The First Martyr Poem by Paul Hartal

On November 9-10,1938,
the land of Goethe, Heine and Bach,
had sunk to a horrible state
of cruel barbarism.
In what became known as Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass,
Nazi Germany organized
an anti-Semitic pogrom
in which Hitler's thugs burnt down
hundreds of synagogues, plundered
and destroyed thousands of Jewish shops
while the police did nothing to stop
the violent mayhem.

At the same time the Gestapo arrested
about 30,000 people
and deported them to concentration camps.
The Nazi mobs also attacked and murdered
Jews on the streets. Hundreds
of their victims committed suicide.

A substantial part of Germans
denounced the pogrom.
People were shocked and horrified.
One of them was Paul Robert Schneider,
an Evangelical pastor
who envisioned Jesus the Jew
among the victims of the Nazi pogrom.

Schneider was also a war hero.
A lieutenant in the Kaiser's army,
he was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery
in the First World War.
He was also the father of five children.
A seeker of truth
and a man of immense spiritual strength,
the compassionate, warm-hearted
Protestant minister despised the Nazis.
He refused to honor Hitler's birthday
and to salute the swastika symbol.

The Gestapo kept a watchful eye over him.
The Nazis arrested him several times.
In 1937 he was imprisoned in Koblenz.
He was sentenced to solitary confinement
and tortured but refused to collaborate
with his tormentors.

Pastor Schneider continued to comfort
and encourage his fellow inmates
amidst all the dreadful conditions
in the concentration camps.
He preached to his comrades
from his cell window.

Carrying the number 2491,
Schneider was transferred in the fall
of 1937 to Buchenwald,
a brutal concentration camp near Weimar.
The SS murdered him here
one and half year later,
on July 18,1939,
with a strophantin injection.
He was forty one years old.

Paul Robert Schneider is regarded
as the first martyr
of the Protestant Church,
the first pastor to die
in a Nazi concentration camp.