Sachsenhausen was the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany

The concentration camp at Sachsenhausen dates from 1933, and was the first camp set up by the Nazis (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Remembrance Day this month has an added poignancy in its commemorations as this year marks the eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, the 75th anniversary of D-Day, and the centenary of the official end of World War I with the Versailles Peace Treaty 1919.

During a recent visit to Berlin, I also visited Sachsenhausen, a former concentration camp in Oranienburg 35 km north of Berlin, where 200,000 people were imprisoned between the years of 1936 and 1945.

The local Nazi ‘Brown Shirt’ paramilitaries set up the first concentration camp in Prussia in a vacant factory in the centre of Oranienburg on 21 March 1933. In the months after the Nazis seized power, Oranienburg took on a key role in the persecution of political opponents, especially in Berlin. It became one of the earliest concentration camps and it was used primarily for political prisoners from 1936.

Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Makes Free’ … the slogan on the gates of Sachsenhausen (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The camp was unique as the administrative centre of all concentration camps and a training centre for SS officers. The political prisoners included Centrists, Social Democrats, pacifists, priests, poets and even dissenting voices among the Nazis.

Other prisoners included Jews, Sinti, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and people branded as ‘career criminals’ and ‘anti-socials.’

Sachsenhausen was used primarily for political prisoners from 1936 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

‘First they came for …’

Prominent prisoners in Sachsenhausen included Pastor Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, the fascist former Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, Stalin’s eldest son Yakov Dzhugashvili, the former Spanish Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero, Trygve Bratelli, later Prime Minister of Norway, and Bismarck’s grandson, Count Gottfried von Bismarck-Schönhausen, a former SS officer.

The cell where Pastor Martin Niemöller was held in isolation (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Niemöller is often remembered for his poem:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then 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 out for me

The number of Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen was 21 in 1937 and 11,100 by 1945. During Kristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’) on 9-10 November 1938, Himmler ordered the arrest of up to 30,000 Jews. The SS transported almost 6,000 Jews to Sachsenhausen in the days after Kristallnacht.

The trees and forests screened Sachsenhausen from view (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Executions and gassings

The Main Gate or Guard Tower ‘A,’ with its 8 mm Maxim machine gun, housed the offices of the camp administration. On the entrance gates to Sachsenhausen is the infamous slogan Arbeit Macht Frei, ‘Work Makes (you) Free.’

About 200,000 people were held as prisoners in Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945. The site was triangular in shape, focused on the large Appellplatz, where tens of thousands of prisoners lined up for morning and evening roll calls. The barracks of custody zone which fanned out from the base of the Appellplatz.

The site was triangular in shape, and tens of thousands of prisoners lined up twice a day for roll calls on the large Appellplatz (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Sachsenhausen was intended to set a standard for other concentration camps, both in its design and the treatment of prisoners. The camp perimeter is an equilateral triangle with a semi-circular roll call area centred on the main entrance gate in the boundary running north-east to south-west. Barrack huts lie beyond the roll call area, radiating from the gate.

The layout allowed the machine gun above the entrance gate to dominate the camp. But additional watchtowers were built on the perimeter.

The camp’s capacity became inadequate and it was expanded in 1938 by adding a rectangular area known as the ‘small camp,’ north-east of the entrance gate and the perimeter wall was altered to enclose it.

There was an additional area outside the main camp perimeter. There two huts, Sonderlager ‘A’ and ‘B,’ were built in 1941 for special prisoners held in isolation.

According to SS files, more than 2,000 women were held at Sachsenhausen, and there were several subcamps for women in Berlin.

Prisoners who stepped into the ‘neutral zone’ at the perimeter were shot without warning (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

At first, executions at the camp were carried out by taking individual prisoners to a small room, where they were told they were to have their height and weight measured but were shot in the back of the neck through a sliding door.

This became time-consuming and was replaced by shooting prisoners in a trench or hanging them. But panicking prisoners were hard to control, and small-scale tests began of what later became the gas chambers in larger camps. By September 1941, when the first trials of gas chambers were beginning in Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen had already been the scene of gassings.

There were few successful escapes from the camp. The perimeter consisted of a 3-metre-high stone wall on the outside. The space inside the wall was patrolled by guards and dogs. This space was bordered by a lethal electric fence. Inside that space was a gravel ‘death strip’ forbidden to the prisoners: any prisoner stepping onto the ‘death strip’ was shot without warning.

At an early stage, prisoners were shot in trenches and hanged (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Forgeries and forced labour

Sachsenhausen was the location of Operation Bernhard, one of the largest-ever currency counterfeiting operations. Prisoners were forced to produce forged US and British banknotes in a plan to undermine the British and US economies. Over £1 billion in counterfeit banknotes were recovered. The fake £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes went into circulation in 1943 and there were plans to drop forged notes over London by plane.

Heinkel, the aircraft manufacturer, was a major user of Sachsenhausen labour, with 6,000 and 8,000 prisoners forced to work on their He 177 bomber planes.

Some of these aircraft crashed unexpectedly around Stalingrad and it is thought the prisoners had sabotaged them. Other firms to use camp labour included AEG and Siemens.

Prisoners also worked in brickworks supposed to supply the building blocks for Hitler’s dream city, Welthauptstadt Germania, planned by Albert Speer as the capital of a world-wide Nazi empire.

The gas chambers in larger camps were first tested and used in Sachsenhausen (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In the harsh regime in the camp, prisoners were often forced to assume the ‘Sachsenhausen salute’ where a prisoner would squat with his arms outstretched in front. There was a marching strip where prisoners marched on a variety of surfaces to test military footwear, sometimes marching 25 to 40 km a day.

Prisoners of war were made to run up to 40 km a day with heavy packs, sometimes after being given performance-boosting drugs like cocaine, to test military boots for shoe factories.

Gay prisoners were often suspended from posts by their wrists strapped behind their backs (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Public executions

Some prisoners kept in isolation, especially gay men, were suspended from posts by their wrists strapped behind their backs. In cases of attempted escape, public hangings took place in front of the prisoners.

Wolfgang Wirth carried out experiments with the lethal sulphur mustard gas, and prisoners were used to test experimental drugs designed to increase stamina and endurance.

Seven British commandoes captured after Operation Musketoon were executed at Sachsenhausen on Hitler’s orders on 23 October 1942.

