One
in Messiah Congregation
Kittle’s Nazi connection - Greek New Testament Dictionary/Lexicon of the New Testament – from Koster’s book “come out of her my people”
There is no word Yahusha in the Hebrew Bible
The son of the famous Old
Testament scholar Rudolf Kittel, he married Hanna Untermeier in 1914, but
there were no children from the union.
In May 1933 he joined the National Socialist German Workers Party.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Kittel - cite_note-cont-5 He had had no previous involvement in politics
but called the Nazi Party "a voelkisch renewal movement on a Christian, moral foundation".
In 1945, after Hitler's Third Reich capitulated
to the Allies, Kittel was
arrested by the French occupying forces, removed from office and interned at Balingen. In 1946 Kittel was released pending
his trial. He was forbidden to enter Tübingen until 1948, however. From 1946 to 1948 he was a Seelsorger (soul carer) in Beuron.
In 1948 he was allowed back into Tübingen,
but died that year before the criminal proceedings against him could be resumed
Nazi German
For the Third Reich, he produced antisemitic propaganda posing as scholarship.
A Professor of Evangelical Theology and New Testament at the University
of Tübingen, he
published studies depicting the Jewish people as the historical enemy of
Germany, Christianity, and European culture in general.
In a lecture of June 1933 Die Judenfrage (The Jewish
Question), that soon appeared in print, he spoke for the stripping of
citizenship from German Jews, their removal from medicine, law, teaching, and
journalism, and to forbid marriage or sexual relations with non-Jews - thus anticipating
by two years the Nazi government, which introduced its Nuremberg
Racial Laws and took away Jewish rights of German citizenship, in 1935.
A close friend of Walter Frank, Kittel joined Frank's Reichsinstitut für Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands, a
highly politicised organisation that claimed to
be involved in scholarship, upon its foundation in 1935. Within this institute
he was attached to the highly anti-Semitic Forschungsabteilung judenfrage.
William F. Albright wrote that, "In view of the terrible
viciousness of his attacks on Judaism and the Jews, which continues at least
until 1943, Gerhard Kittel must bear the guilt of having contributed
more, perhaps, than any other Christian theologian to the mass murder of Jews
by Nazis.
From Net
On June 1st, 1933, New Testament Professor and
Christian theologian, Dr. Gerhard Kittel delivered a speech entitled Die Judenfrage,
“The Jewish Question,” which was later published in a 78 page booklet.
In Die Judenfrage, Kittel advocated that German
Jews be demoted to “guest status” in Germany, a position which was attacked by
more right-leaning Nazi groups insisting upon forced exile or worse.
In reaching his conclusion, Kittel considered three other potential answers
to the Jewish question commonly debated at the time: extermination (which he
dismissed as impractical and, in later editions, “un-Christian”), a separate
Jewish state in the Middle East (which he declined for various logistical
reasons, such as hostilities from displaced Arabs), and assimilation (which he
argued was actually part of the problem, since mixed marriages between Jews and
Christians in Germany resulted in the spread of secular liberalism in Germany).
In May of 1945, Kittel was arrested by French authorities, imprisoned for 17 months, dismissed from
his academic position and refused his pension. In his own defense, Kittel claimed to be a
“good” Nazi, having joined the party only one month before delivering Die Judenfrage.
He insisted that he was attempting to work within Nazi
institutions to steer the discourse on racial issues away from “vulgar racism”
and provide a moral Christian stance for dealing with the Jews in Germany.
Kittel also enumerated fourteen acts of kindness towards
individual Jews in his own defense, such as dedicating one of his books to Issar Israel Kahan, his deceased Hebrew
teacher, and intervening with the Gestapo in Vienna so that Jewish Christians
in the ghetto could receive devotions. The only moral (and possibly legal)
mistake Kittel admitted was being
duped by the Nazi Party and Hitler himself, which he referred to as the “most bitter deception” of
his life.
Although Kittel’s relationship with historical Judaism and German Jews was complex, it is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that he willingly aided and abetted the Nazi
movement.
His father was a specialist in the Old Testament, and Kittel himself knew
biblical, rabbinic, and modern Hebrew, worked with Jewish scholars, and even supported the publication of
critical editions of rabbinic texts. However, after his 1933 speech, Kittel lost many admirers
and some of his scholarly peers viewed his ideological turn with skepticism and
disappointment.
In light of Die Judenfrage,
some of his earlier writings, while (incredibly) not seen as especially
anti-Semitic at the time, come into sharp relief, such as Jesus und Die Juden, published in 1926
and describing modern assimilated Jews as
“people who have lost their souls- and all that remains of them is the outward
hulls of a human being foreign to us.”
In 1943, Kittel worked with Eugene
Fischer (a Nazi scholar involved in race science) on “hooked nosed” terra cotta
figurines unearthed in Trier which he saw as evidence of Jewish racial traits.
