This blog post examines the role that Martin Luther and his
book, On The Jews and Their Lies, played
in Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. It also examines how Christianity was
used in support of Nazi ideals. I conclude that Christianity and Luther were
simply used by the Nazis in order to spread and justify their ideas and
actions.
Martin Luther, one of the most
pinnacle actors in the protestant reformation, broke from the Catholic Church
in 1517, and began teaching the gospel throughout Europe. Three years before his
death, Martin Luther wrote a 65,000 word treatise called On the Jews and Their Lies. This treatise called for Jewish
Synagogues to be burned; Jewish houses destroyed; rabbis forbidden to teach on
pain of death; Jews be prevented from travelling throughout Europe; and their
wealth confiscated. Luther further expounded upon his “solution” to the Jewish
people by stating that the young and strong should be forced into menial labor.
Luther even called for the authorities in Germany to act like a good physician
and cut out the gangrene by slaying three thousand (Jews), ‘lest the whole
people perish’ (Noble, 2002). It should not take anyone very long to realize
the connections between Martin Luther’s writings and the German Holocaust. 400
years after the writing of On the Jews
and Their Lies, Luther’s call to action was used as the underpinnings to
exterminate a race. In this paper I will explain how Martin Luther and
Christianity influenced the rationale and thinking behind one of history’s
worst genocides. 
Christians have persecuted Jewish
people since the dawn of the Common Era. Augustine’s City of God portrayed the Jews as a carnal, faithless race that was
responsible for deicide (Eldridge, 2001). Negative portrayals of Jews only
became worse with time. In Europe, Jews were seen as a parasite on society,
which was even reflected in Hitler’s personal opinions. The stereotypical
grotesque portrayal of Jews emerged in the middle ages. Jews were portrayed
with long noses, bulging eyes, red hair, and were usually depicted as satanic
or devilish (Eldridge, 2001). In the 1300s, a form of anti-Semitic propaganda
was being circulated in Germany. This propaganda portrayed Jews suckling from -
and eating the excrement of - a pig. The portrayal was a way to mock Jewish
people for not eating pork.
The pig was also said to represent the devil, which
made people think that the Jews were synonymous with the devil. The depiction
was called a Judensau, or Jewish sow. This depiction was popular in Germany for
over 600 years, and was even present in German churches after the Holocaust (European
Focus, 2011). Its really not surprising how a country with such a history of
anti-Semitism could have fathered a culture of hatred towards the Jews that
turned into a religious hatred. The culture of anti-Semitism is currently alive
and well in Germany. Anti-Semitic acts and the number of Holocaust deniers were
both on the rise in Germany in the 1990s (Legge, 1998). So not only did Germany
have a history of anti-Semitism, it has anti-Semitism that is still alive and
well after one of the most atrocious genocides in history. As awful as it may
sound, anti-Semitism is arguably a part of German culture, however it is not at
all comparable to what it once was.
Anti-Semitism is a much different
form of racism when compared to other historical contexts. Dislike or hate that
is expressed towards a certain race is usually due to a form of dislike, or
economic fears, or religious hatred, but anti-Semitism was based on economic,
racial, religious, and political prejudice (Brustein & King, 2004). That
breadth that anti-Semitism covers contributes to the violence and acting out
against Jews that we have seen in the past. Jewish people could be blamed for
almost anything that was going wrong within a country. In Europe, between 1899
and 1939, Brustein and King (2004) found that as GDP declined, anti-Semitism
increased. Blaming a declining GDP on the Jews has its roots in some historical
stereotypes, which I’m sure you can think of. Nazi anti-Semitism was not only
founded in stereotypes, but it was also founded in and reinforced by interpretations
of Christianity. However, there are some historians that believe Nazism was
completely devoid from Christianity. Harris (1994) stated that anti-Semitism
was so rooted in the Nazi party because the party was antireligious and
antipolitical. While the Nazi party may have been antireligious and
antipolitcal, anti-Semitism became rooted in German Christianity and German
politics during the reign of the Third Reich. In order to support and implement
anti-Semitic practices in Hitler’s Germany there had to be some form of
justification for villainizing an entire race. While there may not have been a
religious aspect to Nazism, Christianity was used as justification in Nazi
Germany and Luther was used as the poster child. Those in Germany that were in
favor of a national anti-Jewish church cited Luther when justifying their
anti-Semitic ideals (Bergen, 1994). Bergen (1994) also found that Catholic and
Protestant chaplains alike were under instructions to break down religious
barriers and unite Germany under an anti-Semitic ideology. In Germany, both
Catholic churches and Protestant churches were used to further Nazi
anti-Semitic ideas.
