talking about a confession
regarding the Holocaust. How on earth do you
make that radio -friendly? By removing the people
that the audience just doesn't want to hear about.
Wow. Look, the sentiment of the quote is undeniable,
obviously. It's historic. But if we actually
look at the source material we have today, the
historical records, the research from historians
like Professor Harold Marcuse, and the actual
biography of the man who said it, Martin E. Miller.
Right, the author. Almost everything the general
public thinks they know about this quote unquote
poem is a little bit wrong, or even a lot wrong.
Okay, so we have a full -blown case of the Mandela
effect on our hands. A very serious one. We have...
Text that has been edited. We have specific groups
of victims that have been entirely erased and
we have a hero figure in need Miller who is Let's
just say his reality is a lot messier than the
myth. Well messy is usually where the truth lives
So for everyone listening our mission today is
to unpack all of this. We're gonna cover three
main things First the text itself and what's
mysteriously missing? Second, the incredibly
complex and honestly shocking backstory of Martin
Niemöller. Well, definitely shocking. And finally,
the actual historical moment this confession
was born. So let's just start with the text.
I read the version that starts with, first they
came for the socialists. That's the one prominently
displayed at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum,
right? It is. And it's the version most Americans
know by heart. But if you were to travel to Germany,
or if you dig into the earliest transcripts of
Niemöller's speeches from right after the war,
you would notice a glaring omission in that American
version. An omission? A big one. The original
sequence did not start with socialists. Who did
it start with, then? It started with the communists.
The communists. Yes, when the Nazis came for
the communists. OK, that is a very specific swap.
So why the edit? I mean, I can probably guess,
given the history, but walk me through it. Why
do we say socialists, or I've even seen some
versions say industrialists, but we completely
leave out the communists? Well, you have to think
about when this quote actually became famous
in the United States. Yeah. It started circulating
widely in the 1950s. Ah, OK. The Cold War, McCarthyism.
The Red Scare, exactly. I remember the political
climate of the time, you have this incredibly
powerful, moral, anti -Nazi statement that people
want to use. Right. But in 1950s America, it
was politically impossible to sell a poem that
started by asking for empathy for communists.
It would have been investigated? It would have
been dead on arrival. People would have rejected
the whole message. So it was sanitized. Sanitized
for an American audience. Yes. And Professor
Marcuse, who has done an incredible deep dive
into the history of this exact quote, argues
that this isn't just some minor harmless edit
for the sake of palitability. What does he say
it does? He thinks removing communists actually
breaks the internal logic of the entire confession.
breaks the logic. Just by swapping one political
group for another. How so? Because it breaks
the chronological order of who was targeted first.
Well, partly that. The Nazis did target the communists
first, politically speaking. They were the primary
rival in the streets. But it's more about the
psychological point Niemöller was trying to make
to his audience. OK, tracking with you. His argument
wasn't just, hey, we should have protected our
friends. His profound realization was we should
have protected our enemies. Oh, oh, wow. That
is a huge distinction. It's the whole point of
the text. You see, Niemöller was a staunch conservative.
He was a traditional churchman. He instinctively
disliked communists. He didn't just disagree
with them. No, he saw them as godless, as direct
threats to the Christian church and to German
society. So the true power of his confession
lies in him standing up and saying, I didn't
speak up for them because I didn't like them.
because I thought they deserved it. That was
my sin. So if you change it to socialists, which
feels a little softer, a little more democratic
to a Westerner, or if you just skip straight
to Jews, you completely lose that element of,
I let the people I actively hated be taken away.
Precisely. You turn a deeply uncomfortable confession
about political bias and moral blindness into
a generic feel -good statement about solidarity.
It waters it down. Completely. The full list
in the German original usually tracks the actual
escalation. It goes communists, then trade unionists,
then social democrats, then Jews, and finally
the speaker. It's a slippery slope, but the slope
specifically starts with the people on the absolute
margins of that society's sympathy, the ones
nobody wants to defend. Exactly. And that brings
us perfectly to the me in the poem, the speaker,
because understanding why he didn't speak up
for communists initially requires us to understand
who Martin E. Miller actually was. Right. I think
most people, when they read this, they picture
a lifelong resistance fighter. That's definitely
the image I had. Like a brave underground pastor
standing in the pulpit denouncing the regime
from day one. It's a nice image. But looking
at these notes from our sources, yikes. Complicated
is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It really
is. Martin A. Moeller was born in 1892. And yes,
he was a Lutheran pastor. But before he ever
put on the clerical collar, He was a military
man. OK. He was a U -boat commander in World
War One, a highly decorated naval officer. A
U -boat commander. So he's not exactly the profile
of a gentle pacifist. Or from it. He was a fiercely
patriotic, staunch national conservative. And
here's the kicker. The detail that usually floors
people when they first learn about him. Lay it
on me. When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Niemöller
didn't oppose him. He welcomed him. Wait, he
welcomed Hitler. He voted for the Nazi. You're
kidding. Not at all. You really have to understand
the context of the time for someone of his background.
