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Remembered for leading his church's opposition to Hitler, Evangelical Pastor Martin Niemöller still enjoys a reputation abroad as one of Germany's most respected clerics. He was elected one of six co-presidents of the World Council of Churches in 1961, will help preside at the council's meeting this week in Nigeria. But at home Niemöller is more and more regarded with the same kind of pained dismay that Anglican clerics reserved for the late "Red Dean" of Canterbury-and for a not wholly dissimilar reason. He is now a militant...
Inhumanity Personified. Niemöller, who was a U-boat commander during World War I, this month fired another of his political torpedoes. Writing in the fortnightly church magazine Stimme (Voice), Niemöller charged that West Germany's militaristic policies are a danger to peace, and have earned his country a "general unpopularity" matching South Africa's. He cited Transport Minister Hans-Christoph See-bohm and former Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss as "names behind which living humanity suspects inhumanity personified." West German democracy, he said, "only shares the name with what one used to understand...
Niemöller, who spent eight years in concentration camps for his courageous opposition to the Third Reich, has been going left ever since the end of World War II. He has denounced the "war hysteria" of the U.S., and once he said that he would not blame the Russians for trying to drive American forces out of Europe. He has suggested that a reunited Germany under Communism might be better than the present division, and has implied that the Federal Republic's army is a "high school for criminals...
...spokesman to suggest that it would be wiser to ignore the thoughts of a man "who cannot always distinguish clearly between realities and fantasies." Hannover's Lutheran Bishop Hanns Lilje called ballot invalidation "a mistaken means of striving for peace." Hamburg Theologian-Preacher Helmut Thielicke said: "Niemöller is a typical German, who has no sense for compromise." But German church leaders, though embarrassed by Niemöller's political views, have never moved to depose him because of his international prestige. At 73, he has retired from all his offices in the Evangelical Church; his fellow...
While still eager to catch such big fish as Martin Bormann, Hitler's top deputy, and Heinrich Müller, a boss of the Gestapo, who are repeatedly rumored to be alive in hiding, Bonn claims that an extension of the statute would mainly net unimportant minnows at home, and overburden prosecutors who find it harder and harder to prove specific charges after 20 years. As one official puts it: "If you want to bring to court every railroad man who pulled the switches at Auschwitz, knowing that the trains were carrying Jews to their deaths, there will...