1945 newspaper Lutheran minister MARTIN NIEMOLLER freed

SEE PHOTO----- COMPLETE ORIGINAL American WW II era Armed Forces newspaper, the Stars and Stripes dated May 12, 1945. This is the Stars and Stripes edition that was printed in Paris, France.

Prominent back page photo and caption announcing the release of Lutheran Pastor MARTIN NIEMOLLER from a German Concentration Camp after the end of WW II.

Martin Niemöller was a German pastor and theologian born in Lippstadt, Germany, in 1892. Niemöller was an anti-Communist and supported Hitler's rise to power at first. But when Hitler insisted on the supremacy of the state over religion, Niemöller became disillusioned. He became the leader of a group of German clergymen opposed to Hitler. Unlike Niemöller, they gave in to the Nazis' threats. Hitler personally detested Niemöller and in 1937 had him arrested and eventually confined in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. Niemöller was released in 1945 by the Allies. He continued his career in Germany as a clergyman and as a leading voice of penance and reconciliation for the German people after World War II. His poem, "First they came..." is well-known, frequently quoted, and is a popular model for describing the dangers of political apathy, as it often begins with specific and targeted fear and hatred which soon escalates out of control.

"First they came ..." is popular poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group. Althought the precise origin of the poem is not known, Niemoller stated he prefers the version as:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984) was a prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the poem First they came....

Although he was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, he became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the nazification of German Protestant churches. He vehemently opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph, but made remarks about Jews that some scholars have called antisemitic. For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1937 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution and survived imprisonment. After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help the victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt. From the 1950s on, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist.

Role in Nazi Germany

Like most Protestant pastors, Niemöller openly supported the right-wing opponents of the Weimar Republic. He even welcomed Hitler's accession to power in 1933, believing it would bring a national revival. However, he decidedly opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph. In 1936, he signed the petition of a group of Protestant churchmen which sharply criticized Nazi policies and declared the Aryan Paragraph incompatible with the Christian virtue of charity. The Nazi regime reacted with mass arrests and charges against almost 800 pastors and ecclesiastical lawyers. In 1933, Niemöller founded the Pfarrernotbund, an organization of pastors to "combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background." By the autumn of 1934, Niemöller joined other Lutheran and Protestant churchmen such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in founding the Confessing Church, a Protestant group that opposed the Nazification of the German Protestant churches. The author and Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann published Niemöller's sermons in the United States and praised his bravery.

However, Niemöller only gradually abandoned his sympathies with National Socialism and even made pejorative remarks about Jews while protecting converted Jews in his own church. In one sermon in 1935, he remarked: "What is the reason for [their] obvious punishment, which has lasted for thousands of years? Dear brethren, the reason is easily given: the Jews brought the Christ of God to the cross!"

This has led to controversy about his attitude toward the Jews and to accusations of antisemitism. Holocaust scholar Robert Michael notes that Niemöller's statements were a result of traditional antisemitism and that Niemöller agreed with the Nazis' position on the "Jewish question" at that time. Werner Cohn, an American sociologist, who lived as a Jew in Nazi Germany, also reports on antisemitic statements by Niemöller.

Thus, Niemöller's ambivalent and often contradictory behaviour during the Nazi period makes him one of the most controversial enemies of the Nazis. Even his motives are disputed. The historian Raimund Lammersdorf considers Niemöller "an opportunist who had no quarrel with Hitler politically and only began to oppose the Nazis when Hitler threatened to attack the churches."^[15] Others have disputed this view and emphasize the risks that Niemöller took while opposing the Nazis. However, Niemöller's behaviour contrasts sharply with the much more broad-minded attitudes of other Confessing Church activists such as Hermann Maas. The pastor and liberal politician Maas — unlike Niemöller — belonged to those who unequivocally opposed every form of antisemitism and was later accorded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Arrest and imprisonment

Arrested on 1 July 1937, Niemöller was brought to a "Special Court" on 2 March 1938 to be tried for activities against the State. He was fined 2,000 Reichmarks and received a prison term of seven months. As his detention period exceeded the jail term, he was released by the Court after the trial. However, immediately after leaving the Court, he was rearrested by Himmler's Gestapo--presumably because Rudolf Hess found the sentence too lenient and decided to take "merciless action" against him. He was interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. In late April 1945 he was transferred to Tyrol together with about 140 other prominent inmates, where the SS left the prisoners behind. He was liberated by the Fifth U.S. Army on May 5, 1945.

