Did Martin Luther Inspire the Holocaust?

Martin Luther, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust Question

Is Martin Luther anti-semitic? Okay, for those who don't know, these power clips are around the 20 minute mark or so, and I just came up with that term last week when I made a short video, and I thought, you know what would be a good name, not very original, I guess, power clip, because it's just giving you kind of like, it's like a power bar.

You're getting hit with all this information at once, but we're not gonna be talking about the thing that everyone else is talking about. In fact, I'm not even gonna mention that thing. You know what that thing is, but I'm rebelling against that because frankly, I'm sick of talking about it, and it doesn't mean that I don't have other information queued up for an episode soon.

I do, and I'm keeping track of things, but you know what? We need to get our minds off of it because everywhere we look, we're hearing worry and fear, and this is what's happening. It doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on.

You're gonna hear something about how this is the end of the world, and so it's not ever really the end of the world until the world actually ends, and when that happens, we get to go to be with Jesus, and I'm looking forward to that, but we're still in this world right now, and I wanna talk about something that has interested me for a while, and that's the subject of Martin Luther.

He's a Protestant hero. I mean, we usually look at the event of him nailing the 95 theses to the Wittenberg door as the seminal event, the starting point of the Protestant Reformation, and a lot of young Protestant boys look up to Luther, and he's an example of not just a Christian, but a masculine figure, and over the last, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, really like half my lifetime, I guess, I've noticed kind of a shift.

Luther is still mentioned at times, but not quite as prominently, and of course, you got those really Reformed guys who just, they're always gonna talk about Luther, but I think there's a sense in which, especially for just mainstream evangelicals, we're getting a little embarrassed about Martin Luther, and it's because of the fact that he wrote a book called On the Jews and Their Lies, and some of those quotations were used in certain Nazi sources, and so there's a narrative that says, well, Martin Luther, you really inspired the Nazis.

I mean, you can just draw a line from Martin Luther directly to the Holocaust, and I've heard this. I've heard this multiple places, and so I wanted to talk about it and give you something kind of meaty to think about, and so I'm gonna present to you a slideshow I put together from research that I have done on Martin Luther, and I've read the sources.

I've read a number of Luther sources as well as the interpretations of Luther on this question, really since the German Christian movement of the late 1800s, and so I want you to hear what I've compiled, and I think the conclusion you'll draw at the end is that Martin Luther has been greatly distorted, greatly distorted, and in fact, modern historians are using Nazi interpretations of him, which are incorrect, in order to forward this narrative, and so there's really no reason for us to believe it, and next time Reformation Day comes around or whatever the opportunity is to celebrate Martin Luther, you can celebrate Martin Luther, and you can share with people this video.

Right now, obviously, it's not Reformation Day, but I just thought, you know what? I'm gonna share this with you right now. We need to get our minds off of the thing that I keep mentioning that everyone is talking about, so let's put our minds somewhere else.

Luther’s Jewish Writings in Their Historical and Theological Context

Let's talk about Martin Luther. Many historians have reinterpreted Martin Luther by ignoring theological considerations and accepting a Nazi understanding of him, and you can see this understanding in the Volk movement, the German Christian movement, and even in the ways that the Confessing Church was hampered from opposing Nazism because of Neo-Orthodoxy's emphasis on privatized experience, which really was a deviation from Luther's public theology, and so the concern I have as both a historian and a Christian is that Luther's image could become the subject of public censorship, which in some places it already has been.

Let's talk about Martin Luther's understanding of Jews and Judaism. If we look at the full canon of his writings, his objections were really theological in nature, not ethnic or racially motivated like the Nazis' objections were later, and so if you look at, for instance, the first lecture on the Psalms, he says that Jews are heretics, but it's because of their rejection of Christ, and then he encourages, throughout his early years, he encourages Christians to go treat Jews kindly for the sake of evangelism.

He ascribes the Abrahamic Covenant to ethnic Jews, which is a fascinating thing for Reform theologians in particular to consider. Even Roman Catholics accuse Luther of being a Jew's friend. Now, that doesn't mean that he didn't occasionally reference Jews in stereotypical ways for their participation in usury, which would have been a very common thing for medieval thinkers at that time, but in general, you don't see the kind of picture that gets painted by many modern historians about Martin Luther.

However, there seems to be a change in Martin Luther's thinking throughout the 1530s. His evangelistic efforts proved unsuccessful, which bothered him in the Jewish community. There was the threat from Turkey and Suleiman the Magnificent that Islamic domination was gonna come to Western Europe, and there were sources like Antonius Margaritha's The Entire Jewish Faith, which claimed that Jews were secretly working with the Turks and Luther starts quoting this book on occasion, and he's hearing these things.

The Protestants now have to wrestle with the understanding of religious toleration and freedom because they had never actually had to answer these questions. They were not in control of the civil government.

Now they were. Luther's thinking through these things. In his personal life, you have the fact that he's failing in health, and in 1542, his oldest daughter dies, which devastates him. And so for personal reasons and for public reasons, Luther's tone starts to change a bit.

Luther’s 1543 Polemic and Civil Measures Against Jews

It was in this context in 1543 that Martin Luther writes on the Jews and their lies, and in it, he urges rulers to burn Jewish synagogues, schools, and homes, as well as confiscate prayer books and Talmudic writings, and he points to the law of Moses in Deuteronomy 13 as justification for this, that any city which is given to idolatry shall be totally destroyed by fire.

Quoting from Moses. Now, rabbis should be forbidden in his mind to teach on pain of loss of life and limb because they're oppressing the poor Jews. So he's making a distinction between those who are peddling this false theology and those who are succumbing to it as victims.

Luther also advises that Jews should be deprived of safe protection on the highway since he thought their motives were nefarious when they were traveling the countryside. They were guilty of usury, and they were not lords, officials, or tradesmen, so what were they doing out traveling?

And so he starts to cast suspicion on them. He says their money, since it was almost necessarily the product of usury, should be taken and given to converted Jews who wanted to pursue an honest occupation, and that young Jews and Jewesses should be tired for toilsome work or ejected from the country.

So throughout his work, he makes a distinction between the Jews who are following what he considered to be a pagan lifestyle and those who might be willing to convert to Christianity and change that lifestyle.

Now, for Christians who live in modern, secular, multi-religious, multi-ethnic states, this kind of thinking is horrifying, but in Luther's time, that kind of thinking really didn't exist. Each national region had a religion, and in Germany, where people were Christians of some variety, Luther thought that the Jews would tempt Protestants into usury, undermine their strength at the time of the Turkish threat, and also theologically destabilize the region.

So again, it's important to understand at this point that Martin Luther's objections are not one and the same with the objections that came later from the Nazi party. His objections are religious in nature.

They're driven by replacement theology, which really kind of contradicts his earlier position. He believed that the new covenant demonstrated that the imperial laws must be applied to Jews, so they were under German law, not Mosaic law, and he didn't like the fact that they operated under a different system, and so at that time, that was a very common way of thinking.

Now, let's stop for a moment and talk about what Luther wasn't saying. He wasn't making universal statements about all ethnic Jews. In fact, he said that Christians, if they did not fear God, they could receive a fate more terrible than the Jews, so this was definitely a spiritual problem in his mind.

His seven-point plan for what rulers should do in this situation did not apply to converted Jews. Thomas Kaufman says that the idea that On the Jews and Their Lives could be used as a binding manifesto of antisemitism would never have occurred to Luther, and Luther was raging against just about everything.

His harshest criticisms were saved for the pope and the Roman Catholic Church especially, but you would have thought at the time that his diatribes would have been used for those who would have wanted to persecute the Jews, but actually, they did not arouse great public interest or political interest at the time.

In fact, Martin Luther's final sermon included a call to treat Jews with Christian love and to pray for them so that they might be converted and would receive the Lord. So On the Jews and Their Lives, which was one of Martin Luther's least-read works, is not a fair representation of his overall opinion of Jewish people.

Nazi Antisemitism Versus Christian Critique

Now, it's important at this juncture to realize the fact that Nazis were not friendly towards Christianity at all, and I provided a number of quotations that prove this. In J .S. Conway's book, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches from 1933 to 1945, he talks about the state seizing most church property, ministers routinely accused of financial misconduct or sexual perversion, parachurch ministries and information outlets being eliminated, and thousands of clergy being arrested.

In short, churches were stripped of any visible public influence. So they were not interested in Martin Luther's theological critiques of Judaism, nor in Martin Luther's Christianity. What the Nazis were interested in was using Martin Luther's image in a country which had predominantly identified as Christian in order to forward their own agenda, and we find this actually occurring before the Nazi Party, even the bulkish movements of the late 1800s used portions of On the Jews and Their Lies to try to convince people that Martin Luther was making a cultural critique and saying that Jews and Germans could not coexist, and it's very likely that Adolf Hitler was even exposed to some of these.

So Hitler did use Luther's image. In 1918, he calls him a great man. In 1927, he's a great German. In 1934, he says if Luther were alive to see the Nazi church unification, he'd rejoice. In 1925, Adolf Hitler in Weingkamp had listed Luther along with other Volk heroes as protagonists who fought for these ideals, and so Hitler's use of Luther is extremely limited, and compared to his frequent references to scientific racism, it's relatively insignificant, but really like any German, on occasion, he does reference Martin Luther, and so did a number of Nazi leaders, and I've provided a few examples of that.

Even those who disagreed with Christianity completely and were either social Darwinists or part of the Nazi occultist movement, even they appreciated Luther's antisemitism in their minds and how they could use this image of Luther to get the rest of the population to side with them.

So how did Protestants in Germany think about all this? Well, two churches emerged, and as a result, two understandings of Luther, and one was the German Christian movement, which was Hitler's attempt to consolidate Christian Protestantism into a national German evangelical church, and they were focused on de-Judaizing Christianity, so removing Jews from churches, deleting the Old Testament, changing the image of Jesus to fit Aryan ideals, and then you had the Confessing Church, led by Karl Barth and a group of confessing Lutherans, and they tried to resist state overreach as much as they could.

They weren't in bed with the state like the German Christian movement, but both movements were very concerned that bulk religion would replace Christianity, and so both groups tried their best knowing that they could be shut down to accommodate the state, and if that meant, especially for the German Christian movement, using Luther as an image for reinforcing state policies, they would do it.

The Confessing Church was very careful in choosing what battles to fight with the Nazi regime, and especially early on, they did not focus as much on the antisemitism, though it did come up. Now, part of the reason the Confessing Church did not resist more was that they were hampered by neo-orthodoxy and the pietist assumptions that neo-orthodoxy rested upon, so they didn't see their social responsibility that strongly.

J .S. Klan states that neo-orthodoxy contributed to the church's impotence by encouraging her to be concerned primarily with her own affairs, insisting that the church's role was to defend an intolerantly one-sided and transcendental faith laden with paradox.

Karl Barth, in 1933, said, the church has in no way whatever to serve mankind nor the German people. She has alone to serve the word of God. Now, Karl Barth, who led the Confessing Church, believed that the Bible was a human instrument and document bound and conditioned by the temporal views of nature, of history, of ideas, of values, and therefore not sinless and not infallible.

He tried to legitimize Christianity by relegating it to the realm of transcendent experiences, thus rejecting natural revelation and neutralizing modern attacks on inerrancy or the supernatural. And in the process, though, the church lost its prophetic capability.

Faith was privatized and common ground between the church and other institutions eliminated. The very feature that kept the academy from discrediting the church destroyed the authority of the church. Not only did Luther never conceive of such thinking, but he contradicted it by engaging in polemics upon the basis of the scripture and clear reason, as his most famous speech of the Diet of Worms in 1521 testifies.

