An Interview With Prof. Rev. Franklin H. Littell

Prof. Rev. Franklin H. Littell

Department of Religion, Temple University

July 23, 1998, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Interviewer: Prof. Yehuda Bauer

Christian Antisemitism and Its Influence on Nazi Ideology

Prof. Littell, what in your view was the influence of Christian antisemitism on Nazi ideology and its attitude to the Jews?

I think that Christian antisemitism laid foundations, a “bottom layer” if you will, not only in Germany but in all of Christendom, so-called, on which cultural stereotypes and prejudices were then built as a second layer. Then it was possible for the modern antisemites, like the Nazis, with their racism and their political ideology, to develop [their specific attitude towards the Jews] within that general area, which was mostly permissive towards their militant antisemitism, and certainly no barrier against it among those who had been infected in this way.

The Church Struggle

When we talk about a Church Struggle, what do you understand under that title?

The Kirchenkampf — the Church Struggle — is generally dated from the Synod of Barmen in the Ruhr, in late May of 1934, where 131 delegates from Gemeinde — not congregations but parishes in the Protestant State Churches scattered throughout Germany — met, in good part under the inspiration of Martin Niemoeller, and led by Karl Barth and others who had traveled all over Germany, arousing people against the collaborators, the so-called “German Christians” (Deutsche Christen). Already at that time there was a parting of the ways. There were those who followed the theological line of Karl Barth, who declared that Nazism was a heresy and had to be handled as such. There was a small number — Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of them — who said that the attack on the Jews was a dividing line, and they tried to give the Synod the impulse or the courage to tackle that issue. They didn't. And Bonhoeffer therefore refused to sign the protocol of the meeting. But today, looking back, most of the students of the Church Struggle say it was a fatal choice when the Synod decided to defend the integrity of doctrine and the Church as an institution, instead of going the way of commitment to human concerns, which would have placed them squarely in opposition to the whole Nazi enterprise.

The Confessing Church

Would you say that a large majority of Protestants in Germany in the early 1930s, after Hitler's rise to power, joined the German Christians, the Deutsche Christen, and only a small proportion were part of the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche), the organization that came out of Barmen? Or would you say that a large part of Protestants in Germany joined the Confessing Church?

No, no, it was only a remnant, in the Biblical sense as well as in actuality — a “faithful remnant” in that sense. The Church held public elections for the parish leadership, and for the leadership in the districts and the Synods of the Landeskirchen. There were public elections where anybody who had been baptized into a State Church (a “Territorial” Church) could vote, just the way they voted in regular political elections. And the so-called German Christians swept the elections overwhelmingly — in Thuringia for instance, and not quite so overwhelmingly in Berlin and Brandenburg. That was understood by those who were unhappy as a battle clarion to indicate there couldn't be any compromise.

So they condemned the German Christian “line” and their doctrine. The Barmen protocol has six articles where it’s all stated in traditional terms: it cites the Scriptures, and it refers to the Reformation decision, and it concludes with, “Therefore we condemn the false teaching….” Each time they affirm a certain position; then they line out and declare what they don't go along with. Included was the whole idea of a church led by any Fuehrer, and also any invasion by the State into the business of the Church. As I say, it was a defensive line to protect the Church as an institution for most of them — including most of those of Barmen, who didn't see the importance of the attack on the Jews as a truly, fundamentally, serious dividing line. There were some of the men of Barmen who were willing to have separate Jewish congregations. They weren't willing to have the Jews [i.e., Jewish converts] expelled from the churches or have their baptism denied, because that would have been, of course, contrary to the most fundamental teachings. But most of them didn't see the importance of defending the rights of German Jewish citizens as citizens, as human beings. They simply saw the importance of defending converts, Jews who had accepted baptism, saying the Church was unbreakable. To have defended Jews as Jews would have been too much for them. Only a few of them saw the theological seriousness of the attack on the Jews.

Would you say that the members of the Confessing Church were persecuted by the Nazi regime? And to what extent?

