Leicester Museums and Galleries – Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture – HMD 2024

Activity information

Activity type: Public activity

Organisation name: Leicester Museums and Galleries

Website: https://www.leicestermuseums.org/event-details/?id=1a8813fc-0435-4426-a197-04dd8d0dc91b

Address:
Sir Bob Burgess Building, Lecture Theatre 2
University of Leicester
Leicester
Leicestershire
LE2 7TF
United Kingdom

“Then they came for me…”.
Martin Niemöller, Protestant
Antisemitism and the problem of Holocaust remembrance in post-war Germany.

“Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me”. This the final line of the famous quotation by the Protestant pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984). The quote frames the problem of Niemöller’s own complicity in Nazi crimes and the Holocaust in terms of a lack of empathy with the victims of Nazi persecution. This reading of the quote, however, masks a much more complicated reality, as Niemöller continued to voice antisemitic views both in the years from 1933 and in the post-war period.

Niemöller’s public admissions of German guilt from 1945 to 1947 have to be interpreted in light of his insistence on the victimhood of the Germans. The talk will situate the problematic nature of Niemöller’s post-war statements on the Holocaust in the wider Protestant discourse on German guilt and remembrance.

Benjamin Ziemann is Professor of Modern German History at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of six books, including Contested Commemorations, Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (2013) and Violence and the German Soldier in the Great War: Killing-Dying-Surviving (2017). His latest monograph is the award-winning book Hitler’s Personal Prisoner. The Life of Martin Niemöller, Oxford 2024.

Organiser Name

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Other organisation(s) involved

Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies