TABOO 6: MARTIN LUTHER AND THE FINAL SOLUTION
It all ended very badly for him: On October 1,1946, the publisher of Germany’s viciously anti-semitic tabloid newspaper Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher, was sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. His outraged reaction: “If Martin Luther were alive, he would be in the dock beside me!” A monstrous assertion from today’s point of view—after all, October 31st has been declared a holiday in some German states as Reformation Day to mark the date in 1517 when Luther had posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. In this ecumenical spirit, the Catholic Church now acknowledges this day by sending official representatives to Protestant commemorative events. But was Luther interested in bridging gaps between religions? Or was there something to Streicher’s assertion?
In 1543 Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies in which he said:
“Jews are so thoroughly desperate, evil, poisonous, and devilish that they have been our plague, pestilence, and doom for 1,400 years and up to the present.” In his treatise Luther made seven demands that anticipated the cruelty of the Nazi regime 400 years later. He wanted to “set fire to their synagogues and schools” and said that “all cash and treasure of silver and gold should be taken from them.”
For much of the official Protestant Church, Luther’s statements are still taboo—they are viewed as perhaps being “anti-judaism” but not as antisemitic, which is a difficult distinction to make. The historian and theologian Heiko Augustinus Oberman viewed things differently: Luther’s remarks about the Jews were not a dark page in his work but rather a central theme of his entire theology. Church historian Thomas Kaufmann describes Luther’s incendiary writings as part of the “final solution to the Jewish question” that the Nazis sought four centuries later: “Luther’s texts were certainly a factor in making the Holocaust possible, for they helped establish an attitude of mind that paralyzed any kind of civil courage on the part of the Lutheran population.” The sad fact is that the Protestant Church largely supported Hitler’s anti-semitic policies. Hitler himself often mentioned his esteem for Martin Luther and his writings. And so, on the night of November 9, 1938—the eve of Luther’s birthday— Hitler’s minions set fire to synagogues across Germany in a violent rampage infamously recorded in history as the “Night of Broken Glass.”
“Set fire to their synagogues and schools.”