They were persecuted, all right. Many of them were jailed, and of course at the time of July 20, 1943, some of them were rounded up “on suspicion” — but suspicion was enough. Only a few of them were actually involved in the plot on Hitler's life as such. The first martyr of the BK was a man named Paul Schneider, and his case is typical of where they stood. He was in a situation where a member of his parish, who was a local leader in the Nazi Party died, and he didn't want to bury him or to take charge of the church service. The widow begged him to bury him, and legally he [the deceased] was entitled to it, because he had been baptized into a territorial State Church. Finally, Schneider agreed to do it if it would be a strictly Christian service. Simple. No saying, “this was a great man,” no other nonsense, but just a “schlicht” [simple] — as the Germans would say — burial service. Then, in the midst of his conducting this burial, the local Nazi corps marched up and loudly demanded the right to participate in the service for “our dear departed brother,” and so forth. And Schneider said, “I am in charge here,” and proceeded to conduct the service under great adversity, but with the support of village people. He had been pastor there for a long time. Afterwards he was arrested and beaten, and let go. But this happened, I think, three times altogether. They started harassing him then, and finally he was beaten to death in the jail. See, he was taking a stand on basic Christian teaching and doctrine; it didn't have anything to do with politics or with the Jewish issue at all. He had no intention of being involved in politics, he was just being faithful to his vows of ordination — which most of them were not, incidentally. I mean, pastors, bishops, superintendents, cardinals…. But I won't talk about the Catholic side of the track; you can interview somebody else on that. But if you interview any critical Catholic scholar, he’ll tell you that they had their problems too.

Differences in Catholic and Protestant Attitudes Toward the Jews

Well, you are, of course, fully cognizant of the Catholic side as well. Would you say that there was a difference in the attitude toward Jews between Catholics and Protestants in the 1930s?

As far as the leadership is concerned, there was a fundamental difference in the approach of the German Roman Catholic and the Protestant leadership . In the Protestant leadership — including some of the people who after 1934 became leaders in the Church Struggle, like Martin Niemoeller and Bishop Otto Dibelius — a number of them had voted for Hitler. They thought at first there was going to be a national spiritual awakening, Erweckung, and so on — until they realized, eight months into the Reich, what was really involved. By contrast, from 1930 to 1933, the German Catholic hierarchy resisted with all the weapons of the Church; that is, they refused to baptize or bury or marry anybody who was in the Party leadership. It was a really tough position in terms of classical Christian stands. But then the spiritual opposition at that level had its back broken when Pacelli did a deal with Hitler in the Concordat. That really did them in. And it also did in the Center Paas well.

The Impact on German Catholics of “Mit Brennender Sorge”

Eugenio Pacelli, of course, was Pope Pius XII. The previous pope, Pius XI, had published the encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, which means “with a burning concern,” in 1937. Now, how do you see the impact of that on the attitude of Catholics toward the Nazi Party and to the "Jewish Question"

The Jews were never mentioned. It is a general encyclical speaking about the rights of ordinary people to be protected from governmental brutality and from lack of traditional decency in due process. The Nazis immediately said, “he's talking about the Communists again; they're the ones whore guilty of all these atrocities against human beings.” The encyclical was not specific. Of course, it made a few of the Nazi leaders mad, because they knew that the hints being uttered were directed against them. The instructions were that the encyclical should be read on the same Sunday morning throughout Germany. It was smuggled into Germany, so a good many people got the point. But in terms of any specific challenge to the Nazis, or confrontation, it simply isn’t there.

Apostasy

In your writings, you say the Holocaust was committed by baptized gentiles who committed apostasy. Can you explain that position and the use of that particular terminology?

Well, in the first place it is simply a question of brute fact. And the brute fact is that this crime was committed by baptized — Gaensefuessen (as the Germans would say; i.e., “in quotation marks”) Christians. But they were officially Christians. Now, of course, everybody wants to say, “Well, they weren't of us.” That would have been fine if they’d said that in 1936, or 1935. That would have been a wonderful statement then. But today it’s a cop-out. In the case of Franz Jaegerstaetter, for example — a Tyrolean peasant and faithful Christian layman who made the “mistake” of taking the teachings seriously — he was beheaded. Not only his parish priest but his bishop tried to convince him he should get into uniform and be a good soldier. So the brute fact is that this crime was done by baptized Protestants, Catholics, some Eastern Orthodox, and Uniates. Then I say “that's apostasy,” because I think that Christians cannot engage in that kind of what we now call genocidal conduct, and remain Christians — even if their pastors and superintendents and bishops don't have the moral courage to “tell it like it is.” It was an apostasy as far as basic Christian teaching is concerned. And related to that, antisemitism is often called another form of “racism.” You know, you have racism against the Blacks, you have racism against the Jews.… I don't think that's the way to state the issue at all. Antisemitism is blasphemy. As far as a believer is concerned, its blasphemy. And blasphemy is a much more serious sin than racism, although racism is not to be excused, of course.

