Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture 2024

Event Description

Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

“Then they came for me…”. Martin Niemöller, Protestant antisemitism and the problem of Holocaust remembrance in post-war Germany

“Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me”. This the final line of the famous quotation by the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). The quote frames the problem of Niemöller’s own complicity in Nazi crimes and the Holocaust in terms of a lack of empathy with the victims of Nazi persecution. This reading of the quote, however, masks a much more complicated reality, as Niemöller continued to voice antisemitic views both in the years from 1933 and in the post-war period. Niemöller’s public admissions of German guilt from 1945 to 1947 have to be interpreted in light of his insistence on the victimhood of the Germans. The talk will situate the problematic nature of Niemöller’s post-war statements on the Holocaust in the wider Protestant discourse on German guilt and  remembrance.

Benjamin Ziemann is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of six books, including Contested Commemorations. Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (2013) and Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War: Killing-Dying-Surviving (2017). His latest monograph is the award-winning book Hitler’s Personal Prisoner. The Life of Martin Niemöller, Oxford 2024.

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