<P> Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me . </P> <P> Niemöller created multiple versions of the text during his career, but evidence identified by professor Harold Marcuse at the University of California Santa Barbara indicates that the Holocaust Memorial Museum version is inaccurate because Niemöller frequently used the word "communists" and not "socialists ." The substitution of "socialists" for "communists" is an effect of anti-communism, and most ubiquitous in the version that has proliferated in the USA . According to Marcuse, "Niemöller's original argument was premised on naming groups he and his audience would instinctively not care about...The omission of Communists in Washington, and of Jews in Germany, distorts that meaning and should be corrected ." </P> <P> Niemöller's earliest speeches, written in 1946, list the Communists, incurable patients, Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses, and civilians in countries occupied by Nazi Germany . In all versions, the impact is carefully built up, by going from the "smallest, most distant" group to the largest, Jewish, group, and then finally to himself as a by then outspoken critic of Nazism . Niemöller made the cardinal "who cares about them" clear in his speech for the Confessing Church in Frankfurt on 6 January 1946, of which this is a partial translation: </P> <P> When Pastor Niemöller was put in a concentration camp we wrote the year 1937; when the concentration camp was opened we wrote the year 1933, and the people who were put in the camps then were Communists . Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers . Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians - "should I be my brother's keeper?" Then they got rid of the sick, the so - called incurables . - I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian . He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others . Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle (of society)?--Only then did the church as such take note . Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public . Can we say, we aren't guilty / responsible? The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers I believe, we Confessing - Church - Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out . </P>

Who said it is what it is first