He taught college courses on the Jewish question and recommended barring Jews from professional work and
education (e.g., in the picture to the left,
SA soldiers link hands preventing Jews from entering the University in Vienna in 1938, where Kittel would soon serve as chair).
He continued to write publicly on Talmudic justifications
for violence towards non-Jews even after 1943 when he admits to knowing about
Jews being murdered in Russia (published, for instance, in Goebbel’s Anti-judische Aktion).
Kittel wrote more articles for Walter Frank’s National Institute
for History of the New Germany (which was meant to highlight German scholarship
and was constructed by order of Hitler himself) than any other contributor
including Frank himself, and was one of the Institute’s fifteen original
members.
Kittel praised the Institute for its “service” as a “weapon in the fight against Jewry.” The 1936 opening of a special section of the Institute
(dedicated especially to the Jewish question) was attended by Rudolf Hess and
heralded by the Volkische Beobachter (the Nazi
party’s newspaper).
With such complexities in mind, scholars of religion face
important questions as to how Kittel’s scholarship should be regarded and (perhaps most crucially) whether it ought
to be used at all.
Although Kittel never supported extermination of the Jews, and never, as did other Nazi
Christian groups like the Deutsche Christen, suggested that Jesus was anything
but Jewish in blood and culture, or sought the removal of the Old Testament
from the Christian Bible, his ideological work is imbricated with Nazi politics.
Kittel, for instance, commonly referred to assimilated German Jews
as “refuse,” a poison and corruption which “eats at the marrow of a Volk.” It
is therefore worth inquiring as to the
relationship between his politics and his scholarly work.
Take, for example, Kittel’s Greek New Testament Dictionary/Lexicon
(Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, or NWNT) which includes contributions from a wide range of
scholars in Greek, Hebrew, and Biblical Studies, and the academic importance of
which transcends the war years.
The editor’s preface to the 1963/4 English translation
(written by G. W. Bromiley)
described it as “not only a reference work or a starting-point for further
research, but also as a formative contribution to theology.”
Kittel’s role as editor and contributor of the first three volumes of the NWNT may not, at first glance, appear to be problematic, but it is worth noting that the first volume was published in 1933, the same year that Kittel proposed his solution to the “Jewish Question” in Die Judenfrage.
An English translation
of the first volume was published in 1963/4 and reprinted in 1993. The English
translator, Bromiley,
in his 1963/4 preface states that the “ultimate worth” of Kittel’s NWNT ‘lies in its fundamental
orientation and its objective findings.” The 10 volume English translation was
finished in 1976.
In Kittel’s preface to the first volume, he credits the contributors for their expertise
and hard work, such as Walter Grundmann and Georg Bertram.
Grundmann joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and from 1939-1943 headed
the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German
Church Life.
Bertram presided over this same Institute in 1943 and in
1944 described the war as the “world conflict with Jewry for which all the
powers of the German soul have to be mobilized.”
Kittel’s volumes are still used in seminaries today without
any mention of the contributors’ involvement in the Nazi order.
More
from net
Gerhard Kittel joined the Nazi Party in the spring of 1933. He soon gave a public lecture on
“The Jewish Question,” which went to three editions in its published version. Kittel then became a charter
member in a Nazi think tank, Walter Frank’s “Institute for the History of the
New Germany,” and he proved to be the most prolific author in its “Research
Section on the Jewish Question.” From 1933 to 1945 Gerhard Kittel justified the Nazi persecution of Jews
with speeches, articles, and books. In all of this work he tried to show how
and why Jews represented a danger to Germany and to the Western world.
Kittel claimed that Jews in the Old Testament had been a healthy people, but
that they had degenerated over time. With the diaspora, which developed between the fifth
century BCE and the fifth century CE, Jews had become a dangerous minority
wherever they lived. Consistent with Nazi ideology, Kittel described Jews as a “mongrel race”
carelessly intermarrying with non-Jews. When they lost their “healthy tie” to
their own nation and their own soil, they become morally decadent, he claimed. Kittel even accepted the antisemitic stereotype
perpetuated by the famous forgery, The Protocol of the Elders of Zion,
arguing that sinister Jews were plotting to take over the world. As early as
his Tübingen speech in 1933, Kittel warned Christians not
to be deterred by sympathy or pity. God did not ask them to be “sentimental” or
“soft,” but to face up to the task as harshly as necessary. Even if “the whole
world screams at us of barbarism,” Kittel wrote, Germans should hold firm, for it was not anyone else’s business how
Germany regulated is “cultural affairs.”
As late as 1944, Kittel praised Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies, even though he knew at least by 1943
that large numbers of Jews were being murdered on the Eastern Front. In a
lecture at the University of Vienna, Kittel bragged that Christians had long recognized the danger of Jews and kept them
safely restrained by ghetto walls. With the Enlightenment, however, the
democratic ideal of religious tolerance released Jews from all legal restraint.
Now Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party had risen up as a bulwark alongside the
Christian church to protect Western Christendom against the Jewish menace.