The Role of the Universities

To turn to another issue that you have written about. You made a point that the major Nazi figures who actually committed murder, whether on the bureaucratic level or on the direct level, were very often the products of the best European universities. Could you say something on the importance of the universities in raising a generation of Nazis, and what the consequence of that would, or should have been, after the facts came to the attention of the general public?

We have three very important issues here. First, I don't think you can look at most of the members of Hitler's intimate circle as university products. There were two or three of them, but most of the inner circle were marginal people. And one of the critically important things when you have a violent populace and genocidal movement is the extent to which members of the leadership are socially and politically marginal. But of course, in the machine itself you have the offices, with, for example, the people who went through the files of the local parishes to sort out those who could be presumed to be Jewish, maybe with the help of the priest and the minister to be sure they got it right. Not all of these were university people, but they reflect the kind of organization and social structure that is a product of the modern university. And then you have the people who staffed the legal teams, and the doctors and the psychiatrists. I think it’s not too much to say that the people who actually gave the shape and the explanation or rationalization, and the organization and the supervision, were professors and Ph.D.s — not to forget the M.D.s. So then the question is, “What kind of university alumni are these?” What’s going on here? And the question for a person like me, whose whole life has been spent in either the church or the university, except for the war, is, “Are we doing any better?” Or are we also turning out technically competent barbarians in the great universities? I think that's a rather embarrassing question. To what extent, in other words, have we analyzed the role of higher education and the technically confident products of the universities and their role in the Nazi genocide of the Jews? What does that have to say to us?

The Role of Professionals

Would you include in that the other types of professionals, such as lawyers and engineers?

Oh, yes, yes. And theologians — don't forget the theologians. Theology was once known as the “Queen of the Sciences” in the university world. Some of the most scandalous cases were among the professional theologians, of course — Gerhard Kittel and Paul Althaus and others. And then there were great philosophers like Martin Heidegger — who is one of those who never even woke up after the war to what his role had been in all of this; he was apparently totally immune as far as reflective conscience was concerned. 

Would you agree or disagree that there is something specifically German about this situation, in which German universities produced people like that, whereas other universities didn't?

No, I don't agree at all that the uniqueness of the Holocaust is German. Nonsense. The universities in France and Belgium and the Netherlands, and such as they were in the Ukraine and Poland and further east, produced collaborators and the specialists who worked alongside the Germans. If the universities had been bastions of resistance, youd have a different story. But if you look for centers of resistance, except for a few heroic exceptions, like Prof. Kurt Hueber and the students of the White Rose, you're not going to find a very nice story. A colleague recently helped me understand how the elites were poisoned with the modern form of antisemitism before the people at large were, and that wasn't just at German universities, either.

The Issue of Forgiveness

Now there is a question on which the Jewish and the Christian traditions converge on the one hand, and are divided on the other hand, and that's the question of forgiveness. Recently there has been a Vatican statement on that, but it was not the first; there have been statements before, demanding forgiveness, and there was opposition to that. What is your attitude to the question of what the Christian idea of forgiveness could be, and whether it is applicable to this situation?

I think it’s presumptuous. There are only two parties who can forgive in this situation: one of them is dead, and the other is God.

But that really is the Jewish position, and there are Christians who argue against that.

No, they're not sound in their doctrine. They're forgetting who they are and where they are in history, and what their whole place is in the providence of God, using my Church language now. I have no right to claim forgiveness from a third party. If I killed your child, he — any third party — has no right to forgive me.