A memorial to Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Four Special Operations agents led by Mike Cumberlege, who were captured in Greece in 1943 were executed at Sachsenhausen in 1945. At the same time, John Godwin and the survivors of ‘Operation Checkmate’ in 1942 were executed at Sachsenhausen. Godwin wrestled the pistol of the firing party commander from his belt and shot him dead before being shot himself.

At least 30,000 prisoners died in Sachsenhausen from exhaustion, disease, malnutrition, pneumonia and poor living conditions. Many were executed or died because of brutal medical experimentation.

About 13,000 Soviet soldiers arrived as prisoners at Sachsenhausen towards the end of World War II. Over 10,000 were executed and their bodies were then incinerated in a crematorium.

An obelisk with 18 red triangles, the Nazi symbol for political prisoners, usually Communists (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Soviet liberation

With the advance of the Soviet army in 1945, Sachsenhausen was prepared for evacuation. The SS ordered 33,000 prisoners on a forced march. Most of the prisoners were physically exhausted and thousands did not survive this death march. Those who collapsed on the way were shot by the SS.

On 22 April 1945, the camp’s remaining 3,000 prisoners were liberated by Soviet and Polish troops, and the forced march ended on 2 May 1945 when 18,000 remaining prisoners were liberated by Soviet tanks.

After World War II, Oranienburg was in the Soviet Occupation Zone that became East Germany. It was used by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police that later became the KGB, as a special camp until 1950.

Fifteen camp officials and two former prisoner kapos were put to trial before a Soviet Military Tribunal in Berlin in 1947. All 17 were found guilty, 14 were given life sentences with hard labour, and two were sentenced to 15 years imprisonment with hard labour.

The museum exhibits depict life in the camp (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

After World War II, the Netherlands sought the extradition from Czechoslovakia of Antonín Zápotocký, who became President of Czechoslovakia, for his alleged role in the murder of Dutch prisoners during his time as a kapo at the camp.

Sachsenhausen had become the largest of three special camps in the Soviet zone by 1948. Over five years, 60,000 people were held in the camp, and by the time it closed in 1950, at least 12,000 had died of malnutrition and disease.

For some years, Sachsenhausen was used by East Germany's Kasernierte Volkspolizei, a police division that became the nucleus of the East German army in 1956.

The compound has been vandalised by neo-Nazis on several occasions (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Modern museum

The Sachsenhausen National Memorial Site opened in 1961. The first director, Christian Mahler, had been a prisoner in Sachsenhausen in 1938-1943.

Many of the original buildings were removed and the East German government emphasised the suffering of political prisoners. A memorial obelisk is marked by 18 red triangles, the Nazi symbol for political prisoners, usually communists.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of East Germany, excavations found the bodies of 12,500 victims at Sachsenhausen; most were children, adolescents and elderly people.

After German unification, the camp was given to a foundation that opened a museum on the site. The museum exhibits include artwork by prisoners, scale models of the camp, pictures, documents and other displays depicting life in the camp – and a 30 cm high pile of gold teeth extracted from prisoners. A separate museum documents the camp’s Soviet-era history.

The main street from Oranienburg to Sachsenhausen has been named in honour of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The compound has been vandalised by neo-Nazis on several occasions. Barracks 38 and 39 of the Jewish Museum were severely damaged in an arson attack in 1992. The perpetrators were arrested, and the barracks were reconstructed by 1997.

However, a decision was taken not to rebuild buildings on the site built during the Nazi regime. The destroyed section of the huts is now a Jewish museum with the surviving section left as it was immediately after the fire with the paint still blistered from the flames.

The main street leading from Oranienburg to Sachsenhausen, once lined with the homes of camp officers and officials, has been named in honour of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, who died there in 1945.

Flowers remember the prisoners and victims of Sachsenhausen (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

This feature was first published in November 2019 in the ‘Church Review,’ the Dublin and Glendalough diocesan magazine

Remembering the Holocaust 80 years after ‘Kristallnacht’

The cupola of the Neue Synagoge or New Synagogue dominates the streets in Spandau (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

On the night of 9/10 November 1938, Nazi Party members, the Hitler Youth and other people went on a government-sanctioned rampage against Jews throughout Germany and Austria.

That night 80 years ago is remembered as Kristallnacht or the ‘Night of Broken Glass,’ and many say it marks the unofficial beginning of the Holocaust.

Jewish-owned businesses, schools, hospitals and synagogues were set on fire, were ransacked and had their windows smashed. Within two days, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were destroyed or damaged and 1,000 synagogues throughout Germany and Austria were burned down. Up to 100 Jews were killed that night, and 30,000 Jews were arrested and deported to ‘work camps’ that soon became death camps.

The façade of the New Synagogue survived Kristallnacht and World War II (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

The New Synagogue on Oranienburger strasse narrowly escaped being destroyed that night through the brave intervention of a district police chief, Wilhelm Krützfeld. It is around the corner from Tucholsky strasse, where I was staying in Berlin. I was visiting synagogues, museums, houses, factories and hiding places, and the former concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.

Centuries-long presence

A plaque commemorates the centenary of the New Synagogue and recalls Kristallnacht (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

The Jewish community had an oft-interrupted presence in Berlin since the 13th century. For centuries, Berlin had a vibrant Jewish culture, and was the birthplace of important Jewish movements including the Jewish Enlightenment in the 17th century and the Reform and modern Orthodox movements.

When the Neue Synagoge or New Synagogue opened in 1866, it was seen as an architectural masterpiece. The opening was such an important event that the attendance included Count Otto von Bismarck, soon to be the first chancellor of the German Empire.

The name ‘new’ refers to the reformed, modern rites and practices. The building was designed by Eduard Knoblauch and completed after his death by Friedrich August Stüller. It was designed in the Moorish style to resemble the Alhambra in Spain, and could hold 3,200 people.

The Jewish community continued to thrive in Berlin until the rise of the Weimar Republic: 160,000 Jews were living in Berlin in 1933. But over the next 12 years, the Holocaust reduced the Jewish population of Berlin to 8,000.

Many of Berlin’s Jewish institutions, including synagogues, schools and cultural sites, were destroyed during World War II. In the end, even the New Synagogue was damaged severely in the allied bombing of Berlin in 1943.

