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Tag Archives: Holocaust
The Kindergarten and the Holocaust
Posted on December 11, 2018 by Ben Goossen
Children's eyes sparkled in the candlelight. This was the first time many had seen a Christmas tree, aglow in the Einlage kindergarten in December 1942. Soldiers handed out wooden toys. They had spent weeks carving them—model houses, schools, churches, city halls, trucks, and trains—while convalescing at the military hospital in this Mennonite village in southeastern Ukraine. The group joined in song, filling the hall with old German Christmas carols. The tunes, which had not been heard openly during the recent years of Bolshevik rule, reminded all those present of the momentous changes wrought since Hitler's armies had taken control of Ukraine.1
Children march in an October 1942 parade honoring the visit of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, to the Halbstadt Mennonite colony in southeastern Ukraine. Courtesy of the Mennonite Heritage Centre, Winnipeg, Alber Photograph Collection 151-17.
The Mennonite kindergarten in Einlage was a Nazi showpiece. Military engineers and SS agents had helped refurbish the sturdy stone structure, coated with quality oil paints and sporting its own washroom, kitchen, and cafeteria. The kindergarten had steam heating and electric lights. Einlage's recovering soldiers hailed from all over Germany, but they affectionately termed the town's youngest members "their children." In addition to making toys, they had drawn pictures that inducted the kindergarteners into the fantastical world of German fairy tales and myths. Outside, a swastika flag fluttered in the breezes passing over the Ukrainian steppe.2
No other kindergarten in the whole administrative district of Dnipropetrovsk was as magnificent as Einlage's. Nazi occupiers had counted 10,000 kindergarten-aged children in the area as being of "German blood." These had been sorted by men in brown uniforms who could be found in all the villages, going door to door and categorizing inhabitants according to "genealogical and racial biological" criteria.3 Children deemed to be German were put into a segregated school system—separate and very unequal. The 129 pupils in Einlage happened to be the most fortunate of the roughly 5,000 children already organized into the district's 110 German-only kindergartens.4
We know about the Einlage kindergarten because it was profiled extensively in two Nazi papers that served the Dnipropetrovsk district. The Ukraine Post and the German Ukraine Newspaper regularly featured Einlage and other villages in the Chortitza Mennonite colony. "Chortitza on the Dnieper!" wrote one SS journalist, expressing joy that through the war, readers had become familiar with "the most flourishing" colony in the district's "chain of German villages."5 Its fame was rivaled only by that of Halbstadt, Ukraine's largest Mennonite settlement, which became incorporated into Dnipropetrovsk in September 1942 as Nazi civil administration expanded east.6
Nazi civil administration in occupied Ukraine (shaded) had expanded by September 1942 to encompass the region's three largest Mennonite colonies (in black). This involved Germanizing place names: Halbstadt was previously called Molotschna, while Kronau had been Zagradovka.
Most of Ukraine's 35,000 Mennonites lived in three colonies: Chortitza and Halbstadt in the Dnipropetrovsk district as well as Kronau in an area called Mykolaiv. This latter district was served by the German Bug Newspaper, named for the local Bug River. Nazi occupiers reported a total of 13,000 "ethnic Germans" in Chortitza, 25,000 in Halbstadt, and 13,000 in Kronau. Most of these inhabitants were of Mennonite background, although each colony—especially Kronau—included numerous Lutherans and a smaller number of Catholics. All three colonies also had Russians and Ukrainians, whom occupiers subjugated or deported. Death squads shot or gassed resident Jews.
It is possible to reconstruct a detailed picture of Mennonite daily life in Nazi-occupied Ukraine through careful readings of the Ukraine Post, the German Ukraine Newspaper, and the German Bug Newspaper. Scholars must treat these sources cautiously. All three papers' primary purpose was to circulate propaganda. Their target audiences were German-language readers in Ukraine—including soldiers, bureaucrats, and local Mennonites—as well as interested audiences on the home front. Articles were steeped in anti-communist, anti-Semitic rhetoric, and authors wrote confidently of the Third Reich's coming victory at a time when the front was already faltering.
Nevertheless, basic information like dates, events, names, and ranks were generally accurate. Selective combing reveals much about Nazi efforts to expand administrative control. Articles tell how local Mennonites joined the army or bureaucracy.7 Village names were Germanized.8 By October 1942, Chortitza had an operational post office.9 Halbstadt's opened a month later.10 One of Dnipropetrovsk's two courts held session next door.11 Occupiers sanctioned businesses like an iron foundry in Chortitza and a machine factory in Halbstadt.12 Horse breeding took place, as did silk manufacture.13 And tallies are available for grain, milk, and eggs produced in Kronau.14
The nature of these newspapers as propaganda organs makes them valuable for understanding the landscape navigated by local Mennonites. Content and diction reveal how occupiers hoped the region's "ethnic Germans" would learn to think and act. In May 1943, a Nazi Party rally took place in Mykolaiv. The main speaker thundered that "international Judaism" had started the war: "Whether on the side of the plutocrats or the Bolsheviks, the Jew works everywhere as agitator and provocateur. This war is a race war. We must break the Jewish danger, or we will be broken by it."15 Functionaries fanned across the district, repeating this lie in all twenty-nine of Kronau's villages.
