Reformation 500: Berlin exhibition highlights how Nazis exploited Martin Luther’s legacy

Martin Luther is such a towering figure in German history that it’s no surprise Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich exploited his name whenever it could.

Most visitors to events in Germany marking this year’s 500th anniversary of the Reformation, however, probably didn’t expect to find an exhibition setting out just how extensively the Nazis used Luther to justify their anti-Semitism and nationalism.

To dramatise the connection, the exhibition “Luther’s words are everywhere…” is located in the Topography of Terror, a central Berlin museum about Nazi repression methods that was built where the headquarters of the Gestapo secret police and SS paramilitary force once stood.

Kurt Hendel, professor emeritus of Reformation history at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago in the US, said the Nazis saw Luther as a hero because of his virulent 1543 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies.

“They very clearly used Luther’s writings that had all this anti-Semitism in them to support their cause,” he told RNS, noting the treatise called for Jews to be expelled from German cities, synagogues to be burned down and rabbis forbidden to preach.

“Luther is particularly tragic in this sense” since he had rejected anti-Semitism in earlier writings, Dr Hendel said. But Luther always believed Jews should be converted and he gradually lost patience when they did not embrace Christianity.

Read the article by Emily McFarlan Miller and Tom Henegan in Sight Magazine (RNS).