On 17 December 1941 , seven Protestant regional church confederations issued a statement agreeing with the policy of forcing Jews to wear the yellow badge , " since after his bitter experience Luther had already suggested preventive measures against the Jews and their expulsion from German territory . " According to Daniel Goldhagen , Bishop Martin Sasse , a leading Protestant churchman , published a compendium of Luther 's writings shortly after Kristallnacht , for which Diarmaid MacCulloch , Professor of the History of the Church in the University of Oxford argued that Luther 's writing was a " blueprint . " Sasse applauded the burning of the synagogues and the coincidence of the day , writing in the introduction , " On 10 November 1938 , on Luther 's birthday , the synagogues are burning in Germany . " The German people , he urged , ought to heed these words " of the greatest antisemite of his time , the warner of his people against the Jews . " At the heart of scholars ' debate about Luther 's influence is whether it is anachronistic to view his work as a precursor of the racial antisemitism of the Nazis . Some scholars see Luther 's influence as limited , and the Nazis ' use of his work as opportunistic . Johannes Wallmann argues that Luther 's writings against the Jews were largely ignored in the 18th and 19th centuries , and that there was no continuity between Luther 's thought and Nazi ideology . Uwe Siemon-Netto agreed , arguing that it was because the Nazis were already anti-Semites that they revived Luther 's work . Hans J. Hillerbrand agreed that to focus on Luther was to adopt an essentially ahistorical perspective of Nazi antisemitism that ignored other contributory factors in German history . Similarly , Roland Bainton , noted church historian and Luther biographer , wrote " One could wish that Luther had died before ever '' On the Jews and Their Lies '' was written . His position was entirely religious and in no respect racial . " However , Christopher J. Probst , in his book '' Demonizing the Jews : Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany '' ( 2012 ) , shows that a large number of German Protestant clergy and theologians during the Nazi Third Reich used Luther 's hostile publications towards the Jews and their Jewish religion to justify at least in part the anti-Semitic policies of the National Socialists
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Martin Luther