Remembering the Holocaust

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or Holocaust Memorial, is made up of 2,711 unmarked grey stone slabs (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Nine million people, including six million Jews, were systematically murdered during the Holocaust. A room in the Memorial Information Centre and Museum on Cora-Berliner-Strasse has a continuous audio-loop reciting the names of every known Holocaust victim. It takes six years for the audio loop to complete one cycle.

Since the reunification of Berlin and Germany, the German government has worked to make Berlin a city that once again welcomes Jews, and the city and other foundations have created sites and memorials throughout the city to honour the six million Jews murdered by Hitler’s Germany.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or Holocaust Memorial, is near the Brandenburg Gate in the city centre. It was designed by the US architect Peter Eisenman and unveiled in 2005, to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. It was built on land once known as the ‘death strip,’ between East and West Berlin.

This memorial, covering 205,000 sq ft of unevenly sloping ground, is filled with 2,711 unmarked grey stone slabs arranged in a grid pattern, each with a unique shape and size and some as tall as 13 ft. The number 2,711 also corresponds to the number of pages in the Talmud.

Wandering among the slabs – did they remind me of tombstones? – is unnerving and claustrophobic, and a reminder of the mass scale of death in the Holocaust.

The courtyard off Rosenthaler strasse includes three small museums (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

The ‘Empty Library’ at the Bebelplatz, near Humboldt University, was designed by Micha Ullman to recall the events on the night of 10 May 1933. This underground installation in the middle of the square is a sunken glass plate that provides a view into a room full of empty bookshelves that could accommodate about 20,000 books.

The Nazi Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, organised a nationwide book burning that night, when more than 20,000 books were thrown onto a massive bonfire in the middle of the Bebelplatz. The books included works by journalists, writers, scientists and philosophers, as well as works by Jewish writers, including Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx.

Otto Weidt (1883-1947) depicted in a mural at his former broom and brush factory (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

In the middle of busy Hackescher Markt, a courtyard off Rosenthaler strasse has an independent cinema, a café-bar, an art and book shop, artists’ studios and three small museums.

The Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind was once a small broom and brush factory. Otto Weidt is known as the ‘Schindler of Berlin.’ Before the war, he employed Jewish workers, many of them blind. Weidt was blind himself and used his profits to buy luxury goods to bribe Gestapo officers and save many of his workers.

Inside the former hiding room in Otto Weidt’s former broom and brush factory (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

When the Gestapo arrested his Jewish workers in 1942, Weidt convinced the authorities to release some of them. He then hid these Jews in a back room until the end of the war, risking his own life to save theirs.

The Anne Frank Centre hosts a permanent exhibition on the Jewish girl who hid in a house in Amsterdam. The Silent Heroes Memorial Centre honours non-Jewish people who risked their lives to aid and rescue Jews.

Anne Frank depicted in a mural in the courtyard off Rosenthaler strasse (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Oldest Jewish cemetery

The gate into the former Jewish cemetery on Grosse Hamburger strasse, the oldest in Berlin, which opened in 1671 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Grosse Hamburger strasse, linking August strasse and Oranienburger strasse, was once a tolerant street, with Jewish sites shoulder-to-shoulder with other religious institutions, including Saint Hedwig’s Catholic Hospital and the Protestant cemetery of the Sophien Church.

The former Jewish cemetery on Grosse Hamburger strasse, the oldest in Berlin, opened in 1671 and closed in 1827. For more than a century and a half, it was Berlin’s only Jewish cemetery, and almost 3,000 people were buried there. The Gestapo ordered the destruction of the graves in 1943 and used the gravestones to shore up trenches dug on the site.

A surviving gravestone in the former Jewish cemetery on Grosse Hamburger strasse (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Among the few gravestones standing today is a reconstruction of the original grave of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the leader of the Jewish enlightenment movement.

The memorial sculpture of 13 figures representing the women of Ravensbruck was designed by Will Lammert (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

In front of the cemetery, a memorial sculpture of 13 figures representing the women of Ravensbruck was designed by Will Lammert and a memorial stone honours the deported Jews of Berlin.

Stones on the cemetery wall and a Star of David remember the dead (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Further along the street, the Jewish Old People’s Home opened in 1844 and the former Jewish School for Boys was founded in 1862. Both were shut in 1942 and used as holding centres. From these two buildings, more than 55,000 Jews were held and then sent to their deaths in concentration camps.

The Old People’s Home was destroyed, but the school reopened in 1993 as the Gymnasium Moses Mendelsohn and is now a co-educational school for Jewish and non-Jewish children.

At first, Jews in Berlin who had married non-Jews were exempted from deportation to concentration camps. But this policy changed in early 1943 when the Nazis began ‘Operation Factory,’ targeting Jewish men in mixed-marriages. On 28 February 1943, between 1,500 and 2,500 Jewish men were taken to the Jewish Community Welfare Office on Rosenstrasse, near Berlin’s first synagogue at Heidereutergasse, dedicated in 1714.

Fearing that the next step was deportation, the non-Jewish wives and relatives protested at the site. After five days of protests by the women, the men were released. The building where the men were held was destroyed, but a haunting memorial in a nearby park recalls these events.

Ingeborg Hunzinger’s ‘Women’s Block’ commemorates the women’s protest on Rosenstrasse in 1943 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

The sculpture Block der Frauen (‘Women’s Block’) was carved by Ingeborg Hunzinger and dedicated in 1995. The symbols include the Menorah, the Lion of Judah, a bunch of grapes, and hands raised in the Jewish priestly blessing.

Throughout Berlin, brass tiles no bigger than the palm of my hand are embedded in the footpaths. These Stolpersteine – ‘Stumbling Stones’ – are part of a project started in 1996 by the artist Gunther Demnig.

They bear the name, birthdate, deportation date and year and place of death of Jews killed in the Holocaust and are placed in front of the victims’ homes. There are now over 5,000 Stolpersteine in Berlin, and 38,000 throughout Europe.

Irish diplomat’s warning

The site of Berlin’s first synagogue at Heidereutergasse, dedicated in 1714 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

I was staying in the Spandau area in an old Jewish quarter that did not become part of Berlin officially until 1920. It still has its small-town charm, with sedate 19th century apartment buildings, lively side-streets, art galleries and cafés.

The view on every street and in every courtyard in this area seems to be dominated by the gilded cupola, domes and towers of New Synagogue. The heavily damaged New Synagogue was essentially demolished in 1958, except for the front façade and entrance. The Centrum Judaicum Foundation opened here in 1988 and the rebuilt New Synagogue opened in 1995 as a museum, cultural centre and community offices.

