Posted on 10/15/2020 4:38:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
In a never-before-published letter to his family, American soldier Leon Morin reveals something that has been hidden in a dark corner of history: the Nazis, who committed the most gruesome atrocities against 6 million Jewish people, would simultaneously “receive God” on Sundays in beautiful churches built in the concentration camp Dachau.
On July 9, 1945, about six weeks after the U.S. liberation of Dachau, Leon Morin penned a 10-page letter to his family describing his observations of the “worst” concentration camp, Dachau. “… [I]t will take 12 pages like this one to just give an idea about the best organized butchery in the world,” he wrote.
“The gruesome part was how they killed those people. Either by torture by the firing squad, mutilation with starved bloodhounds of which each camp had about fifty or sixty, and by mass gas poisoning …” he lamented.
Much of the unspeakable torturous activities of the Nazis have been documented and taught. But the religious beliefs of the Nazis remain rarely discussed.
Leon Morin documented this in his letter.
“For instance nobody ever mentioned that right among those chambers of horrors stand beautiful churches where these same soldiers of the Reich used to receive God every Sunday and where those same churches are always packed up with people every day of the week. I can’t understand that and there’s nobody in the American Army who does either.”
The Nazi Germans were mostly Lutheran Protestants.
Martin Luther, the German theologist and seminal figure of the German Reformation, influenced the German hatred of their Jewish neighbors starting in the early 1500s. In 1543, Luther authored Von den Jüden und iren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies), in which he called for the burning for Jewish synagogues, prohibition of Jewish religious practice and preaching that would be punishable by death, prohibition of Jewish residence near Germans, and confiscation of Jewish property and valuables. Luther successfully had Jews expelled from Saxony.
Sound familiar?
Martin Luther’s teachings of virulent antisemitism were the primary foundation of Nazi beliefs. Hitler’s restatement of Luther’s writings on his path to power was but a regurgitation of Lutheran theology and reinforcement of hundreds of years of festering antisemitism.
Americans repeatedly comment when viewing evidence of the Holocaust, “how could this have happened?” The answer lies in history that we keep muted. The Nazi enslavement, torture, and murder of the Jewish people in their quest for genocide were but a natural progression of their long-held religious beliefs.
But why isn’t this discussed in America? Indeed, why is it that most American Lutherans, members of my family included, do not know of the antisemitic beliefs of Martin Luther? “Maybe we’re too narrow minded in America,” wondered Leon Morin. Why is it that nobody in the press ever mentioned the churches? Has our news always been “fake news” and we just now wised up to it?
Were American reporters covering up the story?
American Lutheran and Protestant churches did not hold the hateful beliefs of German Lutherans. In fact, American Lutherans are not known as prejudiced towards Jews. But maybe seeing your own religious beliefs smack in the middle of death camps gave too much pause to the reporters.
The uncomfortable history remains: members of the German Protestant clergy actively supported the Nazi regime and their detestable beliefs. It is thus understandable how the Nazi monsters who would kill children with their families just for being born Jewish would feel no conflict in “receiv[ing] God every Sunday.” At the same time, American Protestants were shielded from the beliefs of their German counterparts. That is why it is unsurprising that Leon Morin wrote about his failure to understand.
Lutheran churches throughout the world have in recent years issued statements apologizing for the Holocaust. In 1982 the Lutheran World Federation issued a consultation stating that "we Christians must purge ourselves of any hatred of the Jews and any sort of teaching of contempt for Judaism.” In 2015, the German Protestant church formally denounced Martin Luther’s antisemitic teachings while tepidly accepting blame for ideas that led to the Holocaust. “We cannot ignore this history of guilt,” the church wrote. “Luther’s view of Judaism and his invective against Jews contradict our understanding today of what it means to believe in one God who has revealed himself in Jesus, the Jew.”
As NY Governor Andrew Coumo rubs his hands together....
The Nazis also put 10,000+ priests into concentration camps.
And replace Christian holidays and rituals with pagan ones.
So another effort to condemn Christianity because man. behaved badly
Vichy-Styled Christians.
Not true. There were multiple vernacular versions of the bible before Gutenberg. They had to be guarded so people wouldn’t steal them since they were produced by hand. Even then the vast majority of the population couldn’t read.
Luther has been white-washed into Catholicism, and then Catholicism misunderstood from the lens of being opposed to that white-wash.
For instance, Catholics believe in Sola Gratia, that only through the grace of God are people saved. If you are saved by the grace of God, you will necessarily have faith AND you will necessarily take part in sacraments and works. Luther preached what he called “Sola Fide,” but what he explicitly meant is that you could be saved no matter how wicked and deplorable your acts were. This is why his doctrine was opposed by the Church.
