By Martin Jaffee, JTNews Columnist
On May 23, Methodist minister Franklin Littell, one of the pioneers in the field of Holocaust studies, died at the age of 91. Hubert Locke, professor and dean emeritus at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, founded in 1970 with Minister Littell the Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the German Church Struggle. He is also a member of the Committee on Church Relations at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and author of Learning From History: A Black Christian’s Perspective on the Holocaust. Prof. Locke spoke with UW professor and JTNews columnist Martin Jaffee following Littell’s death on Locke’s career of studying the Catholic Church’s role in the Holocaust. The unabridged transcript of their conversation is below.
Martin Jaffee: Good morning, it’s a pleasure to have you.
The occasion of this interview is the death of professor Franklin Littell. Could you talk a little about how you came to know him and what your working relationship was?
Hubert Locke: I met professor Franklin Littell in the late 1950s. I can’t be precise about the year, but I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and I had just returned to a post on the staff on the dean of students at Wayne State, which was my alma mater, and it was a rather peculiar post in Midwestern universities. Wayne State, Ohio State, University of Minnesota, maybe a half dozen other Midwestern universities had created, after the second World War, what they called offices of religious affairs. These were university posts to which someone was appointed to serve as a sort of liaison between all the campus chaplaincies, the Newman Foundation, the Hillel Foundation, all the Protestant groups, to serve as a liaison between them and the university. I think they were probably created, Marty, originally because the university wanted to keep some distance between itself and the student foundations, the student chaplaincies. But over time these became really very exciting and creative posts for interreligious activities, what we called in those days interfaith work. Franklin had been on the staff of the office of religious affairs at the University of Michigan in the 1940s and he had the idea of getting all of the staffs for these offices together in a national association. Franklin was always very good and very creative about getting national movements going. So we called a meeting, I think it might have been in Ann Arbor, I can’t remember precisely, we called a meeting of all these staffs together in the 1950s, and that was the first occasion that I met him.
MJ: Was he already at that point in what we now call Holocaust studies?
HL: He was, but how should I describe this best? It was at that point described as an emerging interest for him. He’d published, I think right around that time, 1958 or 1959, he published a volume called the German Phoenix, and that was really the story of his work in Germany after the second World War, when he was on the staff of the U.S. High Commissioner responsible for assisting in the de-Nazification program, and he wrote about that experience, but particularly about his first encounters with the principles of what was called the Confessing Church [a protest movement by German clergy against the Nazi regime]. This was in part telling their story, the story of what the Confessing Church did as it tried to expand its position in the Nazi regime. But as I recalled that work, his discussion of the Holocaust was not that extensive. That was an emphasis really that began to emerge in his work in the 1960s.
MJ: Now when you say the Holocaust, do you mean the implications for Christian faith about the Holocaust, or the process of it?
HL: No, the implications of the Holocaust for the churches.
MJ: And so I take it, that through your association through him, you became interested in this problem. Or had it preceded your relationship with him?
HL: Actually, it was almost a confluence of two events in my life, one being the meeting of Franklin, but preceding that I had gone off to take my first theological degree at the University of Chicago. This was in 1955, and there a couple of things of course immediately overwhelmed me. One was that everything we read at Chicago in those days was written by the Germans — written by German scholars, in all the various subfields of theological studies: Biblical studies, historical studies, systematic theology. Everything was written by the Germans. And as I came to be familiar with the literature, most of the authors, most of the German authors either were still alive or had been at the peak of their careers during the Nazi era.
MJ: Martin Heidegger
HL: Exactly. I became fascinated, because I knew having grown up in Detroit during the second World War, I had some faint awareness of the destruction of European Jewry, and I became increasingly fascinated not by what these German authors were saying theologically, but the question, “Where were they when their society was coming crashing down around their ears?” That’s why I never became a decent theologian. I became more interested in their own personal biographies than what they were writing theologically. And it was that curiosity on my part, plus there was the steady parade of visiting professors during that time at Chicago, also from Germany. My major professor at Chicago was the son of Karl Barth, and was called Barth II, and a number of other luminaries came through…. Paul Tillich was in fact on the faculty there. He was still at Harvard but he would come every winter quarter to Chicago to teach. I’m trying to think of the famous pastor, French Huguenot, I’m blocking on it.
MJ: Tomorrow.
HL: Exactly. Tomorrow.
MJ. Gimme a call!
HL: Precisely. So I’m being exposed to all these actors from the period, participants in the period. Then when I meet Franklin a year or two later, he first began to shape this interest for me by suggesting that the key question to explore is what these men were doing and saying about the destruction of the European Jewish community, and that sort of launched me on my [career]
MJ: Can you summarize what you discovered about what they were thinking or doing during the Holocaust?
