[Partisan Gunslinger]

There was a lot of Protestants in Germany, it was a desperate attempt of using Luther at his trial to get protestant sympathy to weasel out of his crimes.

[af_vet_1981]

There was a lot of Protestants in Germany, it was a desperate attempt of using Luther at his trial to get protestant sympathy to weasel out of his crimes.

Do you know what Kristallnacht was ?
Did you know the Nazis implemented it on Luther's birthday ?

The horrors of Kristallnacht were a moment of rejoicing for Bishop Martin Sasse, head of the Protestant church of Thuringia. A night that brought riots, looting, beatings and widespread destruction of synagogues and Jewish property seemed to fulfill Sasse’s hopes: the Nazi regime was finally ridding the Reich of Jews.

The strong action of the Reich against the Jews made Sasse feel he could take strong action to carry out his own project: ridding the church of Jewishness. Not only were baptized Jewish pastors, religion teachers and organists to be fired and baptized Jews excluded from church congregations; not only were pastors forbidden to minister to baptized Jews; not only was the Old Testament no longer to be presented in church to couples celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary; not only was knowledge of biblical Hebrew henceforth eliminated as a requirement for ordination; now, any traces of Jewishness in the New Testament, liturgy, music and theology of the church were to be hunted down, exposed and eradicated.

Bishop Sasse was a leading figure in the German Christian movement, an alliance of pastors, bishops, theologians and lay people, formed in 1932, who supported Hitler and sought to create a nazified, unified German Protestant church, one that was manly, free of doctrinal control and anti-Semitic. As a faction within the Protestant church of Germany, not a separate sect, the German Christian movement eventually attracted between a quarter and a third of Protestant church members. Enthusiastically pro-Nazi, the movement sought to demonstrate its support for Hitler by organizing itself after the model of the Nazi Party, placing a swastika on the altar next to the cross, giving the Nazi salute at its rallies and celebrating Hitler as sent by God.

By 1938 the German Christian movement dominated most theological faculties in the Reich, controlled most of the regional Protestant churches and had sympathizers at the national level, including in the Reich Ministry of Church Affairs and in Reich Bishop Ludwig Mueller.

Still, their anti-Semitic passions were not requited. During 1938 Germans saw increasing militarization at all levels of society and a rise of anti-Semitic propaganda. The German Christian leadership held a series of meetings to plan a Christian response to Nazi anti-Semitism.

On November 15, just days after the pogrom, Bishop Sasse distributed a pamphlet entitled Martin Luther on the Jews: Away with Them! (Martin Luther über die Juden: Weg mit Ihnen!), in which he reprinted excerpts from Luther’s notorious 1543 pamphlet, Against the Jews and Their Lies, urging the destruction of Jewish property. Kristallnacht, he claimed, was fulfilling the goals of Luther; the Nazis were acting as Christians.