Changing Christian Attitudes After the Holocaust

I understand. Now, lets move to another very major issue, the development after the Holocaust of Christian attitudes toward it. Do you see any radical changes in Christian attitudes, and if so, in what churches, Protestant or Catholic? And who is not part of any such movement, if such a movement exists?

In 1948 the Synod of the Churches in Germany simply tried to go back speedily to the traditional position, and said the judgment of God could not be questioned, and urged their people to support the Judenmission — the effort to convert the Jews, such as were left. This, however, really aroused people who had some sense of shame, and there developed a number of very good, in fact, outstanding Christian teachers. There were Eberhard Bethge, for example, and Heinz Kremers, a professor at the new University in Duisburg, who worked through the Rheinland Westphalen Synod for five years, studying the Bible and teachings about the Jews. In January 1980 they released a binding statement for the whole Rheinland Church Landeskirche. It was passed 8 to 1 in the Synod. In it they confessed Christian co-responsibility for the Holocaust, and confessed the sin of antisemitism as something which had been a stain for a long time, and called upon all the theological faculties in the big Landeskirche — the wealthiest Protestant Church in Germany at that time — to have at least one chair occupied by a Jewish scholar, teaching Jewish history, philosophy, whatever. And they did the thing which most of the judicatories of the churches still haven't been able to do: they affirmed that the survival of the Jewish people was in the providence of God, and called on Christians to affirm the State of Israel. They didn't say the “Holy Land” or some other vague notion: they said specifically “the State of Israel.” And they said they were called to this position first of all, by the terrible tragedy, but also by the willingness of Jews to engage in dialogue with them. Its the best statement you will find anyplace in Christendom as yet — meaning the whole Christian world.

There are a number of churches in fairly recent times that have awakened to the fact that something happened, and they have issued statements condemning antisemitism — by this, they mean people who smash synagogue windows and spray graffiti on Jewish houses or something. The official bodies mostly don't know or understand the extent to which this overt, gutter type of antisemitism really is grounded in cultural and theological positions that have obtained for centuries in Christendom.

Now the work of reforming and reconstructing and changing Christian preaching and teaching is going on. We have made some progress in the last twenty-eight years in the United States. We have some younger theologians and professors here and there in our theological faculties, Catholic as well as Protestant, who have come over the top and are on this side of the mountain, so to speak — but not the official church bodies. They still think antisemitism is indecent, which is from my point of view a rather mild way of dealing with it. Just like this recent statement from the Vatican referring to the Holocaust [“We Remember”]: It is always, “ they did something,” “ people did something.” Its never real repentance, which is “ we did something.” Again, its this third person business, which is essentially dishonest, in my point of view. I call it repenting in a passive voice. Nevertheless, it is a sign of awakening unease, at least, in the shadow of Auschwitz.

You are referring basically to two countries — Germany and the United States. Would you say that in both countries there are also unrepentant voices that do not accept any kind of change in the attitudes of Christians, whether they be theological or pragmatic?

I always refer to Israel, America, and Germany, because for years I have said you can test any problem of the Holocaust, any question, in that triangle. But of course the Dutch and the British and others are involved. But those [Israel, America, and Germany] are the areas that I know best and can speak about. And I think that the work that has to be done is just beginning as far as the churches are concerned. If you go out into the rural and small town churches in my denomination (Methodist) in the United States the secondlargest Protestant church body, you'll find the people very much opposed to antisemitism, by which they mean a vulgar sort of “lumpenleit” activity. They're very open to Jewish history, concern and teaching, in the hymns and all the rest of it. And they are also totally unaware that there’s a “Grand Canyon” between the historical situation of the church before 1933–1945, and where it is today. Most of the sermons, and practically all the Sunday school literature, could be just as well carry the date 1898 as 1998. I can name pastors who have “crossed the mountain range,” and some professors, but as far as the bishops of my church (I know half of them; I knew them when they were in the student youth movement of the church, to which I gave a good part of my early years) — they're innocent [of the true implications of antisemitism]. Oh, to be sure, they're nice people: they're against “racism .”

You are referring to the liberal churches.