The congregation in the New Synagogue today is Berlin’s only Masorti synagogue. Gesa Ederberg became the first female pulpit rabbi in Berlin in 2007 when she became the rabbi of the New Synagogue.

A Menorah on the ‘Women’s Block’ carved by Ingeborg Hunzinger in 1995 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Today, there are 19 or so synagogues or Jewish houses of prayer in Berlin, compared with 94 synagogues in 1932. Most adhere to the Liberal rite, with a few Orthodox and reform synagogues. Synagogues outside the organised community including the Addass Yisroel Orthodox synagogue a few doors from where I was staying.

The Rykestrasse Synagogue, which opened in 1904, is the largest synagogue in Germany. It too survived Kristallnacht and reopened in July 1945 immediately after the war. The synagogue was fully restored in 2004 to mark its centenary.

Berlin is home to the world’s fastest growing Jewish community, believed to number about 45,000 people. Initially, Berlin attracted Jews from the former Soviet Union. The community kept growing with the arrival of thousands of Israelis and smaller numbers of young immigrants from Australia, France, the US and elsewhere. This is a diverse and sometimes divided community, from ultra-Orthodox to various reform branches to non-believers.

Since 2009, the Irish Embassy in Berlin has been located at 51 Jägerstrasse. The house was built in 1789 and once belonged to the Mendelssohn family, serving as their home and business premises.

Daniel Anthony Binchy (1899-1989), who was the Irish minister (ambassador) in Germany in 1929-1932, wrote a paper for the Jesuit journal Studies in March 1933, warning of Hitler’s imminent rise to power and the threat he posed to Germany’s Jews and to peace in Europe. It was a prescient warning, and although it was largely ignored, his sharp analysis shows Europe knew the dangers Hitler posed six years before World War II.

My generation may be the last to say we met and knew survivors of the Holocaust. The anniversary of Kristallnacht this month is one opportunity to ensure their stories continue to be told and the memories are handed on to the generations that follow.

This feature was first published in November 2018 in the ‘Church Review’ (Dublin and Glendalough) and the ‘Diocesan Magazine’ (Cashel, Ferns and Ossory)

Four ‘Stolpersteine’ or ‘Stumbling Stones’ on Rosenthaler strasse by Gunther Demnig commemorate the Salinger family (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Remembering the Holocaust 80 years after ‘Kristallnacht’

Patrick Comerford

My monthly column for November in two diocesan magazines, the Church Review (Dublin and Glendalough) and the Diocesan Magazine (Cashel, Ferns and Ossory), marks the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

On the night of 9/10 November 1938, Nazis and members of the Hitler Youth went on state-sanctioned rampages against Jews throughout Germany and Austria. That night 80 years ago is remembered as Kristallnacht or the ‘Night of Broken Glass,’ and many say it marks the unofficial beginning of the Holocaust.

The editor the Diocesan Magazine, the Revd Patrick Burke, who is the Rector of Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny, writes in his editorial comment: ‘An older shame is remembered by Patrick Comerford this month, the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. It is startling to realise that very few direct witnesses to that horror remain … which makes it all the more important to remind ourselves again and again of what took place, both to honour the memories of those who suffered, and to help prevent such an evil raising its head among us again, whatever form it takes.’

He has also uses a collection of my photographs in a full-page colour spread to introduce this seven-page feature, Remembering the Holocaust 80 years after ‘Kritallnacht’.

The two magazines are being distributed in parishes and churches tomorrow [4 November 2018].

So, more about Kristallnacht on this site tomorrow afternoon [4 November 2018], with more photographs and a full account of my recent visit to synagogues, museums, memorials and other sites in Jewish Berlin.

Learning the stories of Berlin’s pioneering and brave women rabbis

Regina Jonas (1902-1944) … murdered in Auschwitz 74 years ago on 12 October 1944

Patrick Comerford

I came back from the three-day clergy conference in Adare, Co Limerick, on Wednesday night to put the finishing touches to my monthly column for two magazines, the Church Review (Dublin and Glendalough) and the Diocesan Magazine (Cashel, Ferns and Ossory).

Next month marks the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of 9/10 November 1938, when Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues and other buildings were attacked in a wave of state-sponsored terror that marked the beginning of the Holocaust.

When I was in Berlin last month, I was staying around the corner from the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, which survived the attack that night, and which remains one of the most eye-catching buildings in Berlin today.

The congregation in the New Synagogue today is Berlin’s only Masorti synagogue, and Gesa Ederberg became the first female pulpit rabbi in Berlin when she became the rabbi of the New Synagogue in 2007.

Gesa Ederberg’s attracted much media attention not only because she is a woman and because her appointment was opposed by Berlin’s senior Orthodox Rabbi Yitzchak Ehrenberg, but because of her interesting background and life story.

She was born in the university city of Tübingen in 1968, and is married with three children. Born a Lutheran, she first visited Israel when she was 13 and slowly fell in love with Judaism. She studied physics, theology and Jewish studies in Tübingen, Bochum, Berlin and she converted to Judaism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1995.

After returning to Berlin, she taught Hebrew school and organised an alternative minyan at the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue, slowly taking on more of a leadership role in the community that has been at the centre of Berlin’s liberal Jewish community for 150 years.

Gesa Ederberg then entered rabbinical school at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, and she was ordained a rabbi in Jerusalem in 2003.

Her first appointment was as the Rabbi at the Jewish Community Weiden, Bavaria, and in February 2007 she became the Rabbi at the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue.

She established a Conservative Jewish beit midrash or study hall in Berlin, and is also the executive vice president of Masorti Europe, and the author and editor of several publications.

Her status as the first woman rabbi to serve in Berlin since the Holocaust has helped her reinvigorate the German community that once represented the cutting edge of liberal Judaism.

Regina Jonas … a portrait by Jared Wright of the first woman rabbi who was ordained in Germany

But Gesa Ederberg is not the first woman rabbi in Germany. Indeed, it was in the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse last month that I heard the story of Regina Jonas, the first woman rabbi who was ordained in Germany in 1935. She served the Jewish community of Berlin and continued to help guide the Jewish community until her death in Auschwitz in 1944.

