RUTHFULLY YOURS

Niemöller’s only meeting with Adolf Hitler was a fiasco. It was January 1934, and Hitler had been in power for just under a year. The chancellor, obsessed with his image, was irritated about strife in the German Protestant church and the foreign press coverage it attracted. Disunity made him look weak. To manage the situation, Hitler summoned a dozen prominent clergymen to his presence. Among them was the Lutheran pastor and former submarine captain Martin Niemöller.

A junior member of the group, Niemöller stood near the back. When Hermann Göring, head of the newly formed Gestapo, spoke he pulled a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and began to read the transcript of a phone call recorded that very morning. It was a conversation between Niemöller and a friend. Frozen with dread, the churchmen heard how a cocky Niemöller had promised that everything would be fine. Hitler would come to see that the people he considered opponents within the church were in fact loyal Germans. Anyway, President Hindenburg would take their side, Niemöller predicted gleefully, and by the end of the meeting the old man would be “administer[ing] the last rites” to the upstart Hitler.

The meeting thus torpedoed, the future of the outspoken Niemöller quivered in the balance. Would the devout Christian emerge a champion against the moral evil of Nazism? Or would the ardent nationalist, who voted for Hitler in 1924 and again in March 1933, redouble his efforts to prove that he could serve both his country and his faith and in the process become complicit in Nazi crimes? The answer, Matthew Hockenos reveals in a gripping biography, is “yes” and “yes,” or, more precisely, “yes but.” Niemöller was heroic but flawed, and his life and legacy challenge the popular notion of the individual hero as society’s best hope. In its place, “the pastor who defied the Nazis” offers two modest messages for those under threat in our own troubled times: help one another and don’t wait too long.

Niemöller earned his reputation for defiance with eight years (1937 to 1945) in Moabit prison then Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. He had been charged with misusing the pulpit for political ends and treasonously besmirching the names of Nazi leaders. Lionized in the United States and featured in Time magazine as the “Martyr of 1940,” the “fighting pastor” became the face of Christian resistance to Nazism and the embodiment of the “other Germany.” In Protestant churches and homes all over the world, people gathered to pray for the Führer’s “personal prisoner.” When the war ended, Niemöller and his wife, Else, were the first German civilians granted visas to enter the U.S.

But Niemöller’s critics, most famously Eleanor Roosevelt and Rabbi Stephen Wise, president of the American Jewish Congress, had grounds for skepticism. Niemöller described himself as an anti-Semite long after the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and in the face of the widespread persecution of Jews in Germany, he continued to preach that Jews were being punished as killers of Jesus. In 1939 he had volunteered, from inside a concentration camp, to join the navy to fight the Allies. After the war, he used his moral authority to lobby for better treatment of defeated Germany and to lambast denazification efforts.

In Mr. Hockenos’s telling, Niemöller is neither a hero nor an idol; he is a person to be admired because he expressed genuine contrition and proved able to change. Both of those qualities, though, depended on other people. It was Else Niemöller who picked the Bible passage from Jeremiah 14:20 that found the words for her husband’s confession of German guilt in the fall of 1945: “We acknowledge, O Lord, our wickedness, and the iniquity of our fathers: for we have sinned against thee.”

Years before, pastor Hans Ehrenberg, who had Jewish ancestry and who was targeted as a “non-Aryan,” helped his friend realize that he had to take a stand against the exclusion of converts from the pulpit. (Niemöller did so clumsily, with a call to the individuals in question to remove themselves from their positions to spare the church.) Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Niemöller’s theological conversation partners, regularly disagreed with him. He did not always listen, but he kept communicating. Niemöller said things about black people that revealed the casual racism typical of his milieu. On this subject, generous people who had thought more deeply and experienced racism first-hand reached out and helped him change. One of those interlocutors was Martin Luther King Jr.

To American audiences, Niemöller exaggerated his anti-Nazi credentials, but for fellow Germans he had another message. Where was I, he asked—where were we—between 1933 and 1937? When the first concentration camp was opened at Dachau in March 1933, Germany still had an independent judiciary, police forces that had not yet been subordinated to the SS, an internationally respected system of education with some of the best universities in the world, even a functioning if frayed civil society. Niemöller and fellow church leaders stood by, busy with their own affairs, as the new Nazi leaders and their local supporters infiltrated, co-opted and destroyed those institutions at the expense of political opponents, German Jews, people deemed disabled and other unpopular elements of society,

It was above all in those early years, Niemöller came to understand, that he and so many others had failed. Recognition of this led to his famous confession of personal guilt: “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not 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 for me.”

One of the people for whom Niemöller “did not speak out” was Victor Klemperer, a professor of literature and prolific diarist. Like Niemöller, Klemperer was a veteran of World War I and a baptized Protestant. But under Nazi law he counted as a Jew, and that categorization shackled him at every turn. The luxury of heroism was out of his reach. Instead, as he observed in 1936, “all private suffering is multiplied and poisoned a thousand times over by the political circumstances.” Klemperer’s words tell the high price of organizing a society around the marginalization of certain members. “Then They Came for Me” invites readers to question the meaning of heroism but more urgently to ponder the possibilities of solidarity.

—Ms. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto and author of “War and Genocide: A Concise History.”