HL: it’s interesting that you ask that, Marty, because I have to give a paper in a couple of weeks at a meeting in Nashville, in which I’m going to reflect on my own 40 years of looking at this question. The major outlines, of course, of which we knew then and it has not changed substantively, is that the church, especially and including the Confessing Church, saw itself locked in this encounter with a totalitarian state, and that was its primary concern, how to maintain its freedom and its responsibilities to its parishioners, to its own teachings, and tradition in the midst of this state, which really wanted to stamp it out.
The church, as a collective, never took up the question of the plight of the Jews.
MJ: During those years…
HL: During those years in a substantive way. There were some relatively courageous things I think one can point to. The Confessing Church, for example, set up an office in Berlin to aid baptized Jews, and Jewish converts who had become Christians after the persecution of the Jews began. It was headed by Heinrich Gruber, a Berlin pastor. He eventually extended the aid of his office through any Jewish person that came and asked for it, and was instrumental in getting a number of Jewish children to families in Britain during the war. So you have individual stories of assistance, but the church as a whole never really confronted the Jewish question.
Now I think, for my small part, that has to be divided into two periods. One is ‘33-‘39, and then after ‘39, because as you and I well know, what we call the Holocaust, if we’re talking about the physical massacre of almost 6 million European Jews, is something that begins after 1939. And by then, most of the leadership in the Confessing Church had either been imprisoned, like Martin Niemöller, or else they’d been rounded up drafted in the army and sent off to the Eastern front, so the church was pretty powerless after 1939.
What I think one could say in the aftermath, however, was that if the church had recognized what was gong on in the period ‘33-‘39, if they had spoken up on behalf of German Jewish citizens, for example, when the rights of citizens had been stripped from them and the signs were going up in the public parks that didn’t allow Jews to sit on the park benches, if they had been more great of foresight at that period, they might have made a difference.
MJ: You’re speaking of the church as a kind of uniform voice, there is Protestantism and Catholicism. Are they the same Church or did they respond differently?
HL: They are not, and their response was different. Curiously, the Catholic Church was much more outspoken in its opposition to national socialism before Hitler came to power than the Protestants. The Protestants were rather enthusiastic about National Socialism as a political movement, because they saw it as overcoming all the liberalities of the Weimar Republic.
MJ: With all the Jews, in any case.
HL: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But the Catholics by and large were quite harsh on the Nazi movement before 1933. They were, in many dioceses, priests were instructed not to give communion to the Nazi Brownshirts who came to Mass in their uniforms. Bishops who were outspoken against all that of course just stopped summarily after 1933, when the Vatican signed a concordat with the Nazi government, and that, for all practical purposes, silenced opposition in the Catholic Church. The reverse happened in the Protestant church. They started out enthusiastic about the Nazi regime in the late ‘20s, etc., early ‘30s, but become quite disillusioned within months after Hitler comes to power — become disillusioned over any number of things, including attempts to impose and enforce in the churches what was known as the Aryan Paragraph, the same strictures that were involved in the April ‘33 civil service decree.
MJ: Let’s move onto a question that’s been on my mind. You were involved with the Holocaust for a long time. In fact, Holocaust as a term didn’t exist when you became interested in it, or it might have been used as one of many terms to describe what was happening in Europe in regard to the Jews.
HL: I think it was just coming into vogue during that period. In the period in which I first became interested, I have to say, Marty, there wasn’t a lot of interest in the Jewish community.
MJ: Still suppressed in those days. I think normally people want to say that the Eichmann trials rekindled interest, and then of course the Six Day War.
HL: I think that’s right. I think that’s right. Certainly, in the early days, when Franklin and I… I remember though, in 1970 we held the first scholars’ conference on the subject, there were some quiet mutterings in the Detroit Jewish community, what are they getting into that question for? There was still a fairly widespread opinion that this was a sad and tragic chapter in Jewish history, but one best left behind us.
MJ: It is over, obviously, the Holocaust is now… everybody knows what it is, there are Holocaust education programs, it is taught in universities. In fact, some people have said it’s a little bit too popular, and over used as a symbol. What do you think about all of this, as you look back after 40 years of involvement with this problem? How does the use of the Holocaust as a contemporary journalistic discourse, a political discourse, are there any areas that you feel uncomfortable with? Do you feel that your life’s work has improved popular knowledge of the Holocaust? Has your work been fulfilled in some way?