Regina Jonas (1902-1944) was born in Berlin and was orphaned at a very young age. She trained as a teacher but later enrolled at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies and took seminary courses for liberal rabbis and educators.

She graduated as an ‘Academic Teacher of Religion’ and completed the thesis that was required for ordination. Her theses asked, ‘Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?’ Her conclusion, based on Biblical, Talmudic, and rabbinical sources, was that she should be ordained.

At first, she was refused ordination because she was a woman. Rabbi Leo Baeck, the spiritual leader of German Jewry who had taught her at the seminary, also refused because the ordination of a woman as a rabbi would have caused serious divisions within the Jewish community in Germany.

However, on 27 December 1935, Regina Jonas was ordained by Rabbi Max Dienemann, head of the Liberal Rabbis' Association, in Offenbach am Main.

Regina Jonas found work as a chaplain in Jewish social institutions while she tried to find a pulpit. Despite Nazi persecution, she continued her rabbinical work as well as teaching and holding services.

She was arrested by the Gestapo on 5 November 1942, and was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. There she continued her work as a rabbi, and Viktor Frankl, the psychotherapist, invited her to help in building a crisis intervention service to help prevent suicide attempts. She met the trains at the station and helped people cope with shock and disorientation.

For two years, she worked tirelessly in the Theresienstadt until she was deported with other prisoners to Auschwitz in mid-October 1944, and she was murdered soon after at the age of 42.

Regina Jonas was largely forgotten until her work was rediscovered in 1991 by Dr Katharina von Kellenbach, a German-born researcher and lecturer in the department of philosophy and theology at Saint Mary’s College of Maryland.

She travelled to Germany to research a paper on the attitude of the German religious establishment, both Protestant and Jewish, to women seeking ordination in 1930s. In a former East German archive in East Berlin, she found an envelope containing the only two existing photographs of Regina Jonas, along with her rabbinical diploma, teaching certificate, seminary dissertation and other personal documents.

Five years ago, a large portrait of Regina Jonas was part of an exhibition in Berlin in 2013 to mark the 80th anniversary of the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 and the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, in 1938.

Meanwhile, in 1995, Bea Wyler, who had studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, became the first female rabbi to serve in post-war Germany, in Oldenburg.

In 2003 and 2004, Gesa Ederberg and Elisa Klapheck were ordained in Israel and the US, and they have gone on to lead congregations in Berlin and Frankfurt.

In 2010, Alina Treiger, who was born in Poltova, Ukraine, and studied in Potsdam, became the first woman to be ordained a rabbi in Germany since Regina Jonas was ordained in 1934.

In 2011, Antje Deusel became the first German-born woman to be ordained as a rabbi in Germany since the Nazi era.

The actual date of Regina Jonas’s murder is not known, but it may have been 12 October 1944, a date observed by many Jewish communities and marked by many Jewish women’s groups … and a day worth remembering today.

The diplomat from Charleville who warned of the evils of Hitler

The former Binchy shop on Main Street, Charleville … the birthplace of Irish diplomat Daniel Binchy (Photograph Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

In my tour of the architectural heritage and legacy found in the shopfronts and houses of Charleville, Co Cork, I skipped over Brúdair’s Coffee Shop and its traditional shopfront on the Main Street. This is not because I ignored or missed this shopfront, but because it such a significant landmark in the town and also the birthplace of Daniel A Binchy, the first Irish Minister or ambassador to Germany from 1929 to 1932.

This is a terraced single-bay, three-storey house, and on the ground floor there is a limestone and marble shopfront with the carved name Binchy and the date 1849.

The arcaded three-bay shopfront has engaged polished red stone columns with moulded bases and ornate composite capitals, over square-plan carved limestone plinths and a supporting central elliptical arch and flanking round arches, all with moulded archivolts.

Above, there is a limestone facing and fascia with a moulded limestone cornice above and string course below. The raised limestone lettering ends with foliate motifs.

This carved stone shopfront is a fine example of the quality of 19th century stone carving, with an interesting and colourful combination of red columns and grey stone. The timber six-panelled door is original. The contrasting style of the upper floors adds to the character of the building, which is a local landmark and forms a significant part of the streetscape of Charleville.

Daniel Anthony Binchy (1899-1989), an academic, diplomat, polyglot and lawyer, has been described as ‘a man ahead of his time’ and ‘a public intellectual,’ and he was a life-long friend of the writers Seán O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor.

The Binchys were an affluent, shop-keeping family with a tradition in medicine and the law. They are thought to have originally come to Ireland with Cromwell but became Roman Catholics in the dying days of the penal laws. The Binchys were committed Anglophiles, and conservative and Catholic in the Redmondite tradition.

Daniel Bincy was born in the Binchy house on the Main Street in Charleville in 1899, a son of William Patrick Binchy, shopkeeper, and his wife Annie (nee Browne). William Binchy took the pro-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s, and dismissed and refused to rehire workers who had taken the anti-Treaty side. One of those dismissed John Higgins. For the rest of his life, John Higgins lived in hardship, and he was the father of President Michael D Higgins (and here).

Daniel Binchy went to school in Charleville and Banagher, and then to the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood, where one of his teachers was Joseph Walshe, later the first head of the new Department of External Affairs – as the Department of Foreign Affairs was then known – and a major influence on Binchy’s later career.

At University College Dublin, Binchy was the Auditor of the Literary and Historical Society in 1919-1920. He collected a number of first-class honours at UCD, graduated with a BA in legal and political science and completed an MA in history. He won a National University of Ireland travelling studentship, and studied at the University of Munich in 1921, where he became fluent in German.

During his student days in Munich, Binchy became a first-hand observer of Hitler and on a murky November evening in 1921,’ when he was invited by a Bavarian fellow student to a meeting of ‘a new freak party’ in a beer cellar.’ It was his first – but not his last – encounter with Hitler, and he was not impressed.

He was struck by Hitler’s ‘strange mixture of intellectual inferiority, slatternly appearance and rhetorical genius.’ He remarked to his friend that Hitler was ‘a harmless lunatic with the gift of oratory.’ His German friend, with rather more prescience, retorted: ‘No lunatic with the gift of oratory is harmless.’

He later recalled: ‘His countenance was opaque, his complexion pasty, his hair plastered down with some glistening unguent, and – as if to accentuate the impression of insignificance – he wore a carefully docked ‘toothbrush’ moustache. I felt willing to bet he was a plumber: a whispered query to my friend brought the information that he was a housepainter.’

