c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In an extraordinary and eerie coincidence, four significant events that still impact us today took place in Germany on either Nov. 9 or 10.

Nov. 10 marks the 525th birthday of Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer. Early in his career, he wrote in positive terms about the Jewish people, calling them “blood relatives, cousins, and brothers of our Lord.” Luther described his fellow Christians as “aliens and in-laws” of Jesus.

But three years before his death in 1546, Luther _ embittered that Jews did not convert to Christianity as he had hoped _ wrote “On the Jews and Their Lies” in which he presented an eight-point program to rid Germany of its Jewish population.

Luther advocated the burning of synagogues, Jewish homes and schools. He wanted to forbid rabbis from teaching Judaism, and, not surprisingly, he demanded that Jews either be expelled from the country or killed.

The U.S. Lutheran scholar Franklin Sherman wrote that Luther’s writings are “full of rage, and indeed, hatred … and cannot be distanced completely from modern anti-Semitism.” The German philosopher-psychiatrist Karl Jaspers said of Luther’s vicious anti-Jewish diatribe: “There you already have the whole Nazi program.”

Thankfully, in 1994, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America publicly repudiated Luther’s anti-Jewish writings, as did the Lutheran Church in Bavaria in 1998. The ELCA declared that Lutherans have “a special burden in this regard because of certain elements in the legacy of Martin Luther, and the catastrophes _ including the Holocaust of the 20th century _ suffered by Jews in places where the Lutheran churches were strongly represented.”

On Nov. 9, 1923, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi followers attempted to overthrow the post-World War I government in Munich with the aim of then “marching on to Berlin” to establish his dictatorship over all Germany. Even though the coup was unsuccessful, Hitler ordained that Nov. 9 be observed as a Nazi “martyrs’ holy day.”

On Nov. 9-10, 1938, the Nazi gangster regime did, in fact, burn synagogues in Germany and Austria, 267 of them, and sent 30,000 Jewish men to concentration camps. More than 7,000 Jewish-owned stores and houses were destroyed and nearly 100 Jews were murdered _ all in one night.

The American and European press coverage of “Kristallnacht” (the night of broken glass) was extensive, but the official reactions were tepid. President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed his shock and disapproval and recalled the U.S. ambassador to Berlin for “consultations.” Nothing more.

There were public outcries from some Protestant leaders, several Catholic bishops and politicians. But no economic or political sanctions were applied to Nazi Germany, diplomatic relations were not broken, and the restrictive American immigration laws remained in place that doomed many European Jews to death during the Holocaust.

Immediately after Kristallnacht, there was a bipartisan effort in the U.S. Congress to open our gates to 20,000 refugee Jewish children. The effort died in committee. FDR’s cousin, Laura Delano Houghteling, the wife of the U.S. immigration commissioner, said: “20,000 charming children will all too soon grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”

Five days after Kristallnacht, Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, the German ambassador in Washington, cabled his superiors in Berlin to say the anti-Nazi “hurricane is raging in the U.S. (but) it will calm down in the near future.”

Sadly, he was correct.

The weak and muted Western reaction to Kristallnacht meant Germany could intensify its “War Against the Jews” that culminated in a national policy of mass murder. The historian Ian Kershaw had it right: “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved by indifference.”

Finally, in the autumn of 1989, East German leader Gunter Schabowski recognized that the end of Communism had arrived, and he said individuals could “immediately and without delay travel to the West.” The hated Berlin Wall quickly fell as thousands of East Germans rushed to freedom.

On which day did that happen? You already know the answer: Nov. 9.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

KRE/PH END RUDIN750 words

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