A Methodist minister, when Littell finished divinity school he decided to go to a religious conference in Amsterdam. On the way he stopped in Germany, since he was curious about a new political movement there. He attended a 1939 Nazi rally in Nuremberg; he was so horrified at what he saw he had to leave.
After the war, he was the Chief Protestant Religious Adviser to the High Command of the occupying forces, spending 10 years helping with the “de-Nazification” of Germany. He was deeply affected by the atrocities he learned of during his time there, and when he returned to the U.S. he wanted others to learn about what happened during the war. In 1959 Littell started the first graduate seminar on the Holocaust at Emory University.
His studies “helped to turn the tide on the awareness of Christian complicity, shortcoming, indifference in the face of what was happening to Jews under Hitler,” said Holocaust scholar John K. Roth. “When Franklin Littell started his work, it was almost the case that there was no such thing as Holocaust studies as a field.” Now there are hundreds. Dr. Littell died May 23 at his home in Pennsylvania. He was 91.