Binchy returned to Dublin and his studies of mediaeval history, and his doctoral thesis was a study of the Irish Benedictine monastery of Ratisbon. He was appointed Professor of Roman Law and Jurisprudence at UCD in 1925, and soon became one of the great Celtic Studies scholars of his day. Later, he would hold senior positions in UCD, Corpus Christi College Oxford, Harvard and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

But his academic career was diverted in 1929 when he was appointed by WT Cosgrave’s government as the first Irish minister to Germany, and until 1932 he was the equivalent of Ireland’s ambassador to Germany.

Binchy never really wanted to be an ambassador, but his reports from Berlin show his acute grasp of the unfolding events and personalities in the critical last days of the Weimar republic, combined with an ability to make important contacts, including a good relationship with President Paul von Hindenberg.

However, Binchy had little time for the round of social engagements, the dinners and the formalities of diplomatic life. Binchy promoted a modernising and independent Irish Free State while experiencing at first hand the disconcerting rise of Nazism and fascism.

He had a second encounter with Hitler in Berlin in 1930, when the Nazis were on the brink of power. Hitler delivered a near-replica version of the speech Binchy had heard in Munich almost a decade earlier, and realised Hitler simply recycled his speeches throughout his career. While his delivery had improved – Hitler practised his gestures in front of a mirror – and his words were tailored to his audience, he always said much the same thing.

‘In his speech I found no change at all. Allowing for the altered place and circumstances, it was substantially the same address which I had heard in the Bürgerbräukeller. There were the same denunciations, the same digressions – and the same enthusiasm. At the conclusion of his speech, the vast throng cheered itself hoarse. The obscure housepainter was now the leader of the second largest party in Germany.’

His reports to Dublin were sharp and prescient. He predicted the consequences of the failure of the democratic parties to work together and had no illusions about the brutality, cynicism, anti-Semitism and murderous racism of the new regime. Binchy reported all of this to Dublin with great clarity.

He returned to Dublin and academic life in 1932 and was followed in Berlin by Leo T McCauley (1932-1933), who failed to grasp the dangers Hitler posed and who actually suggested the Jews brought on themselves their persecution in Germany. McCauley was followed from 1933 to 1939 by the anti-Semite and Nazi admirer Charles Bewley (1888-1969), who persistently thwarted efforts to obtain visas for Jews wanting to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s and to move to the safety of the Irish Free State.

Back in Dublin, in March 1933, just weeks before Hitler accessed absolute power in Germany, Binchy published an analysis of Hitler and the Nazis in a 20-page paper in Studies, the Jesuit journal published in Dublin, drawing on his student days in Munich and his experiences as the Irish diplomat in Berlin.

He described Hitler as ‘a born natural orator,’ and described his style of speech: ‘He began slowly, almost hesitatingly, stumbling over the construction of his sentences, correcting his dialect pronunciation. Then all at once he seemed to take fire. His voice rose victorious over falterings, his eyes blazed with conviction, his whole body became an instrument of rude eloquence. As his exaltation increased, his voice rose almost to a scream, his gesticulation became a pantomime, and I noticed traces of foam at the corners of his mouth.

‘He spoke so quickly and in such a pronounced dialect that I had great difficulty in following him, but the same phrases kept recurring all through his address like motifs in a symphony: the Marxist traitors, the criminals who caused the revolution, the German army which was stabbed in the back, and – most insistent of all – the Jews.’

Bincy recalled how Hitler stayed in control of most of the audience, despite some heckles. ‘His purple passages were greeted with roars of applause, and when finally he sank back exhausted into his chair, there was a scene of hysterical enthusiasm which baffles description.’

In his assessment of Hitler, Binchy refers to his ‘fanatical belief’ and writes, ‘there are only two barriers to megalomania in public life: intelligence and a sense of humour. Either of these qualities would suffice to prevent it, but I believe Hitler to be lacking in both.’

In the 1930s, Binchy warned Fine Gael against ‘any flirtations with fascism in any guise.’ This was at a time when, in Tom Garvin’s words, ‘such ideas enjoyed a certain cachet in parts of the Irish civil service, the teaching professions and in both Fine Gael and de Valera’s Fianna Fáil.’

In 1937, Binchy spent time in Italy, despised Mussolini, and wrote a scholarly analysis of Italian fascism.

After World War II, in 1946, Binchy was awarded a senior fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he and Myles Dillon, a brother of the Fine Gael politician James Dillon, became the two resident Irish Celtic scholars.

Binchy returned to Ireland in 1950 to take up a fellowship at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, but he continued to spend much time abroad, and was a visiting professor in Harvard in 1954.

His article on the old name of Charleville, first published in 1963, discussed the relative merits of the names of Rathgoggin, Charleville, Rath Luirc and An Ráth for the town of his birth.

Until his death in 1989, Binchy remained a major figure in Irish academic and intellectual life. Myles na gCopaleen acidly observed that after years of study Binchy and his contemporaries had established that ‘there was no God, but there were two St. Patricks.’

Binchy is famously the subject of a comic verse by Flann O’Brien. His academic pursuits at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies are satirised affectionately in Brian O’Nolan’s poem Binchy and Bergin and Best, originally printed in the ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column in The Irish Times and later included in The Best of Myles.

Binchy’s life story is the subject of Professor Tom Garvin’s definitive biographical study, The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2016).

Today, Daniel Binchy’s main claim to fame may be that he was a rather remote and awesome uncle of the author and The Irish Times writer Maeve Binchy (1939-2012), William Binchy, Regius Professor of Laws at Trinity College (1992-2012), and other remarkable members of the Binchy family.

Binchy was a perceptive assessor of European Fascism. He judged at a very early stage that Hitler’s regime would prove far more evil and murderous than its allies. In the case of Italy, he recognised Mussolini for the buffoonish thug that he was, but also suspected that the Italian regime would ultimately prove far less steely than its German ally.

His meeting with Adolf Hitler and his insightful paper in Studies were a brave warning against the dangers of totalitarianism. Perhaps today we need someone with his perceptive insights to warn us of the dangers of born natural orators, who rehearse their gestures and gesticulations before speaking, who seek to blame all their nation’s woes on identifiable but marginalised groups, and who promise to make their nation great again.

