Part Two: Martin Niemöller, the author of 'First They Came', was a murderous fascist

Margaret Killjoy (0:01)

Cool Zone Media.

Robert Evans (0:05)

Welcome back, dear friends and dearest enemies. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history, with one of the very best people in all of history as my guest this week, Margaret Killjoy. Margaret, welcome back to the program. How are you feeling about Martin Niemöller?

Margaret Killjoy (0:26)

I knew he was going to start off bad, but I had him as like, you know, he's a pastor, he's kind of like a conservative. Because like I did some episodes about, I should remember this guy's name, the saint who sacrificed himself in a concentration camp so that someone else could live. I literally can't remember his name.

Robert Evans (0:47)

I think it's Colby.

Margaret Killjoy (0:49)

And he started off more on the fascist side of things than the anti-fascist side of things. But I don't think he started off like this. And so I was thinking at the beginning, I was like, I basically run an episode on sort of this guy.

Robert Evans (1:04)

And I'm like, no, no, no, not with the murdering, drowning sailors in the ocean. Yeah. Sinking hospital ships left and right stuff. Yeah.

Margaret Killjoy (1:15)

Bad enough that your biographer has to put obviously fake words in your mouth. Yeah, it has to lie.

Robert Evans (1:19)

And that 1959 book by by Clarese God's Man is so fawning because it was and it was written when he was alive. So she's talking to him. I think he didn't want to admit to this nice young journalist lady that he's just been murdering drowning boys. Yeah.

Margaret Killjoy (1:35)

It wasn't me.

Robert Evans (1:36)

I got lucky. I'm on this side of it.

Margaret Killjoy (1:38)

Yeah.

Robert Evans (1:38)

Yeah.

Martin Niemöller ended World War I as one of the most decorated sailors in the German fleet. His prestige enhanced by the fact that the German Navy had little enough to brag about at the war's end besides its subcruise. He'd gotten engaged to be married in 1917, and one might have thought even the sting of losing the war would be mitigated by the chance to start a family and lead a normal life again. But Martin's not that kind of nationalist. He is What kind. of nationalist? He is a fanatic. Yeah. He is a fanatic. One part of the armistice deal was that the great German high seas fleet, which had so helped precipitate the conflict, would be interned at Scapa Flow under the watchful guns of the British Navy. No one could agree quite on what should be done with it. There were a lot of the British wanted some of those boats, but that was not something they came to an accord on.

But the submarine fleet was ordered to be handed over post-haste, because they were really angry at the U-boats and they wanted them, right? And Martin was ordered to take two U-boats to England. He refused and his reply became famous as a symbol of German post-war defiance. And this is how it's described in God's Man.

Margaret Killjoy (2:54)

First they came for the submarines.

Robert Evans (2:56)

First they came for the submarines and I said, absolutely not. I'll defend those more than any person. I have sailed in submarines for three years fighting against England, sir, he told his Commodore, I have neither sought nor concluded this armistice. And as far as I am concerned, the people who promised our submarines to England can take them over. I will not do it. Okay, man.

Mr. Hospital Killer here getting real, getting busy about handing over his stupid boat.

Margaret Killjoy (3:25)

It's a good thing they didn't have the nuclear submarine or he just would have been like, goodbye.

Robert Evans (3:29)

Bye.

Margaret Killjoy (3:29)

I'm hanging out underwater.

Robert Evans (3:30)

I'm going to just live underwater forever. Yeah.

He resigned his commission. The matter would be wound up being moot anyway. The German fleet scuttled itself rather than fall into English hands. But nonetheless, Martin became a minor celebrity, particularly on the German right for his actions. In 1919, he gets married and begins working as a farmer, and he briefly entertains dreams of starting a farm of his own. But rapidly rising inflation makes that an impossibility.

One Sunday, while at church pondering My People and My Home, he decided to become a pastor. In his Nazi-era autobiography, From U-Boat to Pulpit, Martin would claim that working the soil had drawn him closer to his valk. It's hard to say what actually happened here. The war had ended in Germany with a socialist revolution. It actually starts as a naval mutiny. And this leads, by hook and crook, to the establishment of a democratic republic, the Kaiser's abdication and the end of the war. Martin blames the socialists, particularly Friedrich Ebert, for German defeat. And in doing so, he adopted the stabbed in the back myth with gusto. He never questions this for a moment. He sympathizes because right after this happens, you've got this wing of left wing revolutions that leads to the Weimar government, but then the revolutions keep coming. And so you also get these Freikorps units, these right wing militias of German veterans that rise up and kind of wind up in this period of time in an awkward alliance with the Weimar government because the government needs them to crush this leftist uprising called the Spartacists, right?