Those in Nazi Germany had a skewed
perception of modern day Christianity. For the most part, the fusion of Nazism
and Protestant theology blurred the lines between Hitler and God (Eldridge,
2001). Hitler was seen as a modern day Messiah and as the leader of the Nazi
party. Giving Hitler the power of a prophet and the power of a dictator allowed
him and his party to control the German public through the church. When church
leaders started to adopt anti-Semitic views in their sermons, the mobilization
of the anti-Semitic public took off. There was a belief in Nazi Germany that Jesus
was an Aryan whom sought to eliminate the Jews (Eldridge, 2001). One’s basic
understanding of Christianity would find this idea absolutely preposterous, but
it was a source of anti-Semitic ideology. German Protestants even viewed the
Old Testament as a Jewish book that had no place in Christian theology.
Theologians and scholars in early 20th century Europe founded the
Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,
which was created in the Wartburg Castle where Luther translated the New
Testament into German (Confino, 2012). This institute sought to de-Judaize the
Christian Bible and create a more masculine, Nazified version of Jesus. The
institute just happened to be founded at a castle famous for imprisoning Martin
Luther. The historical significance of the site where this institution, which
sought to eradicate Jews from Germany and the Bible, was founded is hard to
deny. The culture within Germany has been actively seeking to remove Jewish
culture and life from the country for hundreds of years.
Eldridge (2001) also found that
German Protestants used Luther’s Two
Kingdoms Doctrine as a sense of moral security. The Two Kingdoms Doctrine
says that God rules man through law and through gospel. When Christianity and
Nazism merged, this created a false justification for demonizing the Jews. Luther’s
doctrine allowed for the justification of anti-Semitism because anti-Semitic
laws could be portrayed as God’s ruling. It is often hard to combat racism when
the Bible is a perceived justification for that racism. The Nazis used the
Bible and the writings of many theologians, such as Augustine, Luther, and
Calvin, to justify their villainization of Jewish people. Any student of
theology or history can recognize the ease at which biblical writings can be
interpreted to justify one’s own thoughts. Not only did Nazis use religious
context to justify their anti-Semitism, but they also used historical context
and sought to erase Judaism from European History (Confino, 2012). Confino (2012)
also concluded that Nazis not only wanted to eradicate the Jewish population,
but they wanted to rewrite European and Christian history without the Jewish
population.
Seeking to rewrite history without
a category of the population would take a substantial amount of effort,
especially when put into the context of the early 1900s. Jewish people have
influenced history since the beginning of time. Jesus, the Christian Son of
God, was in fact a Jew. And according to Confino (2012) the Nazis sought to erase
that fact from the history books. Armed with biblical justification for their
actions, the Germans were going to remove what they saw as a parasite from the
world. Just as Luther said, Germans sought to remove the gangrene from 20th
century Europe. According to Confino (2012) Jews were blamed for everything
that was wrong with Germany in the 1930s. So much so that the adjective
“Jewish” was attached to every major political problem. The list of things that
Jews were held responsible for is so large that I will quote the list from
Confino.