As Binchy’s friend warned him almost a century ago, ‘No lunatic with the gift of oratory is harmless.’

‘Binchy and Bergin and Best’ by Flann O’Brien (Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O’Nolan)

My song is concernin’
Three sons of great learnin’
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
They worked out that riddle
Old Irish and Middle,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
They studied far higher
Than ould Kuno Meyer
And fanned up the glimmer
Bequeathed by Zimmer,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.

They rose in their nightshift
To write for the Zeitschrift,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
They proved they were bosses
At wrestling the glosses,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
They made good recensions
Of ancient declensions,
And careful redactions
To their three satisfactions,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.

They went for a dander
With Charlie Marstrander,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
They added their voices
(Though younger) to Zeuss’s,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
Stout chase the three gave
Through the Táin for Queen Maeve
And played ‘Find the Lady’
With Standish O’Grady,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.

They sang in the choir
Of the Institute (Higher),
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
And when they saw fit
The former two quit,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
But the three will remain
To try to regain
At whatever cost
Our paradigms lost,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.

So forte con brio
Three cheers for the trio,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
These friends of Pokorny
Let’s toast in Grand Marnier,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.
These justly high-rated,
Advanced, educated,
And far from facetious
Three sons of Melesius,
Binchy and Bergin and Best.

A vision to bring three world faiths together under one roof in Berlin

The House of One is the vision Pastor Gregor Hohberg, Rabbi Tovia Ben-Chorin and Imam Kadir Sanci … with the hope of bringing Christians, Jew and Muslims together in one house in Berlin

Patrick Comerford

We have all heard jokes that begin with an opening line like, ‘A priest, a rabbi and an imam walked into a bar …’

But there is no joking about the way a priest, a rabbi and an imam in Germany are planning an interfaith miracle in the heart of Berlin, creating a sacred space for the three Abrahamic faiths under one roof.

The House of One is planned as a shared place of prayer and learning for the Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities, celebrating the three main monotheistic faiths and what they share and hold in common.

The House of One is the product of a grassroots group. The initial idea came the parish community of St Petri-St Marien, which is working closely with the Jewish community of Berlin, along with the rabbinical seminary, Abraham-Geiger-Kolleg, and the Muslim initiative for dialogue, Forum Dialog e.V.

When it is completed, Berlin’s House of One will bring together a church, a synagogue and a mosque under one roof, in a house of worship shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. The sponsors hope the House of One will help to tear down the walls between religions just as the fall of the Berlin Wall removed the barriers between East and West Berlin almost three decades ago.

The House of One will be located at the Petriplatz (Petri Square) in the historical birthplace of Berlin, between Breite Straße and Gertraudenstraße.

The Revd Gregor Hohberg, the Lutheran priest at the Marienkirche or Saint Mary’s Church, first conceived of the idea of an interfaith house of worship in 2009, when archaeologists excavating a section of ground on Museum Island unearthed the remains of Berlin’s earliest church, the Petrikirche or Saint Peter’s Church, and the city’s Latin school, dating back to 1350.

The church was destroyed and rebuilt several times when the East German communist government decided to demolish the church in the 1960s, and more recently the site has been used as a parking lot.

When the archaeologists excavated the area, they ‘quickly agreed that something visionary and forward looking should be built on what is the founding site of Berlin,’ says Pastor Hohberg.

The House of One will be 40 meters tall, with a shared inter-religious space for 380 people at its heart, and a mosque, synagogue and church branching off in different directions.

The Berlin architect Wilfried Kuehn of Kuehn Malvezzi GmbH has designed an interfaith prayer house that has three separate sections, each in a different in style but with certain repeating motifs to emphasise the similarities and the differences between the Abrahamic faiths.

The communal room in the heart of the building linking the three areas and seating 380 people. Each of the worship areas will be the same in size but of different shape, allowing each faith to keep its own identity.

Architect Wilfried Kuehn’s model for the House of One (© Michel Koczy / The House of One)

The first three faith leaders heading the House of One project were the Revd Gregor Hohberg, Rabbi Tovia Ben Chorin, and Imam Kadir Sanci.

‘Berlin is the city of the peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful coexistence of believers from different faiths – they yearn to understand each other,’ Pastor Gregor says. ‘We have noticed, as a community here in the middle of the city, that a lot of people want to meet people from different backgrounds and religions and that there is a strong desire to show that people from different religions can get along.’

He says the square earmarked for the building has already started to attract worshippers from different religions for side-by-side prayers. ‘This house will be home to equality, peace, and reconciliation.’

‘Berlin is the city of wounds and miracles,’ said Rabbi Tovia Ben-Chorin of the Pestalozzistraße Synagogue. He has since left Berlin but was one of the three religious leaders behind the project. ‘It is the city in which the extermination of the Jews was planned. Now, the first house in the world for three religions is to be built here.’

‘A place that has darkness in its past has the potential for peace in its future. As a Jew, I associate Berlin with memories of pain and deep wounds – but that is not the end of the story,’ he points out.

‘The city has also been a place of alternative paths, a place of enlightenment and of the development of Jewish life. When the Jews were expelled from Spain, they did not return to the country for 500 years. But in Berlin, when the Second World War ended in 1945, the Jews who had been in hiding and those who had fled to the country immediately began rebuilding a new Jewish life in the city. For me, Berlin is all about remembrance and rebirth.’

‘I believe in the power of dialogue. In the world we live in we have two possibilities: war or peace. Peace is a process and in order to achieve it, you have to talk to each other,’ Rabbi Ben-Chorin said.

Imam Kadir Sanci, the House of One’s Muslim leader, said he wanted the project to encourage a conscious dialogue between different faiths and cultures, which would help prejudices against Muslims to evaporate. ‘We want our children to have a future in which diversity is the norm,’ he insists.

‘It is very important for us to overcome all the negative news in the world,’ says Imam Kadir Sanci. ‘I have the wish, for my children, my family, for myself and for everyone, that diversity becomes a reality and that people will accept each other in their otherness.’

He hopes the project will normalise relations between people of diverse backgrounds. ‘We want our children to have a future in which diversity is the norm,’ he says.

The project is trying to make its dream a reality through a crowd-funding campaign for building the House of One. The goal is to raise €43 million and to finance the project entirely through crowdfunding, by selling bricks for €10 each.