Catholics believe that all scripture is inerrant, and no doctrine necessary for salvation lies outside of scripture. Again, most people would recognize that as what Luther taught, but what Luther REALLY taught was that any doctrine that was outside of scripture was of the anti-Christ, and that by “outside of scripture” he meant outside of his biased, angry interpretation of those books of scripture which he judged fit. It wasn’t that atoning offerings, purgatory, the veneration of saints, etc. weren’t biblical; it was that after removing 14 books of the bible, it was no longer clear what was being referred to.
You only need to look as far as today’s liberal Christianity. This is why so many Catholics are horrified to see Pope Francis trying to reconcile Catholicism to the liberal churches, instead of our faithful brethren, the Orthodox churches, and the sincerely Christian (if theologically mistaken) conservative Protestant churches.
You conveniently forget the Lutheran pastors who were also sent to concentration camps to die......because they would not follow the little dictator Hitler, or compromise their faith.
Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was murdered by Hitler’s orders...
...or Dutch Christian Corrie ten Boom who lost her father, sister and nephew to the Nazis and barely survived......because she knew what was happening and hid Jews
...and so many more.......
We have a habit of forgetting about the other 5 million.
Luther’s hateful and inexcusable screed against the Jews was never church dogma. That document was even suppressed over the years by various German governments until the Nazis took over. Probably most Germans never read the hateful document until the Nazis dug it up.
The Nazis wanted to remove all Jewish elements from the New Testament and they taught that Jesus was an ordinary man and his father was a Roman (probably germanic) soldier.
There were many Catholics in the Nazi leadership. It is true that the Nazi Party was less popular and more resisted in Catholic parts of Germany.
The Danes, mostly Lutheran, almost to a person resisted the Nazis and protected Jews.
Hitler hated all churches, Catholic, Lutheran, or whatever.
I’d say the secular and socialist German philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had more to do with NSDAP antisemitism than ancient writings of Martin Luther.
When Nietzsche wrote his infamous passage “God is dead”, he wasn’t referring to a personal accomplishment. He was referring to the extant spirit (or lack thereof) of his time.
Nobody at the higher levels of the leadership was a practicing Christian in any traditional sense. Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were raised Catholic, but were non-practicing by early adulthood. Himmler was openly neopagan as an adult. I think Goebbels mostly worshipped Hitler. Goering was raised Lutheran.
The man who tried to kill Hitler, Claus von Stauffenberg, was a Catholic. There is evidence that he was working both with British intelligence and with the Vatican.
I didn’t suggest Nazis were practicing Christians in any form. As I noted, they believed Jesus was an ordinary mortal. Some Nazis had a Catholic background, some Protestant. There was what I call a “cultural Christianity” in Germany, but that didn’t have anything in it to withstand/resist the Nazis.
"American Lutheran and Protestant churches did not hold the hateful beliefs of German Lutherans. In fact, American Lutherans are not known as prejudiced towards Jews.”
His creed was not simply “sola fide”, it was “sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura”—"we are saved solely by the grace of God, through faith in God, with the Bible as our sole spiritual authority."
Catholics, gypsies, Poles, disabled people...
RIP to all who suffered such atrocities.
Most Lutherans actually are well aware of Luther’s 1543 rant, it is one reason why Luther isn’t worshipped like a god or considered infallible like a pope but is understood to be a sinner just like the rest of us. Lutheran Christians like myself are also well aware Luther really didn’t want people to take on the name “Lutheran” - it was, after all, an insult against him used by his adversaries at the time to dissuade people from listening to what he had to say. Lutherans are also well aware that their Lord and Savior is, in fact, a Jew, and that the Virgin Mary, his mother, is of course, a Jew, and that he is of the line of David. This is biblical, and we know this by looking at scripture for confirmation of the truth as Luther taught us, rather than simply taking anyone’s word for it, including his, a Pope’s, a celebrity’s or anyone else’s word for it.
Luther [and others] were used by God to play a role in bringing the Bible to their audiences, the public, in their own respective languages... yet Luther was a human being and a sinner as prone to error as any man, and was aware of his sinful nature, so much so he described himself as a beggar before God, undeserving of mercy. He never claimed to be a divine authority and would have been horrified at the thought.
Note that Luther was famous for responding to demands that he recant his early teachings and writings [not antisemitic] with the humble but firm reply that he’d be willing to recant any part of it that his enemies, using scripture, could prove was in error. His 1543 rant against Jews couldn’t and didn’t pass the “love” test [see his sermon on love] as scriptural, therefore was not acceptable - by his own standards- and was discarded and disregarded, which is why nothing from it or remotely like it appears in church doctrine.
