When they came after the Jews I did nothing because I wasn't Jewish?

This is part of a widely known quote by Pastor Martin Niemoller, a conservative German nationalist who supported Hitler until the nazis tried to impose their authority on the Lutheran Church in Germany. Niemoller then cofounded the “Confessional Church,” a wing of the German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church during WW2 that resisted nazi demands to exclude Christians of Jewish descent from the clergy.

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This wing of the church considered converted Jews to be fully Christian, by religious confession, whereas the nazis considered them to be immutably Jewish, by race. The issue between them was not so much their ideological disagreement, but rather whether or not the church would remain autonomous or come under the nazi state’s control. The Confessional Church did not, however, oppose nazi antisemitc policy toward the vast majority of German and European Jews, because they had not converted to Christianity.

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After the war, Niemoller was one of those who expressed remorse for his own and the Confessional Church’s passive complicity with the nazi’s anti-Jewish persecutions. One statement of that remorse is his famous quote.

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Here it is in full, in its most common poetic form (though in earlier versions, it also included the incurably disabled):

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First they came for the communists,

and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then 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 wasn’t 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 out for me.