By donating €10 for one brick, you can become a part of the House of One. With every brick, every bit of support and with every person sharing the idea of the House of One, the dream comes one step closer to reality.

As of today, €8,605,695 has been raised for 860.569 bricks, and building is to begin in earnest once the first €10 million has been raised.

You can donate directly HERE.

The day there was no one left to speak up for me

Martin Niemöller’s cell in Sachsenhausen (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2018)

Patrick Comerford

A moving moment during my visit to the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, last week was my visit to the cell where the Lutheran pastor and theologian Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) was held in isolation.

Our guide last Wednesday [12 September 2018] quoted a version of Niemöller’s statement, found in different versions, that begins ‘First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out –because I was not a Communist,’ and that concludes, ‘Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.’

It is sometimes said that the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) was hanged at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, but he was executed in Flossenburg, near the Bavarian border with Czechoslovakia, on 9 April 1945.

The prisoners held in isolation in Sachsenhausen included Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) and Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi (1902-1945), who is now remembered in the name of the street leading from the centre of Oranienburg into Sachsenhausen.

Between 30,000 and 70,000 prisoners died in Sachsenhausen from exhaustion, disease, malnutrition, pneumonia, and the poor living conditions. Many were executed or died in brutal medical experimentation, and many Russian prisoners of war were executed.

The statement attributed to Martin Niemöller has become a legendary expression of the Holocaust. It is quoted in many forms, including:

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor.

At an early stage he was a conservative and initially supported Hitler. But he became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches. He vehemently opposed the Nazis’ Aryan Paragraph, but he made remarks about Jews that some scholars regard as antisemitic.

Martin Niemöller was born in Lippstadt, then in the Prussian Province of Westphalia (now in North Rhine-Westphalia), on 14 January 1892, a son of Heinrich Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor and his wife Pauline (Müller), and grew up in a very conservative household. In 1900, the family moved to Elberfeld where he finished school.

During World War I, he was an officer in the German Imperial Navy. In 1915, he was assigned to U-boats, fighting in the Mediterranean, on the Thessaloniki front, in the Strait of Otranto, planting mines at Port Said and attacking ships at Gibraltar and in the Bay of Biscay, Marseille and other places.

Niemöller was decorated with the Iron Cross First Class, but at the end of World War I resigned his commission, rejecting the new democratic government after the abdication of Wilhelm II.

In 1919, he married Else Bremer (1890-1961), and that year began working on a farm before studying theology at the Westphalian Wilhelms-University (1919-1923).

He was ordained on 29 June 1924, and worked first as a curate in Münster's Church of the Redeemer, and then superintendent of the Inner Mission in Westphalia, and a pastor in Dahlem, an affluent suburb in Berlin.

Niemöller welcomed Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, believing that it would bring a national revival. However, he opposed the Nazis’ ‘Aryan Paragraph.’

In 1933, Niemöller founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organisation of pastors to ‘combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background.’ By the autumn of 1934, Niemöller joined other Lutheran and Protestant church leaders, including Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in founding the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches.

However, Niemöller only gradually abandoned his Nazi sympathies and even made pejorative remarks about Jews of faith while protecting – in his own church – baptised Christians, persecuted as Jews by the Nazis, due to their or their Jewish descent.

In 1936, he signed a petition by a group of Protestant church figures who sharply criticised Nazi policies and declared the ‘Aryan Paragraph’ incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity. The Nazi regime reacted with mass arrests and charges against almost 800 pastors and church lawyers.

Niemöller was arrested on 1 July 1937. On 2 March 1938, he was tried by a ‘Special Court’ for activities against the State. He was fined 2,000 Reichmarks and jailed for seven months imprisonment. He was released after sentencing, but was immediately rearrested by the Gestapo and was interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau for ‘protective custody’ from 1938 to 1945.

He narrowly escaped execution, and in April 1945, Niemöller and 140 other high-ranking prisoners were sent to the Alpenfestung, possibly to be used as hostages in surrender negotiations. The SS guards had orders to kill everyone if liberation by the advancing Western Allies became imminent. The entire group was eventually liberated by US troops.

Niemöller never denied his own guilt in the time of the Nazi regime, and for the rest of his life he expressed deep regret that he had not done enough to help the victims of the Nazis. In 1959, he said his eight-year imprisonment by the Nazis became the turning point in his life, after which he viewed things differently.

Niemöller was president of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau from 1947 to 1961. He was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, signed by leading figures in the German Protestant churches, who acknowledged that the churches had not done enough to resist the Nazis.

Niemöller’s own account of his popular, poetic quotation changed many times between 1946 and 1979. In prose versions, he named different groups on different occasions. In speeches, the middle groups often varied, but he always began with the Communists and ended with me.

He always included the Jews, and usually named Social Democrats and or trade unionists. Sometimes, he also included disabled people, whom he called’'the sick, so-called incurables’ (Kranke, sogenannte Unheilbare). At other times, he quoted the Nazi term, ‘lives unworthy of life,’ referred to ‘occupied countries,’ or named Jehovah's Witnesses (ernste Bibelforscher) or Catholics.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes one of the many poetic versions of the speech:

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.

This version is inaccurate because Niemöller frequently used the word ‘communists’ and not ‘socialists.’ The substitution of ‘socialists’ for ‘communists’ is an effect of anti-communism in the US, and most ubiquitous in the version that has proliferated in the US.

Professor Harold Marcuse of the University of California Santa Barbara points out, ‘Niemöller’s original argument was premised on naming groups he and his audience would instinctively not care about ... The omission of Communists in Washington, and of Jews in Germany, distorts that meaning and should be corrected.’

After meeting Otto Hahn, the ‘father of nuclear chemistry,’ in 1954, Niemöller became an ardent pacifist and campaigner for nuclear disarmament. He became a leading figure in the post-war German peace movement and was charged in 1959 when he spoke critically about the military.

His visit to North Vietnam and Ho Chi Minh at the height of the Vietnam War was controversial. He became president of the World Council of Churches in 1961, and was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966.

He built a small chapel at Dachau that was turned into a museum by the German government. He would greet visitors and discuss his time in the camp as well as hand out copies of his poem. He emphasised that his time in the camp was less important than the lesson he learned in the poem and urged visitors to always speak out for their brothers and sisters.

Martin Niemöller died at Wiesbaden in West Germany on 6 March 1984, at the age of 92.