We are also aware that Luther was a harsh critic had rants against other theologians that were every bit as awful, even worse in some cases, though in his time period vicious satire or such harsh speech was not that unusual- the people of the time were not subject to the political correctness of our age. He, called a “drunken German monk” by the Pope, did not have an off switch for his hotheadedness or for his tongue, and relied on his friend and associate Melanchtheon and his wife to temper it.
An example of the harshness of Luther as an educator :
“In a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin, Irena Backus notes Martin Luther’s generic versatility in the composition of poetry (pp. 331-2, unfortunately not available in the preview). He was capable of satirical extremes that make many modern readers uncomfortable: for instance, a professor he fired from the University of Wittenberg (“for dedicating his first published collection of poems to the Roman Catholic Albrecht of Brandenburg,” 331) attacked him in the poem “The Battle of Monks and Whores (Monachopornomachia),” to which Luther responded with “Martin Luther’s Flux of Dysentery against the Excremental Poet Lemnius (Dysenteria Martini Lutheri in merdipoetam Lemchen),” which is actually a quite clever series of turns on the noun merda (Backus translates it as “excrement,” though it is often more uncouth than that) in the mode of Martial (indeed, Martial uses it in 3.17).”
Luther’s beloved daughter Magdalena died in Luther’s arms in September of 1542, at the age of 13 or 14, and her death had a huge effect on him, in spite of knowing she was going to the Father in Heaven. When he wrote that awful tract he was still grieving, and was ailing, a little under a year after his daughter was buried.
What most of the world does not know [and what the Nazis most certainly did not want known] is that being part of the saving of the Jewish people through preaching the Gospel about the Jewish Savior was Luther’s foremost desire. But near the end of his life, when this tract was written, it was becoming apparent that his vanity was not going to be gratified and his life’s desire was going to be unfulfilled; Jewish leaders refused even to listen, much less to debate, which he found immensely frustrating and disappointing, and likely this made him bitter.
An ailing Luther died in 1546, just 3 years after writing the rant.
He preached over 7,000 sermons and countless furious rants in his life... yet, only this one tract, long rejected by Melanchtheon his friend and by Lutherans, is the one his critics keep bringing up, why is that? Well, it is because bringing up his usual material would thwart their own less-than-admirable aims to forever separate people from their Father in Heaven.
So, here is an excerpt from one of Luther’s sermons:
“...
3. When the lawyer asked Christ, which was the great commandment in the law, the Lord said to him:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments the whole law hangeth, and the prophets.”
4. As if the Lord would say: He who possesses love to God, and love to his neighbor, has all things, and therefore fulfils the law; for the whole law and all the prophets point to these two themes, namely: how God and our neighbor are to be loved.
5. Now one may wish to ask: How can you harmonize this statement, that all things are to be comprehended in these two commandments, since there was given to the Jews circumcision and many other commandments? To answer this, let us see in the first place how Christ explains the law, namely, that it must be kept with the heart. In other words, the law must be spiritually comprehended; for he who does not lay hold of the law with the heart and with the Spirit, will certainly not fulfil it. Therefore the Lord here gives to the lawyer the ground and real substance of the law, and says that these are the greatest commandments, to love God with the heart and our neighbor as ourselves.
From this it follows that he, who is not circumcised, who does not fast nor pray, is not doing it from the heart; even though he may perform external acts, he nevertheless does nothing before God, for God looketh on the heart, and not on our acts, I Sam. 16, 7. It will not profit a man at all, no matter what work he may perform, if his heart is not in it.
6. From this arises another question: Since works are of no profit to a man, why then did God give so many commandments to the Jews? To this I answer, these commandments were given to the end that we might become conscious whether we really love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and in addition our neighbor as ourselves; for St. Paul says in Rom. 7, 7 (3, 20), that the law is nothing but a consciousness and a revelation of sin. What would I know of sin, if there were no law to reveal it to me?
Here now is the law that saith: Thou shalt love God with thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself. This we fulfil if we do all that the law requires; but we are not doing it. Hence he shows us where we are lacking, and that, while we ought really to do something, we are doing nothing.
7. That the Jews had to practice circumcision was indeed a foolish ceremony, yea, a command offensive to reason, even though it were given by God still today. What service was it to God, to burden his people with this grievous commandment? What good was it to him, or what service to a neighbor? Yea, and it did not profit the Jew, who was circumcised. Why then did God give the command? In order that this commandment and law might show them whether they really loved God with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their mind, and whether they did it willingly or not. For if there were a devout heart, it would say: I verily do not know why God gave me circumcision, inasmuch as it does not profit any one, neither God, nor me, nor my neighbor; but since it is well pleasing to God, I will nevertheless do it, even though it be considered a trifling and despised act. Hence, circumcision was an exercise of the commandment, Thou shalt love God with all thy heart.
