Actually it was Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) who said this, not Bonhoeffer.
As an aside - unimportant really - who shares your views?
Not only that, Niemöller wrote/spoke those words (in various different but similar formats) after the end of WWII and the total collapse of the Nazi regime and its political/ethnic cleansing programmes, and after the full horror of the concentration/extermination camps and their victims had become global public knowledge.
To that end, Niemöller was not speaking these words as a martyr (as Vixen incorrectly (and agenda-led) ascribed them to Bonhöffer - who
was murdered by the Nazis as an enemy of the state during the war), but rather he was speaking them as a combination of an apology and a denunciation of the apathy or collusion shown by various authorities and public bodies (not to mention large swathes of the military and civilian population) towards Nazi ideology and practices between 1932 and 1945.
That's important, because Niemöller was actually pointing out that the established Christian churches in Germany turned a blind eye to (and, in a small number of cases, disgustingly assisted in) the Nazi genocide programmes. And he was making the wider allusion to
any groups who were not themselves directly adversely affected by such programmes, but who must have known (or at the very least must have strongly suspected) what was going on. And that it was only at the point when any given group was itself targeted by the Nazi regime that it actually spoke out.
"Yes, yes.... but what's any of this got to do with the Knox/Sollecito trial process?", I hear you ask. Well, it's extremely interesting to note that Niemöller's famous words carry certain resonance in the Knox/Sollecito trials injustice - and a resonance that is ironically opposite to Vixen's misplaced and misunderstood interpretation. And it's this: as soon as Knox and Sollecito were convicted by Massei's court in a gross injustice (and in fact ever since Knox and Sollecito were arrested in the aftermath of those infamous 5th/6th November 2007 interrogations), the vast majority of the media - led by a small cadre of low-intellect stringer hacks who were beholden to an egomaniac prosecutor and who couldn't see what was going on right underneath their noses, but who had become the chief media conduits in this trial process by virtue of having been ever-present - were all too happy to swallow the juicy myth that Knox and Sollecito had grouped up with Guede and sexually assaulted and murdered Kercher. It was a salacious tale which attracted viewers, readers and online clicks, and it had now seemingly been given the
imprimatur of validity by the Massei verdicts.
So, in a very real sense (though very obviously on a dramatically different and incomparable scale to the "turning a blind eye" to the Nazi genocides), almost nobody in the media was willing to stick their necks out and challenge the Massei verdicts and the evidence (or "evidence") underpinning those verdicts. It would - and should - have been very easy for any media organisation, in, say 2010, to have looked properly at the way the Massei trial was conducted, and the evidence/testimony driving the verdicts from that trial. It wouldn't have taken a huge budget for a large media organisation to (for example) consult with several internationally-renowned gastroenterologists and/or forensic pathologists with significant experience in analysing post-mortem stomach/intestinal evidence, whereupon they would have learned that beyond all reasonable doubt, Knox could not have died any later than 4 hours after starting her last meal (very likely at 6.30pm), and that this on its own blew the entire prosecution and court theory of the murder - which was importantly predicated on a post-11.30pm ToD - out of the water. They would further have learned that the stomach/intestine evidence in this case indicated that Kercher almost certainly died within three hours of starting her last meal - placing her death at some point between 9pm and 9.30pm - which also directly contradicted other key prosecution "evidence".
And that's just one example. They could have listened to the world's top forensic DNA scientists, who - to a person - would have stated that the DNA "evidence" presented to the court in the Knox/Sollecito Massei trial was worthless and inadmissible, since it was the product of near-unbelievably incompetent crime scene investigation, evidence collection, evidence handling, packaging and transportation, and evidence analysis in Stefanoni's lab (complete with malpractice in testing and interpreting the results, and the associated failure/inability to provide the critical source data files to the defence or the court).
And they could quickly and easily have established that the three key "witnesses" upon whom the prosecutors and the Massei court relied so heavily were all fundamentally flawed and utterly unreliable/non-credible.
And so on, and so on.
Yet with a few honourable exceptions (Tim Egan in the NYT, the CBS "48 Hours" team.....), most of the mass media simply didn't bother. The narrative had (seemingly) been set in stone, and that was that. Not surprisingly, public perception was coloured heavily by this approach - the public in the US, UK and Italy all lapped up prurient juicy pieces about the manipulative Foxy Knoxy and the pliable "Harry Potter" geek boyfriend under her control. Thus the majority of the public chose to "look the other way" as well.
But Knox and Sollecito knew the truth. Their lawyers knew the truth. Their families and close friends knew the truth. And a very small number of other people in the media, in political circles, and in online communities, knew the truth. And that small collective of people were prepared to speak out in defence of Knox and Sollecito, and in condemnation of the Italian justice process that had treated them so abhorrently between 2007 and 2015.And ultimately (thankfully, but scandalously late) the Italian courts determined the truth (with the dishonourable exception of the outstanding criminal slander conviction, which the ECHR will force Italy to remedy).
And that small collection of people was right.