Martin Niemöller

Martin Niemöller commanded a U-boat in the First World War, came home to a defeated Germany, and became a Lutheran pastor in a wealthy Berlin parish. He welcomed the Nazi rise in 1933 and voted for it - a fact he never denied afterward and repeatedly named as his own guilt. He turned when the regime moved to purge Christians of Jewish descent from the pulpit, organized the pastors who would not sign, and helped found the Confessing Church, which declared that the church answers to Christ and to no Führer.

Arrested in 1937, he was acquitted by a court and rearrested at the courthouse door on Hitler's orders, and spent the next seven years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau until American troops reached him in 1945. He came out and immediately pressed his own church to confess what it had failed to do. The lines everyone quotes - first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out - were spoken in varying forms in his post-war talks, and they are an accusation he aimed first at himself.