8. It was also a foolish command God gave to Abraham, to slay his son, Gen. 22, 2. For if reason had been the judge in this, both it and all mankind would have come to no other conclusion than this: It is an unfriendly and hostile command, how can it be from God, since God himself said to Abraham that he would multiply his seed through this son, and it would become as innumerable as the stars of the firmament and as the sand by the sea. Therefore it was a foolish commandment, a grievous, hard and unbearable commandment. But what did Abraham do? He closes his senses, takes his reason captive, and obeys the voice of God, goes, and does as God commanded him.
By this he proved that he obeyed from the heart; otherwise, even if he had put his son to death a hundred times, God would not have cared for it; but God was pleased that the deed came from his heart and was done in true love to God; yea, it came from a heart that must have thought: Even if my son dies, God is almighty and faithful, he will keep his word, he will find ways and means beyond that which I am able to devise; only obey, there is no danger. Had he not had this boldness and this faith, how could this father have killed his only and well beloved son?
9. The Jews later wanted to follow this example and, like Abraham, offered their children unto God, hoping thereby to perform a service well-pleasing to God; but it was far from it. These poor people came to the conclusion: The service of Abraham was pleasing to God, therefore will ours also be, and consequently they killed one child after another. 0, how many healthy, noble and beautiful children perished! The prophets protested against this service, they preached, warned and wrote against it, telling the people that it was deception, but all was in vain. Yea, many a prophet lost his life because of this, as the history in the books of the kings shows.
10. But why was this service of the Jews displeasing to God? For the reason that it did not come from their heart, and was not done out of love to God; but they simply looked upon the service, and did it without the command and word of God; but God saith: My dear sirs, I was not concerned about the fact that Abraham offered up his son, but that he proved by this act that he loved me with his whole heart. There must be first love in the heart, then follows the service that will be pleasing to God; for all the works of the law tend to the end thereby to prove our love to God, which is in the heart; which love the law requires, and will have above everything else.
11. We are also to notice here that all the works of the law are not commanded merely for the purpose that we simply just perform them; no, no; for if God had given even more commandments, he would not want us to keep them to the injury and destruction of love. Yea, if these commandments oppose the love of our neighbor, he wants us to renounce and annul them. Take the example of this, I recently gave you: Moses brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, leading them for forty years through the wilderness, and not one of them was circumcised, although it was commanded them. Where was their obedience to the commandment? Was God not angry with them because they did not obey his commandment? No, there was a higher commandment in force at that time, namely, that they were to obey God who commanded them to come out of Egypt in haste to the promised land. By their marching they daily obeyed God, and God accepted it as obedience; otherwise he would have been angry in that they did not keep his commandments. Both the need and the love were at hand, which set aside all commandments, for it would have been unbearable to endure the pain of circumcision and at the same time the burden of the journey. Therefore love took the place of the commandment of circumcision, and thus should all commandments be kept in love, or not at all.
12. In like manner Christ excused his disciples, as is recorded in Matthew 12, 3-4, when the Jews accused them of transgressing the law, of doing on the Sabbath that which was not lawful to do on the Sabbath day, when they plucked the ears of corn and ate them. Then the Lord gave them to understand that they were doing no wrong, as if to say: Here is no Sabbath; for the body needs food, necessity demands it; we must eat, even though it be on the Sabbath. Therefore the Lord cited the example of David, which he laid before the Jews, and said, “Have ye not read what David did; he and ‘they that were with him, when he was an hungered, how he went into the house of God and ate the shew bread which was not lawful to eat, nor for those that were with him, excepting for the priests?” 1 Samuel 21, 3f. Then David ate the bread, though he was not a priest, because hunger pressed him to do it. Neither did Ahimelech the priest violate the law in giving the bread to David, for love was present and urged him to give it. Thus even the whole law would have had to serve David in his need.
13. Therefore, when the law impels one against love, it ceases and should no longer be a law; but where no obstacle is in the way, the keeping of the law is a proof of love, which lies hidden in the heart. Therefore ye have need of the law, that love may be manifested; but if it cannot be kept without injury to our neighbor, God wants us to suspend and ignore the law.
14. Thus you are to regulate your life and conduct. There are in our day many customs, many orders and ceremonies, by which we falsely think to merit heaven; and yet there is only this one principle, namely: the love to our neighbor, that includes in it all good works. I will give you an example we recently heard. Here is a priest or monk, who is to read his prayers or the rules of his order, or to hold mass, or say penance. At this moment there comes a poor man or woman to him who has need of his help and counsel. What shall this priest or monk do? Shall he perform his service, or shall he assist the poor man? He should therefore act prudently and think: True, I am required to read my prayers, hold mass, or say penance; but now on the other hand, a poor man is here; he needs my help and I should come to his rescue. God commanded me to do this; but the others man devised and instituted. I will let the mandates of men go, and will serve my neighbor according to God’s commandment....”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.