LUTHER AND HITLER
SIR,—Mr. Wiener has misread my letter, but I must reply in a sentence to his four questions.
(1) I should agree that Dr. Niemoller, with very many others of the Evangelical Church, welcomed the Nazi revolution with very high hopes. (2) The Harvest Festival sermon from which Mr. Wiener quotes does not even remotely bear out Mr. Wiener's assertion that Dr. Niemoller thanked Hitler for his concentration camps and other persecutions. His third quotation might well be accurate, but, if so, it means something quite different from what Mr. Wiener supposes. Finally, it may be true that Dr. Niemoller offered his services as a naval officer in Sep- tember, 1939, but I cannot assert it as an established fact. Mr. Wiener maintains that "no section of the German Confessional Church ever opposed Hitler." If he had said that Church opposition was limited to the Nazi philosophy, to ethical questions, and to political inter- ference with the freedom of the Church's witness, he would have been substantially accurate. I have not derived my information from "a hand- ful of refugee-pastors in this country who propagate the myth of Church opposition inside Germany," nor have I really needed • the assistance of "a great many Anglican Churchmen and scholars" to make clear to me the interesting and not unimportant connection or relation between Luther and Hitler. I know the lop-sided picture of Luther as the war- monger, the anti-Semite, the German nationalist which has been sponsored by Nazi propaganda. I can well believe that Mr. Wiener has supported this case with a stack of evidence. A balanced and historical account of Luther must take these facts into account. It is, however, gravely dis- turbing td the Dean of St. Paul's many admirers that he should have apparently accepted the Nazi picture of Luther, without criticism and without further enquiry, as just and true.—Yours, &c., NATHANIEL MICKLEM.
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