In Memoriam
Franklin Littell was a Methodist minister who dedicated his life to Holocaust research after spending nearly 10 years in postwar Germany as chief Protestant religious adviser in the U.S. high command. An undisputed groundbreaker in his field, he was the first American scholar to offer courses on Holocaust and genocide studies, beginning with a graduate seminar he set up in 1959 at Emory University in Atlanta. In 1970, with Dr. Hubert Locke, he set up annual scholarly conferences on the Holocaust, a forum that continues through to the present time.
In 1976 Dr. Littell established at Temple University the nation's first doctoral program on Holocaust studies and founded a national institute on the Holocaust. In 1998, he and his wife, Dr. Marcia Sachs-Littell, established the first interdisciplinary master’s degree program in Holocaust studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Franklin Littell authored more than two dozen books and 1,000 articles (he was apparently working most recently on his memoirs). The most well-known of his writings is the 1975 book, The Crucifixion of the Jews, which traces a direct connection between any church doctrine that teaches hatred of Jews and Judaism and the development of a worldview that allowed the Holocaust to happen. Dr. Littell’s challenge to the church to produce an in depth theological and ethical response to the Holocaust became a major thrust of his work for years to come. Pressing this point bore fruit. According to Holocaust scholar, John K. Roth, emeritus professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, Dr. Littell “helped to turn the tide on the awareness of Christian complicity, shortcoming, indifference in the face of what was happening to Jews under Hitler.”
Dr. Littell impacted generations of future scholars and activists not only by the content of his writings and the higher education programs he established, but by their role in opening up development of Holocaust studies as a widely accepted field of scholarship. In the first decade or so following the end of World War II, there was little public discussion or study of the Holocaust. By the 1960s, however, the Eichmann trial and publication of books like Elie Wiesel’s “Night” and other survivor testimonies began to draw attention to the subject. “When Franklin Littell started his work,” said Dr. Roth, “it was almost the case that there was no such thing as Holocaust studies as a field.” That is no longer the case. Hundreds of colleges offer courses and programs on the Holocaust, and many public schools are required to teach about it.
In an essay eulogizing Dr. Littell, author JoAnn Magnuson, active for many years in Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust studies expressed her gratitude for his “pioneering work in these fields.” She continued to explain. “In the 1950s, when I first began looking for information on the Holocaust, there was very little to be found. Even in the mid-1970s when I first discovered The Crucifixion of the Jews, it was quite possible for a serious student to have read most of the literature available on these topics. Today the bookshelves overflow and many colleges offer courses in Holocaust studies.”
The genesis of Franklin Littell’s passion for daring the world to respond to the Holocaust can be found in a defining moment in his life as a young man. It was 1939, and a 22-year-old Littell was traveling with other young co-religionists to a Christian youth conference in Amsterdam. They happen to pass through Nuremberg, Germany just in time to attend the great Nazi rally held there. Littell and his friends were horrified at the open racism and religious glorification of Aryans displayed there. When Adolf Hitler took the stage bathed with a god-like halo of lights and greeted with waves of adulation, they were so repulsed that they stood up and left. This reaction would come to typify Franklin Littell. He didn’t just write and teach – he acted. "He believed you could not hide behind the ivory tower of academia or the sanctity of the church," said Marcia Littell, currently professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Richard Stockton College. "You must be actively involved in all that you do."
A former student said of him, “He didn’t just have a front row seat to history; he was a part of history, and he brought that to every seminar. “
That inclination to stand up and act on his beliefs was also expressed in Dr. Littell’s enthusiastic support for the State of Israel, in part because he believed that its very existence refuted theologies that foresaw or favored the passing away of the Jewish people. He rejected any theology which teaches that the church has replaced the Jewish people in God’s plan, and wrote against what he called “traditional Christian myth about their [the Jews’] end in the historic process."
Shortly following the Six-Day War in 1967, Dr. Littell founded an organization called Christians Concerned for Israel, dedicated to promoting pro-Israel views in Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. In 1978, along with Sister Rose Thering and Rev. David A. Lewis, Littell started the National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel (NCLCI), which lobbied against arms sales to Arab nations and campaigned against the United Nations “Zionism=racism” resolution, adopted in 1975 and since repealed.
Dr. Littell did not shy away from warning a too often indifferent Christian church on the dangers of theology that could lead to hatred of the Jews. "A rise of Antisemitism is often the first seismographic reading on a serious shifting and shearing along the fault lines of bedrock Christianity,” he wrote. “The fundamental fault line...is a line of false teaching about the Jewish people."
In a world in which the public discourse has grown increasingly violent and unmannered, Franklin Littell tried to caution the world about the result of such a trend. On the occasion of the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, Dr. Littell wrote of “the Language of Assault, which prepares the way and justifies physical violence. It can never be justified under a legitimate government.” This was a point he had already made with force and eloquence in his 1965 tome, Wild Tongues: A Handbook of Social Pathology. Now, thirty years later he once again warned that “words have consequences in action. And the immediate result of a crescendo of irresponsible verbal assault can be marked in the burial of a hero of war and of peace a few weeks ago in Jerusalem.”
