Hitler and his God

Luther, the anti-Semite

Then came the Reformation with the towering personality of Martin Luther, who threw his long shadow ahead in German history. In a previous chapter we have seen him as the precursor of nationalism; here now we will have a look at his influence on the sentiment which is inseparable from nationalism, namely racism, in this case mainly manifesting as anti-Semitism. “It is true that, right at the beginning, the Jews welcomed the Reformation, because it divided their enemies”, writes Paul Johnson. “It is true also that Luther, in particular, turned to the Jews for support of his new construing of the Bible and his rejection of papal claims. In his 1523 pamphlet, On the Fact that Christ was born a Jew, he argued that there was now no reason at all why they should not embrace Christ, and foolishly looked forward to a voluntary mass conversion. When the Jews retorted that the Talmud conveyed an even better understanding of the Bible than his own, and reciprocated the invitation to convert, Luther first attacked them for their obstinacy, then in 1543 turned on them in fury. His pamphlet On the Jews and their Lies, published in Wittenberg, may be termed the first work of modern anti-Semitism, and a giant step forward on the road to the Holocaust.” 554

Luther’s anti-Semitism grew into an obsession, as did everything which he thought justified his cause, and he became “the poison spitting author of strident anti-Semitic works”, a whole series of them. He wrote for instance: “O, how the Jews love the Book Esther, which agrees so well with their bloodthirsty, revengeful, murderous greed and hope. The sun will never shine on a more bloodthirsty and revengeful people, which therefore thinks that it is the people of God and that it has to murder and strangle the heathen.” 555 Or: “Cursed goy [i.e. non-Jew] that I am, I cannot understand how the Jews manage to be so skilful, unless I think that when Judas Iscariot hanged himself, his guts burst and emptied. Perhaps the Jews sent their servants with plates of silver and pots of gold to gather up Judas’ piss with the other treasures, and then they ate and drank his offal, and thereby acquired eyes so piercing that they discovered in the Scriptures commentaries that neither Matthew nor Isaiah himself found there, not to mention the rest of the cursed goyim.” 556

“What shall we, Christians, do with this depraved, damned people of the Jews?” asked Luther. He had the answer ready: their schools and synagogues were to be burnt; their houses were to be flattened; all their prayer books and Talmuds were to be confiscated, for they were full of idolatry, lies, malediction and calumny; their rabbis should be forbidden to teach, on punishment of death; the Jews should be forbidden to walk freely in the streets; their usury should be forbidden and all their valuables in gold and silver taken from them; the young and strong Jews of both sexes should be forced to work in the sweat of their brows; they should compensate for all the money fleeced from the Germans, and be expelled from the country … 557 Several authors who mention this programme proposed by Luther remind their readers that it was exactly what Hitler, who called Luther “that powerful enemy of the Jews”, would implement – adding a point of his own which for others had remained unthinkable, at least to such an extent. “The historical connection of the Lutheran anti-Judaism with the National-Socialist anti-Semitism is clear for all to see.” 558

“Luther was a racist pure and simple”, states John Weiss, “not at all bothered that his hatred of the Jews denied the power of Christ to redeem all humanity. To him the Jew was simply not human. As the Protestant ‘German Christians’ of the Nazi movement would later claim: the blood of the Jew was beyond redemption.” 559 “A line of anti-Semitic descent from Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler is easy to draw. Both Luther and Hitler were obsessed by a demonologized universe inhabited by Jews. ‘Know, Christian’, wrote Luther, ‘that next to the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew.’ Hitler himself, in that early dialogue with Dietrich Eckart, asserted that the later, anti-Semitic Luther was the genuine one. Luther’s protective authority was invoked by the Nazis when they came to power, and his anti-Semitic writings enjoyed a revival of popularity. To be sure, the similarities of Luther’s anti-Jewish exhortations with modern racial anti-Semitism and even with Hitler’s racial policies are not merely coincidental. They all derive from a common historic tradition of Jew-hatred.” (Lucy Dawidowicz 560)

Luther, with all his talents but also with his obvious flaws, seems to have been the embodiment of the German national character. Sebastian Haffner finds that “he almost personifies the German character”, and Thomas Mann calls him “a gigantic incarnation of the German being”. There was in him the refinement, broad interest and great learning of the Renaissance; his inspired use of the written and spoken word practically created the German language anew; he had a feeling of music and liked to play within the circle of his family. There was the recognition of the use of reason, the refusal to accept what was felt to be erroneous, and the preparedness to stand up for the autonomy of reason within the individual domain. There was also the spiritual impulse, born from the soul and claiming the right of an unhampered individual development. In contradiction with all this there was in the same person coarseness, no doubt in accordance with the popular mentality of the time, but too often debasing itself to the boorish and scatological. The world of “this Germanic prophet of a Nordic religion” (Mosse) was filled more with the pestering presence of the Devil than with the consolation of the grace of God. And Luther’s few lilies of pure spirituality flowered on a compost heap of psychological conflict and desperation. The Germany which responded to the call of Adolf Hitler will suffer from similar internal contradictions, and it will be torn apart by them.