This week in Christian history: Benny Hinn remarries, Martin Niemöller rearrested

Martin Niemöller rearrested by the Nazis – March 2, 1938

This week marks the anniversary of when Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, famous for creating the “First they came for …” poem on Nazi cruelty, was rearrested by authorities shortly after being freed from prison.

Originally sympathetic to Nazism, Niemöller became a staunch critic of the Third Reich due to its increasing interference in the affairs of Protestant churches.

Eventually, Niemöller was arrested in July of 1937 and jailed for several months before his trial began the following February, during which he faced various charges.

According to a contemporary account from The New York Times, although Niemöller was freed on March 2, Nazi secret police immediately detained him upon leaving the prison.

“A group of Herr Niemoeller's followers had assembled at the prison door to await his release after the reading of the verdict at noon, but he was smuggled past them in a locked police van and hurried off to a secret police cell at Alexanderplatz,” the newspaper reported.

“It was not until crowds in both chapels of his Dahlem parish had waited nearly an hour this evening that an associate pastor came to announce that despite the verdict Herr Niemoeller was still in prison. The parishioners did not conceal their bitterness against the secret police.”

Niemöller would remain imprisoned at various concentration camps until the end of World War II.