Franklin Littell was an influential thinker about early warnings of totalitarianism and of genocide, as was reviewed and evidenced in his contribution on early warnings in The Encyclopedia of Genocide, published in 1991.
Dr. Franklin Littell will be greatly missed by the many individuals who knew him, were taught by him, and were affected by his writings. The following testimonials describe several aspects of Franklin Littel’s contributions:
Dr. Hubert Locke, Dr. Littell’s longtime friend and colleague, co-founder of the Annual Scholar’s Conference on the Holocaust, and Professor Emeritus, University of Washington announced Dr. Littell’s death as follows:
"And the king said to his servants, do you not know that . . .a great man has fallen this day in Israel?" II Samuel 3:38
With profound sorrow, we wish to inform you of the death on Saturday, May 22nd, of Dr. Franklin H. Littell, Professor Emeritus of Temple University and Founder of the Annual Scholars' Conference. Dr. Littell served on the staff of the U.S. High Commissioner in Germany after World War II, taught at Emory and Southern Methodist Universities, the Chicago Theological Seminary, and was President of Iowa Wesleyan University.
His death marks the passing of a generation of outstanding Christian scholars who were the first to term the Holocaust a "crisis of faith" for the Christian world. A memorial is tentatively planned for October at the 39th Annual Scholars' Conference. "May he rest in peace and may his memory be a blessing."
Dr. Abraham J. Peck, Director, Academic Council for Religion, Genocide and Human Rights:
Baruch Dayan Emet---Blessed is the true Judge. These are the words that Jews repeat upon hearing the sad news of someone's death. In that blessing, God is honored as the true and righteous judge. The blessing affirms that God, whose wisdom we praise when the Creator of heaven and earth provides acts of goodness, is the very same Creator who decides the time of death.
With Franklin's passing, those words are more than appropriate. Allowing us to be a part of Franklin's life, to observe what surely must have been an act of the Divine in empowering him with the voice of the Prophets--he with the flowing white mane, the anger at the world as a bystander, the charge against the teaching of Christian contempt towards Judaism--was a privilege that could have only come from God. Hearing of his death tells us that his earthly work in repairing the world-- a task that he may not have finished, but that he undertook with a conviction and a purpose few have ever possessed--is no more.
I wrote the following words on the occasion of Frank's 80th birthday:
I have often wondered what if one, a hundred or a thousand Franklin Littells could have stood on the pulpits of churches in Europe and America in the 19th and 20 centuries. Would we have then had an end to the teaching of contempt?
Would Jewish identity and memory not have to be predicated to such a degree on the politics of victimization? Would my 14 murdered uncles and aunts, and their spouses and children, who died in the Holocaust, been a part of something only others know as an extended family?
But I quickly interrupt my daydream to bring myself back to reality. You are the only Franklin Littell and if I have to dream it is that your ministry will help to secure the future of my Jewish children and grandchildren.
Rest in peace, dear Frank, you have caused a revolution, you have helped to change the mind and path of Christianity, you have changed the world
Dr. Israel Charny, writing to Dr. Littell’s widow, Marcie:
In June 1982 Franklin Littell agreed to be the Keynote Speaker for our beleaguered First International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in Tel Aviv. Elie Wiesel had resigned as President of the Conference. What's his name President of American Jewish Congress had agreed to keynote and pulled out at the last moment. Yad Vashem, where we were supposed to open the Congress canceled and literally closed the gates without a proper announcement to people arriving from overseas --we moved the Congress to the Hilton in Tel Aviv.
Franklin didn't hesitate. When he had convictions he acted on their behalf and didn't fold to totalitarian pressures. He gave a pre-Congress workshop: "Teaching the Holocaust and Genocide." He delivered the dramatic Opening Plenary: "The Holocaust as a Watershed Historical Event." He chaired a session -- so did you another session, Marcie. He ran a several-session "Track Session: Teaching about Genocide to One's Own People and to Other Peoples" (in which you too presented, Marcie). He chaired another Plenary. He chaired another session, "The Holocaust and God" (who else would confront the latter, I add?). And more and more up to and including participation in the Conference Summation Panel.
His contribution was enormous and unforgettable.
Personally, in addition to the Congress, and especially in my earlier more youthful years, I gained so very much from Franklin of basic ideas, inspiration, and encouragement. It was always a pleasure to see him and speak with him. He was as free of posturing and academic manipulativeness as they come-- a mensch.
Marcie, please accept my personal condolences, as I too join a whole world of Holocaust and genocide scholars in honoring and loving Franklin.
Selected Writing by Franklin H. Littell
Littell, Franklin H. (1969). Wild Tongues: A Handbook of Social Pathology. New York: Macmillan.
Littell, Franklin H. (1975). The Crucifixion of the Jews. New York: Harper and Row.
Littell, Franklin H. (1988). Early warning. Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 3(4), 483-490.
Littell, Franklin H. (1999). Early Warning System (EWS). In Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Genocide. Boulder, CO: ABC-Clio, pp. 261-265.
