I first met Franklin Littell at Wayne State University in Detroit, in 1970, at one of the first conferences on the Holocaust that was held anywhere. It had the title “The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust” and was organized by Hubert G. Locke and Franklin H. Littell. Both were Protestant clergymen, and both wellknown academics (Hubert Locke is a sociologist, and was the first Afro-American Provost of the University of Washington in Seattle). The two men remained close. I was tremendously impressed with Franklin’s erudition and his great passion. Over the next decades, we became allies and friends.
Franklin Littell was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1917 into a family of Methodists. His father, too, was an academic and a clergyman. He was educated at Cornell, received his M.A. at New York’s Union Theological Seminary in 1940, and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1946, specializing in theology and Church history. The main intellectual influence on his life was that of the great Protestant theologian of German descent, Reinhold Niebuhr. He became a Methodist minister, and later taught Christian theology and Church history at various universities: among others, Emory, Chicago Theological Seminary, and then, from 1969, for many years, at Temple University in Philadelphia. In his last years, from 1998, he taught in the M.A. program at Stockton College in New Jersey, a program founded and organized by his wife, Dr. Marcia Sachs Littell.
As a theology student, engaged in organizing and teaching Protestant youth, he had a traumatic experience at age 22. In July 1939, he was persuaded by a German friend (Littell knew German) to attend a Nazi rally in Nuremberg. The orchestrated pseudo-Christian, ideological–political drama that he witnessed convinced him to fight Nazism and all it stood for, as well as any other authoritarian and anti-democratic movement, with all his strength. His expertise in theology and Church history was of great help.
During his long life, Franklin Littell published some two dozen books, most of them on various aspects of Christianity. He became a world specialist on the Anabaptists and Mennonites, and on Protestant dissent generally. He also tried to popularize his humanistic concept of Christianity in books such as The Macmillan Atlas of Christianity (1976) and its second revised and expanded edition, Historical Atlas of Christianity (2001). Some of his books, especially those related to Israel as the Holy Land, were published by Carta in Jerusalem.
His view of the Holocaust was shaped both by his pre-Holocaust opposition to the Nazi regime, and by his acute perception of what was going on in Europe before his eyes. But that perception was not just political or sociological. It was informed by a very strong ethical approach, which colored all his writings and a huge number of speeches — he was a marvelous orator — throughout his career. Influenced by Niebuhr and others, he knew about the struggle of a few Protestant theologians and clergymen in Germany against the influence of Nazi ideology. Early on, he appreciated, but also criticized, the Barmen Synod (1934) of the Protestant dissidents, who then developed into the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche). He appreciated their courage in adhering to a Protestant theology that did not accept outside political leadership interfering in theological matters, but he strongly criticized their lack of understanding of the import of the Nazis’ antisemitic policy and their failure to oppose the regime on moral and Christian grounds. He was later to criticize even the towering moral figure of the Protestant martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom he accused of starting from a knee-jerk, anti-Jewish attitude (Kulturantisemitismus), before he, much later on, became a defender of Jews, not just of Jewish converts to Protestantism. After the war, Littell became the Protestant adviser to the U.S. Army in Germany, and he spent almost ten years in this position. He therefore was intimately acquainted with the internal struggles of German Protestants and strongly criticized their 1948 synod, which did not repent, did not accept responsibility for their behavior during the Nazi period, and tried to return to an antebellum attitude of back to normalcy. He demanded a revision of their Christian beliefs, and their admission of guilt — something that happened only much later, in Rheinland-Westfalen, in a declaration of Protestant clergy there in 1980. He much appreciated his Lutheran friends who, few as they were initially, were instrumental in changing the attitude of their fellow Lutherans after a long and protracted struggle.
