When each group stays silent while another is persecuted, no one is left to speak when the persecution reaches them.
The Lutheran pastor Niemöller, who had at first supported the new regime and was then held in concentration camps from 1937 to 1945, used variations of this confession in speeches from 1946. The groups named differ between versions, the early ones beginning with the communists; the text is less a poem he wrote than a set of confessions recorded by those who heard him.
In practice
- A professional body says nothing as colleagues in another field are purged, and finds itself next with no allies.
- An employee who watched a co-worker bullied without a word becomes the next target.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is the bystander effect: each person waits for others to act. Another is the calculation that speaking up invites risk while silence seems safe, until it is not.
- In its favour
- Widely used as a lesson in solidarity, and consistent with research on bystander inaction and pluralistic ignorance.
- Against it
- As history it compresses a complex process, and critics note that Niemöller's own early support for the regime is part of the story the confession tells. As a precept it says nothing about how or when to act.
- Standing
- Compare the bystander effect and pluralistic ignorance.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Rules that restrain power, and advice on using it