All Germans Are Equally Guilty of Murder of 6,000,000 Jews, Niemoeller Charges

Pastor Martin Niemoeller, who was imprisoned by the Nazis for seven years, told an audience of more than 3,000 people yesterday, that the German people must share the guilt for the murder of 6,000,000 Jews.

"Perhaps at some distant date," Niemoeller said, "when our grandchildren, or our childrens’ childrens’ grandchildren, offer a beggar in France or Holland a crust of bread, that beggar will refuse it, saying: ‘I take no bread from the hand that is stained with the blood of 6,000,000 Jews.’

"Let the Germans not forget that 6,000,000 people were done to death ‘according to plan’ — done to death deliberately, gassed, hanged, shot, beaten. Let us recall the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’, and let us not forget our guilt for these 6,000,000 murders." Describing how the Allies gave him permission to show his wife the cell in which he was confined at Dachau concentration camp, Pastor Niemoeller declared:

"When we read the memorial plaque commemorating the burning in the crematorium there of 238,756 fellow human beings between 1933 and 1945, my wife shuddered, and my guilt for those deaths was brought home to me. Of course, I could argue that I had an alibi. I myself was in a concentration camp after 1937 and could not be expected to speak out against their horrors–which, believe me, were worse than the films we have seen and worse than the newspaper descriptions. But what did I do when I was a free man and still a preacher in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem? I did nothing, except go on preaching as if nothing was happening that should have moved every factor to protest.

"There came to see me recently a Jew who had lost his parents in Theresienstadt concentration camp and his own family in Oswiecim. What could I say to him except ‘my dear brother, I frankly confess my guilt and the guilt of my people. I know what my people have done to yours. In all humility I ask you to forgive us–if you can forgive us.’"