After his former cell mate, Leo Stein was released from Sachsenhausen to go to America, he wrote an article about Niemöller for The National Jewish Monthly. Stein reports that having asked Niemöller why he ever supported the Nazi Party, Niemöller replied:

"I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it as much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me. I had an audience with him, as a representative of the Protestant Church, shortly before he became Chancellor, in 1932. Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews, assuring me as follows: 'There will be restrictions against the Jews, but there will be no ghettos, no pogroms, in Germany.'"

"I really believed," Niemoeller continued, "given the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany, at that time—that Jews should avoid aspiring to Government positions or seats in the Reichstag. There were many Jews, especially among the Zionists, who took a similar stand. Hitler's assurance satisfied me at the time. On the other hand, I hated the growing atheistic movement, which was fostered and promoted by the Social Democrats and the Communists. Their hostility toward the Church made me pin my hopes on Hitler for a while.

"I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me."

Release and post-War activities

In April 1945 Niemöller was, together with other prominent prisoners, transferred to Tyrol, where he was liberated by the Allies on May 5, 1945. According to Lammersdorf, there had been some attempts to whitewash his past which were, however, soon followed by harsh criticism because of his role as a NSDAP supporter and his attitude toward the Jews. Niemöller himself never denied his own guilt in the time of the Nazi regime. In 1959, he was asked about his former attitude toward the Jews by Alfred Wiener, a Jewish researcher into racism and war crimes committed by the Nazi regime. In a letter to Wiener, Niemöller stated that his eight-year imprisonment by the Nazis became the turning point in his life, after which he viewed things differently.

Niemöller was president of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau from 1947 to 1961. He was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, signed by leading figures in the German church. The document acknowledged that the church had not done enough to resist the Nazis.

Stars and Stripes is the newspaper published for the United States Armed Forces overseas. It is available in three formats: the European Edition, the Mideast Edition, and the Pacific Edition.

On 9 November 1861, during the Civil War, soldiers of the Illinois 11th, 18th, and 29th Regiments, after forcing the Confederates south, set up camp in Bloomfield, Missouri. Upon finding the newspaper office empty, they decided to print a newspaper for their expedition, relating the troop's activities. They called it the Stars and Stripes. Today, the Stars and Stripes Museum / Library Association is in Bloomfield.

In World War I, the staff and roving reporters and illustrators of the newspaper were veterans of the newspaper world or, more frequently, talented young soldiers who would later become famous members of the United States media in the postwar era. Harold Ross, the editor of the Stars and Stripes, returned home to found The New Yorker magazine. Cyrus Baldridge, art director and principal illustrator, later became a major illustrator of books and magazines, as well as a writer, print maker and stage designer. Drama critic Alexander Woollcott's essays for Stars and Stripes were collected in his book, The Command Is Forward (1919).

Stars and Stripes was then an eight-page weekly, which reached a peak of 526,000 readers, relying considerably on the improvisational efforts of its staff to get it printed in France and to distribute it to U.S. troops.

In World War II, the newspaper was printed in several editions in several operating theaters. Again, both newspapermen in uniform and young soldiers, some of whom would later become important journalists, filled the staffs and showed zeal and talent in publishing and delivering the paper on time. Some of the editions were assembled and printed very close to the front in order to get the latest information to the most troops. Also, during the war, the newspaper published the 53-book series G.I. Stories.

The newspaper is the main printed source of news at the installations in Europe and Mideast and East Asia. Stars and Stripes has expanded to an average of 40–48 pages each day and is still published in tabloid format, reminiscent of many British dailies. The newspaper employs civilian reporters, and U.S. military senior noncommissioned officers as reporters, at a number of locations around the world.

After Bill Mauldin did his popular "Willie and Joe" cartoons for the WWII Stars and Stripes, he returned home for a successful career as an editorial cartoonist and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Former Stars and Stripes staffers also include 60 Minutes’ Andy Rooney and Steve Kroft, songwriter and author Shel Silverstein, comic book illustrator Tom Sutton, author and television news correspondent Tony Zappone, cartoonist Vernon Grant (A Monster Is Loose in Tokyo), Hollywood photographer Phil Stern and the late stock market reporter and host of public television's Wall Street Week, Louis Rukeyser.