Word: pastors
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Inflation of the German mark after the War ruined a rich uncle who had offered to set up Martin Niemoller as a farmer in Tecklenburg. He turned to the relative financial security of Germany's State-supported Lutheran Church, became a pastor in 1924. Ten years later Pastor Niemoller, who threw into saving German souls the same brawling vigor that stood him in good stead sinking ships, had corralled Berlin's wealthiest and most influential congregation for his Jesus Christus Kirche in the swank suburb Dahlem. Such redoubtable parishioners as Dr. Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, autocratic Reichsbank Governor...
When he first heard of the Nazi movement Dr. Niemoller supported it with such enthusiasm that he is believed by many Germans to have been for a time an enrolled member of the Nazi Party. When, however, he saw that Adolf Hitler intended to dominate the Church, Pastor Niemoller began preaching about the Nazis very much as though they were ships he wanted to torpedo. As he had fought for the Kaiser, he now fought for the Church, and in Berlin most churchmen agree today that but for Niemoller most of the opposition to Hitler within the Lutheran fold would...
...haired Nazi Prosecutor Thissen, the prisoner-pastor at once shouted accusingly: "Why am 7 here under the accusation of a traitor? I have done nothing to justify such a charge...
...staked everything on repeated and increasingly impassioned demands that Presiding Judge Hoepke make this a public trial. The prisoner's lawyers, who for the sake of their own careers at the German bar could not keep on making such demands indefinitely, finally were shoved into the background by Pastor Niemoller who reputedly shouted: "In religious matters I know more than the three of them put together...
Niemoller on Nazis. Whether or not it was "treason" for Pastor Niemoller to preach, write and talk as he has against the Nazi system, his published sermons* are undoubtedly among the most controversial ever preached. In Germany the Nazis claim to object only to what they call "Negative Christianity," claim to approve "Positive Christianity" (TIME, Aug. 10, 1936). Pastor Niemoller, in perhaps his most controversial sermon, boldly accused the Nazis of taking in this matter today exactly the line the Jews took when Christ was alive...