Niemöller hated the Weimar Republic, which was
the fragile democracy that came after World War
One. Right. A lot of conservatives felt it was
forced on them. Exactly. He thought it was weak,
chaotic and fundamentally un -German. So when
Hitler came along promising a national revival,
Niemöller bought in. He believed the Nazis would
restore order. traditional values and national
pride. So he wasn't just a passive bystander
in the beginning. He was a supporter. He actively
wanted this revival. He was an enthusiastic supporter.
He even met Hitler personally in 1934 and came
away from that meeting initially thinking, I
can work with this man. We share the same goals
for Germany. OK, so. Obviously, things went south
at some point. Niemöller famously ends up in
a concentration camp. So what was the turning
point? Did he see the street violence against
Jewish people and suddenly realize he'd made
a terrible mistake? You would hope that was the
line in the sand. As modern readers, that's what
we want the turning point to be. But it wasn't.
The historical record is very clear that it wasn't.
Niemöller didn't turn against Hitler because
of the Holocaust or the broader persecution of
minorities. Initially, he turned against Hitler
because of a turf war. A turf war. Over what?
Over who controlled the church. Hitler and the
Nazis wanted to coordinate all the Protestant
churches in Germany. They wanted to create this
unified, right church that entirely followed
Nazi ideology. Oh, they wanted to absorb religion
into the state. Exactly. And as part of that,
they introduced something called the Aryan Paragraph
into the church constitution. And what did that
paragraph do? It explicitly stated that anyone
of Jewish descent even if they were baptized
Christians, could not serve as pastors or hold
any office in the church. Basically, the totalitarian
state was telling the church who was allowed
to be a minister. And that's where Niemöller
finally drew the line. Yes. He essentially said,
you don't tell the church what to do. The state
cannot dictate theology. So it was an institutional
defense. He founded the confessional church specifically
to oppose this state control. But we have to
be incredibly careful with the nuance here, as
the sources point out. He was fighting for the
autonomy of his religious institution. He wasn't
necessarily fighting for the human rights of
Jewish people and society at large. So he was
staying strictly in his lane, defending his own
house. Correct. And we know this for a fact,
because even in 1935, and remember, this is two
full years into the brutal reality of Nazi rule,
Niemöller is still giving sermons where he says
some truly regrettable, deeply prejudiced things.
Like what? He preached from the pulpit that Jewish
people were being punished by God for, quote,
bringing the Christ of God to the cross. Wow,
okay. That's standard centuries -old theological
anti -Semitism. It was very common, yes. Yeah.
But it shatters the myth of him as this enlightened
hero fighting for a universal equality from the
start. He was very much a man of his time, harboring
all those inherited prejudices. Right. He was
protecting baptized Jews within his church because
he viewed them as Christians, not because he
opposed anti -Semitism as a fundamental evil.
That is a massive, massive distinction. But eventually,
despite his narrow focus, the regime got tired
of him pushing back. They did. He was too high
profile and too loud. Hmm. So in 1937, he was
arrested by the Gestapo. He was sent to Sachsenhausen
concentration camp and later transferred to Dachau.
He spent seven years as a personal prisoner of
the Fuhrer. Seven years in those camps? I mean,
regardless of his early politics, that is a horrific
price to pay. That kind of suffering usually
cements someone as an untouchable martyr. It
does. And he absolutely suffered. He was kept
in solitary confinement for a long time. There
is no minimizing that. But... And this is the
part of the research that I literally had to
read three times to make sure I wasn't hallucinating.
You can't know exactly what you're about to bring
up. It's wild. The letter. The letter. So I want
you to picture this scene. It is 1939. Niemöller
has been locked in a concentration camp for two
years. He is a political prisoner over the Nazi
state. Right. World War II officially breaks
out. And what does Niemöller do? He writes a
letter to the Nazi Naval Command. He volunteers
to fight. I just... I really can't wrap my head
around that. He's sitting in a cell in a concentration
camp put there by Hitler, and he writes a formal
letter saying, put me back in a U -boat. I want
to fight for Germany. It is the ultimate historical
paradox, but it really speaks to the sheer depth
of his nationalism. In his mind, he was able
to completely separate the Nazi government, which
he was actively fighting against on church matters,
from the fatherland. which he loved unconditionally.