Neo-Orthodox theologians departed from the foundation of Luther's theology, which was the word of God as divinely communicated in a temporal realm and therefore subject to reasonable inquiry. So the Confessing Church was not able to resist Nazism as well because of a disagreement they had with Martin Luther's theology.

And in a similar way, the German Christian movement, which always was quoting Martin Luther for justification and their anti-Jewish measures, disagreed with Luther because they appealed to racial theory, higher criticism, and historical critical interpretations to supplant Orthodox Christian teaching, the same kind of teaching that Martin Luther taught.

They constantly referenced Luther as an image supporting what the Nazi party was doing. And yet, at the same time, their reading of him was very selective because they only took portions of certain writings, especially on the Jews and their allies, to try to parallel it with the Nazi party's policies.

Now, the irony is, while the German Christian movement is trying to use Martin Luther's name to justify what they're doing, he would have disagreed with just about all of it, including bringing Roman Catholics and Protestants together, editing the New Testament and replacing the Old Testament.

To the point of removing Martin Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress, from their hymnal and replacing his own catechism. Now, the German Christian movement relied on higher critical ideas, which originated with Schleiermacher.

And in contradiction to Luther, who believed the scriptures have never erred, Schleiermacher destroyed the inerrancy of scripture and disagreed with Luther by claiming the Jewish background of the historical Jesus was insignificant and that no continuity whatsoever between Judaism and modern Christianity existed.

These ideas became more and more popular, leading to political antisemitism, the documentary Hypothesis, and the theory that there was a Galilean Jesus, who was Arian. And the German Christian movement latched on to all of these ideas, but at their base, they destroyed the inerrancy of scripture which Martin Luther believed in.

Why Luther Should Not Be Blamed for the Holocaust

So we can safely conclude that Martin Luther should not be blamed for German antisemitism, which was based on scientific racism, or the horrors of the Holocaust. Because in each case, whether it was the anemic lack of a response from the confessing church, or the German Christian movement, and they're going along with the Nazism, or Nazism itself, in each case, those groups had to disagree with something foundational in Luther's theology to either allow it to happen or to forward it.

However, academic historians have by and large accepted the Nazi interpretation of Hitler. Peter F. Weiner said that Luther was obsessed by antisemitism and anything but godly. Rita Steinhardt Bottenwick said Luther's verbal attacks on the Jews were not equaled until Goebbels rhetoric.

Robert Mitchell portrayed Luther as a racist who perceived Jews as worthy of slaughter and lumped him in with the Nazis. Eric Gritsch ascribes antisemitism, a hint of racism and a murderous tendency similar to Hitler's to Luther.

There have been a few historians who have tried to contradict this narrative, but they have not received a lot of traction. And the interpretation of Luther has resulted in a number of Lutheran denominations renouncing and apologizing for Luther's antisemitic views.

My conclusion is if we start by understanding the full canon of Luther's theology and its historical context, we may disagree with pre-modern conclusions, but we will accurately represent his views for the time in which they existed, including his positive contributions.

Finally, we will keep from abusing and distorting his image in the way both the Nazis and many modern historians have done. We may even be able to preserve his legacy for generations to come. Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed that.

I know it's a lot different than some of the content I put out there. And if you're a history buff, you probably enjoyed it and wanna know more. If you go to the link in the info section, I have the slideshow available there for free.

If you're a patron of mine on Patreon, you're gonna get a much longer detailed explanation with citations, so you can go research yourself if that's something you are interested in. Not all of us are history buffs like that, but I happen to enjoy history and I thought you'd be blessed by that.

And I do have material, like I said at the beginning, to go over soon, probably early next week, maybe the end of this week, but there's a lot to talk about. But we need a little bit of a diversion. I hope it was a diversion for you.

God bless and enjoy the rest of your evening.