Pastor Martin Niemoeller met in person with Adolf Hitler; he was blown away by Hitler’s megalomania and his evil plans.
Hitler let clergy know both protestant and catholic, that he expected them to stand with him and to encourage their congregations to do the same thing.
Pastor Niemoeller, when he met with Hitler, was with a group of pastors. I don’t know which of the other pastors were permitted to speak to Hitler or what they might’ve said. This is what Pastor Niemoeller said to Hitler, however:
Mr Reich Chancellor, you said, “leave the care of the German people to me.” But I tell you: neither you nor any other power in the world is in a position to relieve us, the church, of the responsibility God has placed on us [churches with their clergy] for the people and the fatherland.
Not all of those pastors were unhappy with Hitler, and they signed on to be his cheerleaders willing to do whatever he demanded of them. The sold-out MAGAt religious leaders spit in the face of God with pleasure every time they’re able to try to baptize all evil attitudes and actions by Donald Trump and his sinister sheep.
Many people only know Pastor Martin Niemoeller by name because of the poem he wrote, “First They Came,” but the courageous pastor who did not initially oppose Hitler ended up experiencing just what the last line of his poem warns. Pastor Niemoeller was thrown into a concentration camp by Hitler, where he was kept for most of four years until the Allied Forces liberated those under Hitler’s thumb. Not all clergy lived to see the liberation. Some, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were executed by Hitler’s ICE agents.
