Then they came for me . . .

The other day we ambled around the grounds and graveyard at St. Anne’s Church in Dahlem, a leafy suburb of Berlin. One can hardly imagine a more lovely and historic setting for a church.

Relatives and descendants and friends maintain the many hundreds of grave plots, so you stroll past one tidy mini-garden after another, each festooned with blossoms and shrubs, each giving eloquent testimony to the work of loving hands, and each residing in the dappled shade cast by the canopy of ancient deciduous trees. A calico cat dozed on a wall and opened an eye to mark our passage.

St. Anne’s Church was established six hundred years ago so has more history than one can contemplate, but the generations living today focus on the four years from 1933 to 1937 when the pastor of St. Anne’s, Martin Niemoller, inspired what was known in those days as the German Confessing Church.

The German people elected Adolph Hitler as their chancellor in 1933 and he wasted no time in reorganizing the German Lutheran Church into an organ of the Reich, loyalty oath included. Martin Niemoller scratched his head and declared that, no, Adolph Hitler was not the head of the church, Jesus Christ was. So he set about organizing the Confessing Church in direct opposition to the Nazis. For his temerity they shipped him off to Sachsenhausen in 1937 and from there to Dachau where the Allies freed him in 1945. Not all were so fortunate. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, perhaps the best known leader of the Confessing Church, they hanged at Flossenburg two weeks before the 90th and 97th infantry brigades of the United States Army liberated the camp in the closing days of the war.

Perhaps every one of us has wondered at least once in our lives whether we would have been Good Germans in those drastic days. Not all Germans were. Some few, like Niemoller, resisted, but even he acknowledged of himself that he did too little, too late.

“First 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 for me.”

Birgit Karcher escorted us around St. Anne’s where she went to confirmation class as a girl . . . a few years before she came to live with us in Mill Valley back in 1985. We visited as well in Berlin with Katja Kulessa, another long-ago teenager in the Hutchinson house. Both have somehow morphed from adolescence to parenthood themselves . . . of wonderful high school and college age children. The years they are a-flyin’.

St. Anne’s Church

Old friends