That level of compartmentalization is terrifying.
His instinct as a former soldier and a German
patriot was simply that when the country's at
war, you fight. Even if the guy leading the war
is the exact same guy who locked you up. Did
they let him out? Did they actually consider
giving him a U -boat? No. Thank goodness. The
Nazis flatly rejected the offer. Goebbels apparently
thought the whole thing was absurd. But just
imagine for a second if they hadn't rejected
him. Oh, man. Imagine if the man who eventually
wrote First They Came had spent the Second World
War actively sinking allied ships in the Atlantic
for the Third Reich. We definitely wouldn't be
quoting him on protest signs today. Definitely
not. So if we pull all this together, we have
a man who welcomed Hitler, spouted anti -Semitic
rhetoric from the pulpit, fought for his church,
but not for broad civil rights, and then literally
tried to volunteer for the Nazi Navy while rotting
in a concentration camp. How in the world do
we get from that guy to the beautiful universal
poem about standing up for others? We get there
through a very slow, very painful, and very public
awakening. And honestly, that's what makes the
text so powerful when you really understand it.
It's not a pristine lecture from a saint who
was always right. Right. It's a raw confession
from a deeply guilty man. He finally realized
he was wrong, but only when it was way too late.
Exactly. That brings us to the actual origin
of the text itself, because as we touched on
earlier, it wasn't written as a poem at all.
He didn't sit down at a mahogany desk in a study
in 1945 and pen a brilliant sonnet. It came from
a speech, right? Just off the cuff. Yes. January
6, 1946, in Frankfurt. Now, to understand the
speech, you have to picture the scene. Germany
is absolute rubble. The war is over. The true
scale of the Holocaust has just been revealed
to the world. And the prevailing mood among the
surviving German populace wasn't, oh my God,
what have we done? What was it? It was, look
at what happened to us. They were freezing. They
were starving. Their cities were firebombed.
They felt overwhelming self -pity. They felt
like the victims. So nobody in that audience
wanted to hear about German guilt. Nobody. They
wanted comfort and sympathy. Andy Miller gets
up on that stage and entirely refuses to give
it to them. He's speaking to the confessional
church, his own people, and he's there to talk
about one thing. Mea culpa. My fault. Our fault.
There's a specific line in the transcript of
that 1946 speech that really stood out to me
when I was reviewing the sources. He's talking
about the communists being taken away to the
camps in those early days of 1933. And he says,
and I quote, we knew it, it was printed in the
newspapers. That line is devastating. Really,
it was printed in the newspapers because it cuts
right through the most common post -war excuse,
which was, we simply didn't know. Right, the
myth of ignorance. He destroys that myth. He
admits to his own flock, we knew, but we just
didn't care. In the speech, he says, who raised
their voice, we thought, well, communists. Those
are opponents of religion. Should I be my brother's
keeper? He's stripping away every ounce of innocence.
He's looking at his peers and saying, we saw
it happen in broad daylight and we let it happen
because we didn't like the people being targeted.
And he doesn't stop there. He also uses this
really intense, almost jarring mathematical hypothetical
in that speech. Did you catch that figure? I
did. It's a staggering calculation. He basically
speculates that if 14 ,000 Protestant pastors
had just stood up together in 1933 and 1934 and
defended the truth to the death. Right. He says
maybe 30 ,000 or 40 ,000 Christians would have
had their heads cut off. He's very graphic and
blunt about the cost of resistance. But then
he says if they had done that, if they had sacrificed
themselves early on, maybe they would have saved
30 to 40 million people. It's chilling. He is
literally weighing the hypothetical martyrdom
of his own colleagues against the total death
toll of the war in the Holocaust. And he concludes
that because they weren't willing to pay the
relatively small price of 14 ,000 lives, the
whole world was forced to pay the price of 30
million lives. That is just, I mean, it's incredibly
heavy. It's an economic argument about the cost
of silence. It really is. It perfectly encapsulates
the idea that the price of resistance is undeniably
high, but the price of silence is infinite. So
if this origin was a rambling, emotional, extemporaneous
speech about shared guilt and mathematical death
tolls and reading the newspaper, how did it eventually
become the tidy four stanza poem we see on posters
today? It was essentially the ultimate game of
telephone. Yeah. It started circulating informally
in religious circles right after the war. Niemeller
eventually went on a massive global speaking
tour. He actually became a huge figure in the
international peace and anti -nuclear movement
later in his life. Full 180 from the U -boat
days. Exactly. And people would go hear him speak
and they'd naturally paraphrase the core message
to their friends. They'd say, you know, he said
first they took the communists, then they took
the unionists, and we did nothing. and eventually
someone decided to polish it up. Right. By the
1950s, the structured poetic form that we recognize
today just sort of organically emerged in print.
