MARTIN NIEMOLLER, RESOLUTE FOE OF HITLER

The Rev. Martin Niem"oller, the German Protestant preacher, theologian and church leader who led church opposition to Hitler and survived the Dachau concentration camp, died Tuesday at his home in Wiesbaden, West German Protestant church officials announced. He was 92 years old.

The church did not give the cause of death, saying only that Pastor Niem"oller had died after a long illness.

A U-boat commander in World War I, Pastor Niem"oller was serving a Berlin parish when he became the best- known advocate of clerical resistance to the Nazi regime, which came to power in 1933. Interned Eight Years

But in 1937 he began eight years in Nazi internment - at the Sachsenhausen prison camp and later at Dachau - because of his criticism of the Nazi party and the Third Reich, particularly for its persecution of Jews. He went on to become West Germany's most prominent pacifist in the 1950's and 1960's and an outspoken critic of nuclear arms.

After American soldiers freed him from captivity in 1945, he propounded the view that Germans bore collective guilt for World War II.

From 1961 to 1968 Pastor Niem"oller was a president of the World Council of Churches, traveling to the United States and the Soviet Union as well as to North Vietnam.

He was awarded the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize in 1967 and West Germany's highest honor, the Grand Cross of Merit, in 1971. Chancellor Praises Clergyman

Chancellor Helmut Kohl praised Pastor Niem"oller yesterday as one of ''the most oustanding personalities in the fight of Protestant Christians against the totalitarian claims of the National Socialist state.'' In a telegram to the pastor's wife, the Chancellor said the clergyman fought for his beliefs without compromise until his last days.

Over the decades, Pastor Niem"oller's views went far afield from his early right-wing German nationalism and opposition to the Weimar Republic in the years after World War I.

He served as president of the Evangelical Church - which is Lutheran - in Hesse and Nassau, West Germany, from 1947 to 1964. After retiring from active church work, he went on preaching and writing.

''Live according to the Gospel without fear or fail,'' he used to say in response to critics. Was Called a Communist

While the Cold War raged, he spurred assertions that he was a ''fellow-traveler'' of the Communists because of a 1952 visit to Russian clerical leaders in Moscow and other journeys in the East Bloc in the early 1950's.

''You do not have to fight Communism in order to save Christianity,'' he contended. But he repeatedly denied that he was a Communist, and he took steps to forestall anticlerical measures by the East German Government. Emphasizing his pacifist views, he served as president of the German Peace Society and was active in West Germany's draft-resistance movement. He spoke out against German rearmament after World War II as well as against nuclear weapons, and he traveled widely to denounce the United States role in Vietnam.

After a trip to Hanoi in 1967, he declared: ''Even if 10 million American soldiers are sent there, Vietnam will never be reduced to the status of an ideological colony of a non-Vietnamese power.'' Only months later, he received the Lenin Prize.

Applying his energies to West German politics in 1965, he stirred a commotion by scorning the ruling coalition that was formed that year by the two main parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democratic Union. He contended that they had engaged in what he called a ''dictatorial monopoly'' in forming a Cabinet, and he went so far as to call on West Germans to protest by abstaining from elections. A Native of Lippstadt

Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niem"oller was born Jan. 14, 1892, in the former Hanseatic town of Lippstadt - known for its 12th- and 13th-century churches - in what is now the West German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

His activism in Germany's Protestant Church, which traces some of its origins to Martin Luther, was his by birthright. He was the son of Heinrich Niem"oller, also a Lutheran pastor, and the former Paula M"uller.

Young Martin attended public schools in Lippstadt and in Elberfeld, a textile-mill center which is now part of the West German city of Wuppertal. He decided to become a career naval officer and, in 1910, when he was 18, he entered the German Navy as a cadet. He later rose to lieutenant and proved to be a skillful submarine commander in World War I when he raided Allied shipping in the Mediterranean and became known as ''the Scourge of Malta.''

After World War I, he studied theology. He was ordained in 1924 and in 1931 was called to a parish in the fashionable Dahlem district of Berlin, then the sole German capital.

He was not at first a foe of Nazism, saying at one point he was ''confident that Hitler will support collaboration between church and state.'' It was reported later in the United States that Pastor Niem"oller had voted for the Nazis before they took power.

Then came a confrontation in which, Pastor Niem"oller later said, he told Hitler: ''You have just said, 'I will take care of the German people.' But we, too, as Christians and as pastors, have a responsibility to the German people. That responsibility was entrusted to us by God, and neither you nor anyone in this world has the power to take it from us.'' Suspended and Interrogated

Before long, the pastor was suspended from preaching because he had opposed the Nazi regime's rule that people of Jewish ancestry could not serve as pastors. A few months later he was interrogated by the Gestapo because he had criticized the paganism of some Nazis.

Pastor Niem"oller soon founded and became director of the Pastor's Emergency League to Resist Hitlerism, an organization that aided clergymen who were struggling against Nazi influence within German Protestantism.

From that organization developed the German Confessing Church, a grouping of like-minded Protestants who felt the need, in the Hitler era, to voice public opposition to the Nazi regime.

In 1934, the year of his suspension, he wrote a volume of memoirs of his early years that was later published in the United States under the title ''From U-Boat to Pulpit.''

Late in 1934, Dr. Ludwig M"uller, a former navy chaplain, was installed as Reich bishop of the German Evangelical Church under Nazi pressure. More than 8,000 German pastors refused to accept him, and Pastor Niem"oller denounced him as ''the scourge of the church of Christ.''

Undaunted by his suspension, Pastor Niem"oller kept preaching at his crowded church. Then, in 1937, the Gestapo seized him on charges of seditious activities and abuse of the pulpit. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to seven months of what was officially termed ''honorary imprisonment.'' 'Hitler's Personal Prisoner'

Pastor Niem"oller rejected terms offered for his release, and his detention was prolonged into a kind of administrative internment. He was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau, as he later put it, ''as Hitler's personal prisoner.'' He was quoted later as saying that, as such, he was treated somewhat leniently.

After being freed in 1945, Pastor Niem"oller worked to reconstruct German Protestantism. He went back for a short time to his Berlin parish, then began wide-ranging travels, propounding pacifism and the concept of Germans' collective guilt for the war.

In the early postwar years, he also inveighed against waging any ''crusade against Communism'' and contended that Germany should be a neutral nation, supervised by the United Nations, and should not rearm. In 1946, he paid his first visit to the United States despite opposition by Eleanor Roosevelt and other liberals who contended that his anti-Nazism sprang entirely from church considerations and that he was still a nationalist and an advocate of authoritarian government.

Pastor Niem"oller joined the Council of Protestant Churches in Germany, a new church agency, and became the head of its Frankfurt-based foreign department. But in 1955 he was criticized at a church gathering in Weimar, East Germany, as ''too political,'' and in 1956 he quit the post under protest. A Visit to New York

In 1960, on a visit to New York, he created a stir by telling American churchmen that there was ''more Christian church life'' in Communist East Germany than in West Germany. He argued that a postwar resurgence of Protestantism in West Germany had been stifled by prosperity after economic reforms in 1948.

Several collections of Pastor Niem"oller's sermons were published in book form over the years, and he wrote numerous articles, largely on theological topics.

Pastor Niem"oller was married in 1919 to Else Bremer, and they had four sons - the eldest, Hans-Jochen, was killed on the Eastern Front during World War II - and three daughters. Mrs. Niem"oller died in 1961 in an automobile accident in Denmark in which Pastor Niem"oller was seriously injured.

In 1971, he married Sibylle von Zell, a former member of his Berlin parish.