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Political passions swirled last week around Pastor Martin Niemoeller. Was he a democratic hero? His sponsors said he was. An unreconstructed Nazi? His enemies said so. The truth seemed to be that Niemoeller was neither: he was not a leader, a thinker, a martyr, a racist or a hypocrite. U.S. opinion had inflated the Niemoeller myth out of all relation to reality; now some of those who helped create the myth stood by it while others, disillusioned, attacked Niemoeller with a bitterness he did not deserve.

The fight over Pastor Niemoller, smoldering since Eleanor Roosevelt's adverse comment on his U.S. arrival, flamed last week. The hawk-faced ex-internee told Manhattan reporters, who knew better, that anti-Semitism was dead in Germany. (Some of the reporters failed to note that Niemoeller added: "What has been done to the Jews has been revenged ... by God on our nation.") In the confusion of charges and countercharges, the facts about Niemoller were stretched in both directions.

U-Boat to Pulpit. The unstretched facts: Martin Niemoeller served as a U-boat skipper in World War I, emerged from the German Navy an authoritarian, and with a strong sense of frustration as a consequence of Germany's defeat. In his search for order, he turned to the church. Although he had to work with his hands to support his theological training, Niemoeller at first felt little identity with his fellow laborers.* He joined a group of militarists in the abortive Kapp Putsch of 1920, and a few years later became one of Hitler's early followers.

Niemoeller's record between Hitler's accession in 1933 and the pastor's imprisonment in 1937 shows that he 1) opposed administrative regimentation of the church by the state; 2) rejected racism but was mainly disturbed by its effects on Christianized Jews; 3) never was--nor pretended to be--a democrat.

"For What I Am . . ." In June 1945, after his release from the Dachau concentration camp, Niemboeller told U.S. correspondents in Naples:

"You must take me for what I am. ... I think the German people will be a little more cautious in the future, but more than this I cannot promise. ... It may be that Germany can become democratic, but. . . . The German people are different . . . they like to be governed; they like to feel authority."

His sponsors in the U.S., the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ, might not like the real Martin Niemoeller as much as the legendary figure; nevertheless, Niemoeller's presence in the U.S. would serve to remind Americans of what a typical Prussian was like: courageous and stubborn, intelligent, authoritarian--and, first & last, a German.

* In his book, From U-Boat to Pulpit, Niemoeller, in describing his employment as a platelayer on the German railways, commented: "The most trying feature of it all was the intimate contact with the city workmen without any privacy or class distinction." But the man capable of this piece of snobbery was also able to tell how he made friends with his fellow workmen (by beating one of them in a fight) and later proudly told his wife: "That's my gang."

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