HL: I don’t think, obviously, we can ever get enough of it because the great fear, the great danger, I think always, is for a repeat of this experience in some form or fashion. What I tend to lament at this point — lament may be too strong a word, Marty — but what concerns me at this point is that while our knowledge of this event has increased exponentially in the 40 years that I’ve followed the field, I’m not certain that we’ve had a corresponding improvement or refinement of our capacity for analyzing its meaning. I’m struck, for example, by the extent to which we are still locked into these rather artificial categories of perpetrator/victim/bystander. That’s particularly bad, I think, at the college and high school level if you look at the course syllabi.
MJ: I’ve never seen one.
HL: Look them up on the Internet, and just about every single one of them persists in this kind of, for me, oversimplistic view of how the populace ought to be divided up in that period. And we ought to look at the people who either were active participants in it, or were the victims, or else were bystanders. That’s just far too simplistic a view of things.
I don’t think [like] [Norman] Finkelstein and others that the Holocaust has been turned into an industry by any stretch of the imagination. I do think that there are some refinements that I would have expected we would be making at our approach to Holocaust studies at this point in time which really haven’t occurred.
MJ: Do you feel, for example, when the Holocaust is applied to the abortion debate or other obviously salient situations where human life is cheapened, do you feel this is cheapening the Holocaust?
HL: I’m not sure that I would term it a cheapening of the Holocaust as again just a part of this tendency to engage in simplistic sort of soundbite frames of reference or analyses. Everything these days has become a Holocaust if it’s something of some magnitude and something that someone doesn’t like. Which is why of course in the academic community we’ve gone to the term Shoah, a term of reference, but there’s nothing to keep that from being overused in the same fashion except people can’t spell it as easily.
MJ: As we sort of move toward the end of this discussion, it’s actually quite common to have Christians involved in the study of the Holocaust now, and I think one of the intentions of Holocaust Studies is the holistic trend to study this period and this event to an agenda of common interest that many people can learn from and participate in. It’s not my impression that there are a lot of African Americans involved in Holocaust studies. I wonder how you see your own position as an African American as contributing to your interest of Holocaust studies or not — is there some connection between your existential situation as an African American and your interest in Holocaust studies?
HL: It certainly is for me. What I must say in the 40 years that we’ve held the annual scholar’s conference, in that period there has only been one other black chap who’s ever shown up at the meetings, and he is a Nigerian guy. I’ve not found any interest in the black scholarly world on the subject. There well may be some out there, but I’ve not come across it.
MJ: Do you get invitations to speak in the black Christian community about these issues?
HL: It’s an appropriate question. It’s an appropriate question. For years, the response was to me, from my own black colleagues and confreres, the rhetoric was we’ve got our own set of problems. Why are you so interested in what happened to the Jews? My response of course was because, precisely because, it could have been us, for God’s sake. And if you don’t recognize that then you’ve really got a dangerous blind spot in your social mission. The question would get caught up at various times in the larger tensions between the black and the Jewish communities that would break out over some issue or Other.
When Farrakhan would erupt and say something off the wall about the Holocaust, then the local Jewish leadership would rush to the head of the NAACP and the Urban League and they would say denounce him, denounce him. And they would say in return, “Well, nobody’s really paying any attention to him, he doesn’t have a following.”
You don’t understand the politics that we have to contend with if we find ourselves in that place. Unfortunately it became a political question and issue, Marty, in the African American community, which still has not quite, you know, surmounted. For me, as I indicated earlier, it was precisely because I felt that this is the great lesson for anyone or any ones who find themselves in the position of minority in any one society. This is the way a very modern 20th-century highly civilized society and culture decided to solve their race problem. And if we lose sight of that, you’ve just missed a major chapter in human history, friend. That always has been and still is my sort of lode star on this question, and it’s why I’ve followed it with such interest.
MJ: My final question: I take it that you get invitations to speak in the Jewish community. How are your interactions with the Jewish community over the Holocaust? Do people question your right to speak on this issue, not being Jewish,?
HL: Some of that, some of that. Someone you and I both know, a person of great prominence in the American Jewish community, who when she first met me, the first words out of her mouth were, “What are you doing here? Why are you concerned about this question?”
We’ve since become very dear friends, but that was my initial greeting. I don’t want to exaggerate that, though, because by far the greater response has been, I think, one of genuine gratitude that someone who is not Jewish is interested in the Jewish saga, interested in the Jewish experience in this regard. I don’t get as many invitations as I’d like. I still do a Yom HaShoah address usually somewhere every year. But I don’t do as much, but that’s in large part my own slowing down and trying to get out of the limelight.
… Sometimes I don’t talk about it as easily as I would like, or at least I find it easier, Marty, to write about it.