I looked this up after reading the what if thread on the Pope and the responses on how the Church and the other Christians and Germany felt about Hitler. This if from my copy of the Time Magazine Capsule 1940. Man of Courage The defiant words off Pastor Martin Niemoller—"Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Fuhrer"—were echoed by millions of Germans. And Hitler raged: "It is Niemoller or I." So this second Christmas of Hitler's war finds Niemoller and upwards of 200,000 other Christians (some estimates run as high as 800,000) behind the barbed wire of frozen Nazi concentration camps. More than 80% of the prisoners in the concentration camps are not Jews but Christians, and the best tribute to the spirit of Germany's Christians comes from a Jew and agnostic—the world's most famous scientist, Albert Einstein. Says he: "Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities immediately were silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church befoe but now I feel a great affection and admiration because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual truth and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly." Though the Nazis have jailed over 10,000 pastors, priests and monks and an unknown number have been beaten to death, church congregations have grown remarkably. Sales of the Bible have shot up from 830,000 copies in 19333 to 1,225,000 in 1939, topping Mein Kampf by 200,000. From Hitler's viewpoint the most dangerous aspect of the Christian resistance is the refusal of thousands of churches, both Protestant and Catholic, to pray for a Nazi victory. The Gestapo can silence all open attacks from the pulpit, can imprison all outspoken pastors and forbid bishops to write pastoral letters, but it cannot make them pray for a Nazi success. That situation is unparalleled in a nation at war. Living martyr and symbol of Christian resistance in Germany, both to Germans and the whole world, is Pastor Niemoller. A gaunt, blunt, unbending hero of World War I, who won the Iron Cross for his exploits as a submarine commander (he sank 55,000 tons of Allied shipping), he was pastor of a swank suburban Berlin church and led the attacks on Nazism until clapped into jail in 1937 for "misuse of the pulpit." the court freed him when he came to trial in February 1938 but the Gestapo promptly hustled him off to concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. There he remains, having refused release offered to him on condition that he promise to cease preaching. At Sachsenhausen Pastor Niemoller has been placed on a regime of half-rations, double heavy labor, solitary confinement. Rock-breaking, road-building, ditch-digging, harsh treatment are fast wearing him out. (He was released in 1945.)