His study of the Holocaust led him, as a believing Christian, to write his groundbreaking book The Crucifixion of the Jews, in which he pilloried the attitude of the Christian world to the Jews in general, and their lack of empathy with the tragedy of the Jews in the Holocaust in particular. He said clearly and unequivocally that all the perpetrators of the Holocaust had been baptized, and he called all Europeans who participated in the crime “baptized heathen.” This, he said, created a crisis of credibility for the very existence of Christianity, a credibility crisis that had to be faced.
His major contributions to the discussion of the relationship between Christianity, the Jews, and the Holocaust, can be summarized by concentrating on a few of his pithy statements, most of them found in The Crucifixion of the Jews. He made it quite clear that without Christian antisemitism there would have not been the Nazi kind of racist Jew-hatred. Although Nazism differed from its predecessor in its proto-pagan type of antisemitism, it was nevertheless bound to it. Littell discussed the Church Fathers, and the original theological dispute with Judaism, as a necessary, though not the only basis of the Nazi variety. He saw Nazism as a terrorist movement from its beginnings in the early 1920s, recounting the terrorist assassinations and other forms of violence that its members engaged in before the party came to power. He also concentrated on the role of the German intellectuals, describing present-day universities as tending to produce “technologically competent barbarians,” ignoring the mission of the “universitas,” all-embracing humanism, which had been the hallmark of the great universities of the past. He called for a revision of Christian doctrine because, as he emphasized in his later work, Christianity was basically a Jewish creed, and the Greek additions to it had not always been felicitous.
Franklin Littell saw an ideal Christianity that would return to its original task of being the Servant of the People, as he put it in an interview I recorded with him in 1988 for Yad Vashem. His outlook was that of a radical democrat, although paradoxically he was a lifelong registered Republican and extremely critical of Republican administrations. He was a fighter by nature, and used his academic standing and oratorical gifts to become a public presence. He taught the first graduate seminar in Holocaust studies at Emory University in 1959, and followed the initial 1970 conference on the Holocaust and the German Church Struggle with the continuing Scholars’ Conferences until shortly before his death. During the last years of his life, he left the organization and planning of the conferences largely to Marcia Littell, his second wife of some thirty years — after the death of his first wife, Harriet Lewis Littell, in 1978. He participated in many of the major conferences on the Holocaust, including the mammoth conference in Oxford “Remembering for the Future,” and conferences in Israel and in Germany. He became an Adjunct Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then the only Christian to become a member of the International Council of Yad Vashem. Parallel to that, President Jimmy Carter nominated him as a member of the President’s Advisory Commission on the Holocaust. He was a founding Board member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and served on its content committee. He published a weekly column in The Philadelphia Inquirer, “Lest We Forget,” which reminded his many readers of their moral obligations in all fields, but especially in the fight for Christian–Jewish understanding.
In 1967, shortly after the Six Day War, he founded the organization Christians Concerned for Israel, a Christian pro-Israel advocacy group. He did not necessarily support all Israeli policies, but he was very determined to assure that Israel’s voice was heard, and that the Jewish State be recognized as a permanent and positive feature on the international horizon.
But there was more to Franklin Littell than the committed Christian humanist, Holocaust scholar, teacher, preacher, educator, and public figure. The private Franklin was a family man, a joy to be with, singing American folksongs in his beautiful high-pitched tenor voice, a great raconteur with endless and fascinating stories, and a loyal — and critical — friend. It was dangerous to arouse his ire — he could lash out at any action or word that he thought was not truthful or straightforward. In his home, with his Jewish wife, both Christian and Jewish traditions were meticulously observed. At mealtime, those around the table would hold hands while he made a Christian blessing, and then said the words of the Hebrew blessing over bread. He celebrated Passover and Easter, Christmas and Hanukkah. He sought real understanding, based on mutual respect and knowledge of each others’ traditions.
My wife and I met with him a couple of weeks before he died. We knew that in his thoughts he was struggling with himself, just as Jacob is said to have struggled with the angel. He was struggling with his God. He knew, as all of us did, that this was the end. We talked, and then the moment of parting came. As he was being wheeled out, he turned to me and said, “See you on the other side.” A truly Righteous Man.
