Pastor turned pacifist after war

Press, 9 March 1984, Page 6

Pastor turned pacifist after war

NZPA-Reuter Wiesbaden, W. Germany

Pastor Martin Niemoller, a Protestant church leader who defied Hitler and crusaded against the United States entanglement in Vietnam, died in Wiesbaden on Wednesday. He was 92. An Evangelical (Lutheran) Church spokesman said that Pastor Niemoller had been in frail health for a long time.

A World War I Commander of a German submarine, his later pacifist views earned him the hatred of Hitler’s Nazis and, more recently, opprobium in the Western world as a “fellowtraveller” of the Communists. t After his release from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II he

preached collective German guilt for the war. Martin Friedrich Gustav Emil Niemoller, who always denied Western allegations of being a Communist, was born to a Westphalian farming family in Lippstadt on January 14, 1892. An early ambition to continue the family’s farming traditions turned to wishes for a sea-going career and in 1910 the Kaiser’s Navy accepted him as an officer cadet

He was eventually given command of a U-boat His sorties against allied shipping in the Mediterranean earned him the title of, “The Scourge of Malta.” But even then religion was occupying his thoughts, and after the war, in 1924, he was ordained as a minister and six years later became a parish priest in Berlin.

A Right-wing nationalist and opponent of the Weimar Republic, he became disen-

chanted with Hitler’s Nazi Party after its rise to power in 1933 and began to denounce its doctrines, especially the persecution of Jews.

His outspokenness led to his arrest in July, 1937. He was sentenced at a secret trial to seven months imprisonment and later imErisoned in the Sachsenausen and Dachau concentration camps.

Allied troops released him in 1945 and he returned briefly to his old Berlin parish, before beginning to travel the world preaching pacifism and the guilt of all Germans for the war.

He quickly became an even more controversial figure . when he criticised West German rearmament, arguing that Germany should be a neutral country under United Nations super-

vision, and opposed any “crusade against Communism.”

In 1952 he visited Russian religious leaders in Moscow and his “fellow-traveller” tag was firmly established. But he also intervened to prevent the persecution of Christian churches by Communist authorities in East Germany. “You do not have to fight Communism in order to save Christianity,” he once said.

In 1967, after he visited the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, Moscow awarded him the Lenin Peace Prize. By then he had retired from active church work. His autobiography, published in the 19305, was entitled! “Vom U-boot zur Kanzler ("From U-boat to the Pulpit”). He was married twice.