Yes, the so-called “mainline churches.” Now if you take the other tack, you can look at the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest Protestant denomination in America, and where I have many friends because I wrote a great deal on Religious Liberty, and the Baptists are historically good on that issue, at least. They (the SBC) still take the traditional line, namely that the Jews missed the turn in the road, way back then, when they didn't follow Jesus. The Jews suffer, they wander, the judgment is on them, and the only solution is conversion. And they finance conversionist activities, which I think cannot under any circumstances be excused today. I'm not talking about arbitrary dates like 1648 (Treaty of Westphalia) or 1815 (Congress of Vienna). I'm talking about where we are in the historical process. One reason why I was very happy to know Johann Pilon of Nes Amim [a Christian moshav in northern Israel] was that he was a Dutchman who very early said we no longer have a right to missionize. Rather, he taught, we Christians have to build a community in Israel to help build up the land, and prove that Christians can be good neighbors. And that's the sort of things I think Christians ought to be doing in this whole area. The need for a basic orientation should be clear enough already, with basic reworking of Sunday School materials and preaching materials that are sent out. Also, most important, teaching in the seminaries, in the schools of theology needs to change. At my seminary, Union, and my doctoral university, Yale, there is not in either one of them a single person who really is dealing with this issue. Its a scandal, to this alumnus, at least.

Addressing Anti-Judaism in the New Testament

What are your ideas about how Christianity can deal with the passages in the New Testament — which is after all the defining literature for Christianity — that appear to be anti-Jewish, and which really create a tremendous abyss between Christianity and religious Judaism. How would you deal with that literature, or with those statements, or with those teachings today?

The Israeli scholar, Malcolm Lowe made a very important study of the “koine” — the language of the Greek New Testament. In those passages which get translated in Luthers [German] Bible as die Juden, or in, say, the King James version (the most used English translation) “the Jews cried out,” “the Jews said, let his blood be on us,” and so forth, the actual [Greek] word was hoi Iudaioi, which is “the Judeans.” And if you take the various political and religious parties, of which there were four or five important ones from a Christian point of view at the time of Jesus (and there were probably fifty others that we don't even know about, in that boiling pot under brutal Roman occupation), you have the “Galilean” party, which is what they usually called the Christians — like the “Texans”, when LBJ was president: the White House was “the Texans.” You had the Pharisees; you had the Sadducees; you had the Qumran people; you had a whole lot of them. And the “Judeans” were the Temple party, and there was great hostility between the Galileans and the “Judeans”. The New Testament just reflects the inter-party strife.

By time of the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., the Christian Imperial structure enacted prejudicial legal actions against the Jews. Jews, for example, were not allowed to celebrate their holidays if they were at the same time as those of the Christians; Jews could only celebrate when Christians had finished their holidays. And this is the time when Sunday came to replace the Sabbath for most of the congregations — and all that, officially, by law. And then the theological antisemitism was built into Christian apologetic, to the degree that [it was said that] God was through with the Jews. The Jews produced Jesus of Nazareth; but the Church is now the “new Israel.” The New Covenant supersedes the Old Covenant. With all this theological triumphalism, a New Testament phrase like “the Judeans” — or you could even say “the mob cried out” — begins to be expressed as “the Jews did this,” “the Jews did this,” “the Jews said this.” And that's not what the text actually says, but it reflects the way in which a growing body of prejudice and hostility gets written into even the translations by the churches.

The Reactions of the Non-German Churches to the Holocaust during the War

Let us go back for a moment to the period of the Holocaust itself. Would you have any thoughts on the way the churches in the free world, or in the neutral world, reacted to what became known, as time progressed, in 1942, 1943, or 1944, about what was happening in Europe to the Jews?

There’s now quite a bit of published material. I guess the most widely circulated is the book by Robert Ross, So It Was True, which shows that even the newspapers were carrying these stories — usually on a back page someplace — so it can't be said that it was unknown. But it was not in the consciousness of the Church people, nor in the American people as a whole. It was just another illustration of Nazi barbarism, against which we were heavily engaged [during the war] and there wasn't any perception on the part of church people that this had a peculiar significance. There were a few exceptions. My mentor —and friend as long as he lived — Reinhold Niebuhr was the only significant voice in American Christianity, including Catholics as well as Protestants, who wrote editorials and who preached and said again and again that the assault on the Jews was a very direct and serious challenge to Christian faith as such, not just another example of “inhumanity.” But he was not heard on this in his generation. I can name you some of his younger students and younger theologians, who heard what he was saying. Most of them have worked with me and my colleagues, and in recent years have tried to get the churches to catch up with history.