“Jews were responsible for Bolshevism, Communism,
Marxism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, pacifism, cosmopolitanism,
materialism, atheism, and democracy; for the defeat in the First World War, the
1918 November Revolution, and the Weimar Republic; for Weimar’s culture of
entertainment in cabarets and the club scene, as well as for sexual freedom,
psychoanalysis, feminism, homosexuality, and abortions; for modernist, atonal,
and jazz music, for Bauhaus architecture; and for abstract painting as
represented by impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism, and Dadaism, and
expressionism.”
When such a vast array of problems are blamed on one race,
it makes it easy to instill hatred in the masses, especially when there is a charismatic
dictator spouting his ideals in front of the country. Priests and pastors even
expressed anti-Semitic ideas from the pulpit. The churches participated in the
rhetoric just as much as everyone else in 1930s Germany did. And when some
realized the scale and magnitude of what was happening in Europe – the
holocaust – the churches were silent for fear of backlash from the Nazi regime.
The Churches and Christianity were seemingly held hostage and used as a puppet to
instill hatred. Although they did not seem to be forced to profess their
anti-Semitic rage, instead the churches seemed to just follow and profess
Hitler’s ideas on their own. The ease at which people grabbed a hold of the
Hitler’s anti-Semitic ideas was helped by the fact that Germans needed someone
to blame their plight on. Germany had just exited a war that left the country
physically, economically, and psychologically harmed, and the Jews were an easy
target.
Hausheer (1937) found that the Nazi
anti-Semitism was supported by man’s ability to unconsciously justify something
with vast superstructures that are already in place in society, so the churches
may have been superstructure that the public needed in order to justify their
reasoning behind anti-Semitism. The churches may have simply been a part in a
much larger anti-Semitic society that has its roots in thousands of years of
history. But nonetheless, Christianity did support and solidify German
anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 40s. Christianity served as a vessel through
which a skewed view of Christianity was expressed in Germany. Christianity and
Martin Luther were merely used to justify the atrocious acts that were taking
place. As Hausheer (1937) said, society needs justification in order to believe
in something, whatever that justification may be, and Christianity was a form
of justification for some in Germany. Martin Luther’s writing may have been
used to justify Jewish condemnation but I do not think blame for the holocaust
can be placed on him or his writings. Through the research I have done, I found
that while Christianity definitely was negatively influential during the holocaust it was not the
problem. Anti-Semitism was concentrated in the region at the time and one man
took advantage of the situation in order to rally a country behind him. The
problem of anti-Semitism is much larger than Luther or the treatise that he
wrote.
Going into this project I was ready
to place at least some responsibility on Luther because I found his writings
very out of place for a founder of modern religion, and quite frankly I just
wanted to. But from what I read it seems that Luther’s writings were just
exploited to sell anti-Semitism to the public. If you think that a race is so
bad that they need to be exterminated and a very prominent church leader came
to the same conclusion, you are going to use those writings as justification. Without
Hitler, the Holocaust would not have happened. Hitler kept it a secret because
he knew the information would not be stomached well (History Place, 2000). As I
stated before, the Nazi regime was not a religious regime, Christianity was
just distorted to fit within the Nazi ideology.
Bergen, D. L.
(1994). Catholics, Protestants, and Christian anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. Central European History, 27(3), 329-348.
Brustein, W. I.,
& King, R. D. (2004). Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. International Political Science Review, 25(1),
35-53.
Confino, A.
(2012) Why did the Nazis burn the Hebrew Bible? Nazi Germany, representations
of the past, and the Holocaust. The
Journal of Modern History, 84(2), 369-400.
Eldridge, S. W.
(2006). Ideological incompatibility: the forced fusion of Nazism and Protestant
theology and its impact on anti Semitism in the Third Reich. International Social Science Review, 81(3),
151-165.
European Focus.
(2011). Regensburg cathedral and the judensau. Retreived from
www.europeanfocus.com/regensburg-cathedral-and-the-judensau/
Noble, G. (2002) Martin Luther and German anti-Semitism. History Review, 4, 1-3.
Hausheer, H.
