“First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.” If you had to take one guess as to who said this quote directed towards the Jews, my guess is most of you would say Adolf Hitler. But this quote actually comes from a man who inspired most of the German hate towards the Jews, a man who was and still is regarded as one of the great reformists of the church. A man named Martin Luther.
Martin Luther’s hate towards the Jews is present, not only in Nazi propaganda, but in Nazi actions. Luther, a German hero, has a handful of quotes about burning down synagogues and forcing the Jews to move away. 400 years later, his wish gets fulfilled by the Nazi party coming to power. Almost instantly Nazi propaganda started flooding the streets, and within a few years, Jewish synagogues got burnt down (Kristallnacht) and Jews started being excluded from society and later sent to concentration camps to be killed by the masses.
Some try to argue and say that it is only all coincidence and that anti-Semitic behavior has been around long before Luther. This is true, but you have to look at a man named Julius Streicher. Streicher was the publisher of a Nazi magazine “Der Sturmer” and was executed after being convicted at the Nuremberg trials. He made these remarks during his trial “Dr. Martin Luther would very probably sit in my place in the defendants' dock today, if this book had been taken into consideration by the Prosecution. In this book The Jews and Their Lies, Dr. Martin Luther writes that the Jews are a serpent's brood and one should burn down their synagogues and destroy them...”
Martin Luther did lots of great things to help reform the church and get it on the right path, but he had a lot of wrong ideas that can’t be over looked. Although Martin Luther didn’t create the hate towards the Jews, he defiantly poured gas on the fire. It is clear throughout testaments from high ranking Nazis and the manner they conducted their business that they were inspired by Luther’s book. For people to still say this it is all just a coincidence, stop living in denial.