Christianity’s Crisis of Credibility

Would you then say that what you call the “crisis of credibility” of Christianity refers to the idea that unless Christianity reforms itself, it is not credible as a faith for the people who believe in it, or would you put it in a different form?

I would agree with that; I’ve said it many times. I don't believe that Christian faith can be articulated in terms of propositions, or abstractions, or general statements, or formulae. I think intellectual discipline is important, so I'm not against Theology as such. The Black folks say “do you walk the talk”? That's the question. That's the significance of the teaching of the way of life, which has something to do with the way you think, of course. But it is by no means the basic test. It was not for Jesus, and it certainly ought not to be for Christians. The question is, “Are there actions that make for credibility?” So even if the churches should get their doctrine straightened out, that wouldn't be anything unless they begin to “bear fruits worthy of repentance,” as the Scriptures say, and to act in relationship to the Jewish people in a way that makes credible what they would, I hope, someday come to say. At the present time, because cultural antisemitism — the instinctive, the unexamined — has its foundation in theological antisemitism, is so all-pervasive, from the most fundamentalist Christian clear through to the Unitarians, anything that the State of Israel does, for example, which in a normal country would be regarded as regrettable, but still happens, is immediately zeroed in on as a special sign of Jewish perversity. I can show you church papers where everything that happens when a house is blown up because young men in the family were terrorists, or whatever it is, becomes a big story, yet they don't talk about the bombing of the Mahane Yehuda market. You know, that's not deliberate political Neo-Nazi stuff; that is the malaise of cultural antisemitism (Kulturantisemitismus).

Christian Attitudes Toward Other Genocides

In that case, how would you differentiate the attitudes of Christian churches to the Holocaust from the attitudes of Christian churches to other genocides that did happen, some of them to Christians, such as in the Armenian case, or the Tutsi case, who are also Christians, or other genocides that happened toward people who were neither Christians nor Jews.

At the Back of that is a very fundamental question. My thinking is concerned, you know, with the theological. I don't think you can prove this philosophically or historically at all. It is a question of how you look at things: was the Holocaust “another genocide,” or does it have a characteristic of being unprecedented, basically different in kind from what’s happened to the poor people in Tibet at the hands of the Communist dictators — with the movement of populations and the settlement of their lands so that Tibet today is more than 60 percent Chinese, all new settlers. That's genocide. But I don't see it as quite the same challenge to Christian faith as the genocide of the Jews.

Why?

I'll come back to that in a minute. I feel a certain live concern about what the dictatorship and the Moslem extremists in Khartoum are doing to those poor Christians in southern Sudan. Why are the churches pretty much oblivious to that one too? I'm not sure.

Now you ask, “why do I think that the genocide of the Jews has a peculiar and particular characteristic?” That's because I believe that in the fullness of time it will be clear that the Jewish people have had a special role in human history. That's the simplest and quickest way that I can put my belief. And that means that I affirm not only that they shouldn't be beaten up on, God forbid, but that Christians should have a special concern for the well-being of the Jewish people.

Because of the relationship with the Jews to the rise of Christianity, the personality of Jesus?

No, no, I go back to Father Abraham; I'll start with that. I believe in the essential Jewishness of Christianity. If you want to talk technically theologically, I find that the input from Greek philosophy has been to a considerable extent deleterious and negative as far as Christian life and witness is concerned. And therefore, I would affirm both practically and in teaching, the importance of the Jewish component in my own belief.

Well, thank you very much, Prof. Littell, for this talk, and we hope that your hopes will come true.

Well, we've opened up some questions, indeed a good deal of work still, but my conviction is, above all, we have to avoid premature closure. See, that Synod in 1948 wanted to go back to “the good old ways” and close the book. And now you can find other church statements where they say, “Now we can get on with the real business.” And what I want to do is to keep this thing [the memory of the Holocaust] irritating — you know, be the harpoon that the fish can't escape.

Source: The Multimedia CD ‘Eclipse Of Humanity’, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2000.