(1937). Nazi racial anti-Semitism: an analysis and Estimate of its ideology. Social Science, (12)1, 30-45.
History Place.
(2000). Genocide in the 20th century. Retrieved from
www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/holocaust.htm
Legge, J. S.
(1998). Exploring the symbolic racism thesis: the German sense of
responsibility for the Jews. Polity, 30(3),
531-545.
Luther, M. (1543). On the Jews and their lies.
Your paper has come a long way since I critiqued your rough draft, and I like how it turned out. I enjoyed your topic in general about how the Martin Luther’s writing impacted the holocaust, and learning about how these stereotypes of Jews. I especially like the pig information. It is sad how we still use some of those stereotypes today. I wonder if people knew where they came from, if they would think twice about using them. I also found it interesting how Christianity was used as a form of justification, and how it had a negative influence on the holocaust. I agree with you on the fact Martin Luther’s writings may have influenced the holocaust (from the information you provided in your paper), but he and his writings aren’t to blame for the holocaust. What was most surprising to you when doing this research? I am sure you came across a lot of interesting and little known facts when doing your research.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting paper. While I knew that Hitler had used a Christian document and Biblical references to support his claims on the Jews, it was particularly interesting that Martin Luther had a large part in it. It is unfortunate, but if society allows its religious beliefs to become so powerful that they are able to cherry pick Biblical references to support their genocidal tendencies, this will happen again. You can see this happening on a much lesser scale with the LGBTQ Community and how they are being ostracized from religious, political and educational systems today. While any person would not like to see this connection made, look at what is happening. A large amount of people believe that LGBTQ individuals look a particular way, talk a particular way, and (in extremist religious views) are the reason that our traditional moral family values are decreasing. None of these things are true, but the language used is justified that “It’s in the Bible” (even when it technically isn’t—thanks for cherry picking!)
ReplyDeleteI found your blog very interesting, as I am currently taking a Holocaust class right now and this subject is very fresh on my mind. I think that Martin Luther was indeed used as an example by the Nazi’s to instill anti-Semitic propaganda into the German public but he was not the sole source of anti-Semitic feelings. In fact, the Nazis did not create anything new when they started persecuting the Jews but instead used old ideas that were still very strong in Central and Eastern Europe at the time. The only thing that the Nazis made new was the governmental anti-Semitism and how it was a state run enterprise. Instead of the many pogroms (attacks on Jews) that had taken place for centuries, the state would order the extermination of the Jews and would create the bureaucratic infrastructure needed for the Holocaust. I would also say, in my opinion, that Hitler was not the sole architect of the Holocaust but was a figure that let it continue to occur while his many underlings interpreted his vague orders. He definitely deserves blame but is not the sole cause of the Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteYour blog was quite interesting to me, especially about the part of Hitler being seen as a messiah. I visited Germany not too long ago with the UNK History Department and I often wondered throughout the trip if he was seen this way. His home was proudly displayed on the side of a mountain and the Eagles Nest is also on top of a mountain, both to display that power of Hitler. It was also mentioned on our trip that it was difficult for Hitler to breathe at the altitude of the Eagles Nest so he only visited every once in a while; this fact was hidden from the general public because it would ruin the view of Hitler being a superhuman. I was also curious if you looked into the medieval holocaust of the Jews in Asia. This is something that I did research on a long time ago, because I had thought that it would connect and give reason for the Nazi regiment. I am just curious if you were able to find any connection here as well.
ReplyDeleteI think the Christian doctrine is relative, and can have various interpretations. Depending on who is interpreting it, the bible can be used as a means to an end. There is no doubt in my mind that Martin Luther was a hypocrite, because Jesus Christ himself was Jewish. It also does not tally with what Luther taught for much of his life. That being said, anti-Semitism originated from the belief that “Jews killed Jesus”, Luther’s anti-Semitism could have been based on this belief. In fact, Nazi propagandists used this belief, as one of the reasons to exterminate Jewish people. I also agree that organized religion can be used as a tool to manipulate people, the US is a shining example of this. Religious hypocrisy is prevalent everywhere, and Luther’s anti-Semitism, I think is the epitome of religious hypocrisy. It makes me question organized religions and “people of god” even more critically.
