Part One: Martin Niemöller, the author of 'First They Came', was a murderous fascist
September 29, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readMartin Niemöller is remembered as the author of the poem “First They Came,” a staple of Holocaust education that appears to be a confession from a passive bystander who failed to act against the Nazis. But as this episode of Behind the Bastards argues, that poem is a sanitized legend. The real Martin Niemöller was not a regretful centrist who did too little; he was an enthusiastic, murderous fascist who celebrated the Nazis’ early victims and only turned against Hitler when the regime finally came for him.
The Making of a Kaiser’s Man
Niemöller was born in 1892 into a fiercely Lutheran and nationalist household in Westphalia. His father, Heinrich, was a pastor who venerated Martin Luther—not just as a religious reformer, but as a model of patriarchal authority and a source of vicious anti-Semitism. Luther’s 1543 book On the Jews and Their Lies, which called for burning synagogues and argued that Christians were “at fault in not slaying them,” was a formative text in the Niemöller home. Heinrich also worshipped the Kaiser, leaving his family for six months to follow the emperor on a trip to Palestine and teaching his sons that God and the Kaiser came first.
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What you'll learn
- 1 Part One: Martin Niemöller, the author of 'First They Came', was a murderous fascist
- 2 (00:05) **Episode Setup** - Robert Evans introduces the controversial pick: Martin Niemöller, the poet behind "First They Came," and teases a very different picture of him than the common anti-fascist hero narrative.
- 3 (11:27) **Family Origins and Lutheran Extremism** - Martin's ancestry and upbringing in a militantly Lutheran, hyper-patriarchal household that venerated Martin Luther and the Kaiser.
- 4 (23:55) **Early Influences and the "Social Question"** - Martin's childhood exposure to poverty and suffering through his father's pastoral work, viewed entirely through a religious and nationalist lens.
- 5 (32:38) **Obsession with the Navy** - From age five, Martin was fixated on joining the Kaiser's Navy, covering his walls with ship posters and demanding his siblings memorize fleet names.
- 6 (46:34) **World War I Begins** - Martin enters the war as a mine-laying U-boat officer, seeing it as Germany's opportunity to achieve its rightful place.
- 7 (63:04) **Torpedo Boat and War Crimes** - Transferred to a proper torpedo U-boat, Martin participates in sinking a French troop ship and then deliberately prevents rescue of survivors.
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Show Notes
You've heard Martin Niemoller's famous poem about Nazi Germany: "First they came..." In these episodes, Robert exposes Martin's true past as a war criminal and Nazi supporter.
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