Political passions swirled last week around Pastor Martin Niemöller. Was he a democratic hero? His sponsors said he was. An unreconstructed Nazi? His enemies said so. The truth seemed to be that Niemöller was neither: he was not a leader, a thinker, a martyr, a racist or a hypocrite. U.S. opinion had inflated the Niemöller myth out of all relation to reality; now some of those who helped create the myth stood by it while others, disillusioned, attacked Niemöller with a bitterness he did not deserve.
The fight over Pastor Niemoller, smoldering since Eleanor Roosevelt's adverse comment on his U.S....