ReplyDeleteI found this reading very interesting because through out of schooling we read and are thought about the holocaust but I had never heard of Luther’s book or his hatred for the Jewish people. Although wasn’t antisemitism was a worldwide idea in the 1930s? Before the concentration camps, Hitler let a lot of Jewish people live the country but many countries didn’t want to give refuge because they were Jewish. Also, would you consider the Holocaust a kind of terroristic act that used religion to justify their actions? Would I be able to say, that the same thing is going on in the Middle East, expect instead of Martin Luther they base their teachings of Muhammad and instead of being backed up by Christianity, its backed up by Islam? In a way, it’s kind of the same thing because they both groups are persecuting a minority for political reason. Then they cherry pick the bible and readings to justify their actions.
ReplyDeleteBefore reading your post, I actually had no idea that Hitler used Christian documents to endorse anti-Semitism, and I certainly never knew that Martin Luther’s work was used in such a manner. All I really gathered from my public school education was that he used Jews as a scapegoat for political problems as a way to rise to power, nothing about religious issues. It seems to me that this is a pretty important part of history to have somehow not learned in the public school system. I wonder what the reasoning behind this was: is it just not considered important, or are teachers imposing some sort of self-censorship because they really don’t want to talk about religion in the classroom? I find it problematic that religion may have become such a touchy subject in schools that teachers might not even be comfortable teaching parts of history that involve one religion against another. Whatever the case may be, I am glad I now have this insight.
ReplyDeleteYour blog really caught my attention and it was really interesting couldn’t stop reading. The fact that maybe Martin Luther is seen as having influenced the holocaust is surprising I knew that Christian documents and the Bible were referenced to justify what Hitler was doing but never had I though Martin Luther as being a part of it. True he can’t be blamed for what he wrote or how others looked and interpreted it, but the fact that he was seen as an example to scare and kind of manipulate people to accept what was going on is scary. The fact that Christianity is seen as a big force justifying the Holocaust is awful because the fact that individuals take their religion to a point where it is okay to eliminate others based on ridiculous biases is horrendous. Clearly, Hitler was the big force behind the Holocaust but I don’t think after reading your paper that he is the sole father of the idea.
ReplyDeleteI am going to respond to the comments in a chronological order. The most interesting thing that I discovered while studying Martin Luther and the Nazis was that the Nazis displayed Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic book during Kristallnacht. I found that very representative of what I was trying to portray with this post.
ReplyDeleteI find the similarities between the LGBTQ community and the religious justification for the holocaust similar as well. In both instances, the people that are denying rights are using biblical justification, which can be used for almost anything. I’ve seen the bible cited as justification for and against homosexuality, which is just completely absurd but very representative of both issues.
As far as Hitler not being the sole source of anti-Semitic ideas in Germany, I completely agree with that. I just do not think that the Holocaust would have happened as it did if Hitler were not in power.
I did not examine the Asian Holocaust at all, however I will definitely look into it and see what connections I can draw between them.
I do agree with the hypocrisy of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and I know that Luther’s beliefs were based on the Jews killing Jesus. His views changed when he was treated badly by Jews. I do not remember the exact context of the situation but earlier in his life Luther was very sympathetic towards Jewish causes.
I think that the Holocaust could be considered similar to what is going on in the Middle East, however I do not think it is terrorism as we see it today. The Germans believed the Jews caused their problems and they wanted them out, very similar to why ISIS and many terrorist organizations want westerners out of the Mid East.
I think that the reason none of this was taught in high school is censorship and our American exceptionalism. As a Christian nation, no teacher would want to teach that Christianity could be blamed for the Holocaust.