Niemöller himself was actually asked about the
wording in an interview in 1976. What did he
say? He openly admitted he had no written minutes
or exact script of that original Frankfurt speech.
He said he might have formulated it slightly
differently on different nights of his tour,
but the core idea was always exactly the same.
All of that was not our affair. Not our affair.
That is the truly chilling part. It is. And to
add another layer to this, there was a recent
2025 interview with his biographer, Matthew D.
Hakanos. OK. What does he add to the timeline?
Hakanos suggests that the famous rhythmic poetic
structure was most likely a direct contribution
from Niemöller's supporters and translators.
They cleaned it up for him. They took this incredibly
messy raw sprawling confession and expertly turned
it into something punchy that could fit on a
memorial plaque. Which honestly makes total sense.
You can't put a 45 minute agonizing theological
speech on a bumper sticker or a t -shirt. But
the poem. That format sticks in the brain. It
sticks perfectly. And that precise stickiness
is what allowed it to travel everywhere. To the
permanent exhibition at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem,
and all the way into pop culture references like
the Billy Bragg song, Sea of Heroes. But hearing
all this history, it leaves me with one really
big question. Sure. Does the clean version, the
poem everyone knows, does it lose something essential?
If we forget that socialists was originally communist,
and if we forget that the guy saying it was a
former anti -Semite who literally wanted to command
a U -boat for the Nazis, do we lose the actual
teeth of the warning? I think we absolutely do.
If you view the poem as coming from a saint,
a pure, unblemished hero who always knew right
from wrong from the very beginning, then it's
really just a nice, safe sentiment. Right. It's
just, hey, be nice to people, look out for each
other. Exactly. It becomes a platitude. But if
you view it as coming from a collaborator, from
a man who was actively part of the problem, who
shared the dark prejudices of his time, and who
realized his catastrophic mistake only when the
monster finally came to his own door, then it
becomes a much more urgent, terrifying warning
about us. It completely stops being a comfortable
story about history and starts being a mirror.
Yes. It forces us to ask ourselves, what are
we intentionally ignoring right now because we've
decided it's not our affair? That's what the
sources refer to as cognitive inertia. Cognitive
inertia. Break that concept down for me a bit.
It's the human tendency to just keep going with
the flow of society, to not react or put yourself
at risk until the problem directly disrupts your
own personal life. Nieler's confession is a blistering
condemnation of that exact inertia. He's saying
that waiting until you are the target is essentially
a death sentence. Because by the time they get
to you, the institutions and the people that
could have protected you are already gone. Exactly.
The unions have been dismantled. The opposition
parties have been outlawed. The press has been
silenced. You're completely alone. It really
reframes the entire experience of reading that
quote. I don't think I'll ever be able to look
at it the same way again. It's not a hero's advice
from a mountaintop. It's a cautionary tale from
a deeply flawed man who failed the test. And
flawed men are much, much easier to relate to
than saints. We are all flawed. We all have built
in biases. We all have groups of people in society
that we'd rather not stick our necks out for.
So we've unpacked the Mandela effect of the changing
text, the very messy reality of the U -boat commander
turned pastor and the fascinating transformation
from a post -war speech to a global poem. What
is the one core thing you want the listener to
take away from all these sources today? I would
go right back to Professor Marquise's point about
that missing first line. First, they came for
the communists. The true power of the quote doesn't
lie in naming your friends. It lies in specifically
naming the people you really don't want to defend.
The people who make you uncomfortable or who
you fundamentally disagree with. Exactly. So
I want to leave the listener with a thought experiment
based on that. If you were writing this poem
today for your own society right now, Who would
be in that first stanza? Who is on your list?
Who are the people currently being targeted or
marginalized that you instinctively feel, mm,
eh, that's not my problem? Because according
to the painful lesson Niemöller learned, if you
wait until the threat gets to the second or third
stanza, you're already too late. That is a very
heavy, provocative question to chew on, but I
think it's absolutely the necessary one to ask.
For everyone listening, we highly encourage you
to go look up the full original German translation
and the excerpts from that 1946 Frankfurt speech.
It gives a totally different, much rougher texture
to the words we all think we know so well. Thank
you for helping us navigate this incredibly messy
history today. It was a real pleasure to dig
into it with you. We'll catch you on the next
deep dive. Stay curious.