National Socialists murdered 1.2 million Jews in occupied Ukraine, including tens of thousands in the Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv regions. Propagandists avoided reporting explicitly on the Holocaust. Journalists instead portrayed Jews as aggressors who must be stopped. Jews' alleged victims were Mennonites and other "ethnic Germans." The very real deprivations and terrors of Soviet rule were thus ascribed to "Jewish-Bolshevik tyranny."16 Occupiers seized Jewish property and redistributed it, claiming to redress past wrongs. Jubilant reports of one aid action in Kronau mentioned only that the 32,000 clothing and household items were "for the most part used."17
The same agencies that liquidated Jews provided aid to Mennonites.18 Their backdrop was total war. Thousands starved across Ukraine, and the land was pocked with barely-covered mass graves. But Nazi administrators wanted "ethnic Germans" to live happy and whole. "Blossom-white are the dresses and the head coverings of the women and the girls," remarked one visitor of a Sunday in Chortitza.19 Another crowed: "The simple church is no longer a movie theater as in Bolshevik times."20 Both Chortitza and Halbstadt played host to triumphal delegations of the Third Reich's leading Nazis, including enormous rallies for Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg.21
"You are a piece of Germany!" Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, spoke to thousands of Mennonites and other "ethnic Germans" in the Chortitza colony in June 1942. Rosenberg and his high-powered entourage visited Halbstadt a year later. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.
Administrators moved quickly to indoctrinate Mennonites into National Socialism. By December 1941, all able-bodied men in Kronau were organized into a paramilitary German Corps. Boys aged fourteen to seventeen belonged to a German Youth Corps, and their female counterparts aged fourteen to twenty-one joined a League of Ethnic German Girls.22 The local Women's League was responsible for activities like sewing circles and distributing clothing shipments from Auschwitz. Aid workers arrived in the colonies with such organizations as the German Red Cross, the People's Welfare, and the SS. Chortitza, Halbstadt, and Kronau all received youth delegations from Germany.23
This 1942 feature piece in the wartime Nazi newspaper, Ukraine Post, lauded local Mennonites: "Thanks to their strict lifestyle and their outstanding work ethic, they became the most successful German settlers in the East."
Occupiers stressed education. Wartime transportation needs initially prevented regular teacher exchanges between Germany and Ukraine. Small groups of professionals therefore held crash courses so that local educators could be "indoctrinated in the National Socialist mindset."24 These specialists organized back-to-back three-week camps in Kronau during the spring of 1942.25 Wagon upon wagon of men and women arrived, some from as far as one hundred miles away.26 Participants heard lectures on German politics, literature, and art. They then returned to their villages, where schools received Nazi-oriented workbooks and reading materials.27
Kindergartens comprised just one among many types of German-only educational institutions to open in Mennonite colonies. Chortitza's segregated kindergartens were joined by elementary schools and, in 1943, at least two high schools.28 Kronau boasted planned or operational middle schools, high schools, an agricultural school, and a training school for rural women's work. The orchestra of one institute played Wagner for visiting dignitaries, and pupils pledged loyalty to Reich and Führer from the stage.29 A teacher training academy that served as Ukraine's primary location for cultivating "ethnic German" educational professionals held class in Halbstadt.30
Education prospered both in and out of the classroom. Hitler Youth officers kicked into high gear during the summer of 1943. A third of eligible young people across Dnipropetrovsk already belonged to the German Youth of Ukraine, with the best results from Chortitza and Halbstadt's "fertile ground."31 Following a leadership training camp, the graduates—forty-two girls and thirty-two boys—staffed camps throughout the district. The grandest lasted six weeks and had 160 participants.32 Affirmative action also came to Ukraine. In Chortitza, twenty gifted young people competed for five spots to study in Germany.33 Others returned from learning trips to teach true Nazism at home.34
No single school received as much public attention as the Einlage kindergarten. This was the prize institution overseen by "Aunt Müller," the area's child education specialist. In 1942, Aunt Müller, who originally hailed from Transylvania, organized a camp for twenty girls and women who would go on to become Chortitza's kindergarten workforce. They put on a craft exhibition, and those who were particularly quick studies received awards.35 Under Aunt Müller's direction, plans were initiated to expand the school and to board children aged three to seven from outlying villages. The Chortitza iron foundry agreed to repair donated beds.36
"It is a miracle." So wrote a German soldier named Leonhard Froese in 1943. He one day hoped to have a kindergartener of his own, and he penned a glowing letter to the German Ukraine Newspaper describing his visit to the school in Einlage. Each day, the building opened by 7:00. At 8:00, the children assembled outside for roll call. The swastika flag would be hoisted, and it was time for athletic exercises. Then everyone would "goose step" through the front door. Each child had a personal cubby for jackets. During field trips, they were divided into three groups by height: giants, dwarves, and Thumbelinas. To Froese's eye, he could have been in Germany.37
Decades after the Second World War, under entirely different circumstances, I, too, attended a Mennonite kindergarten. My school was in Indiana, not war-torn Ukraine. My parents had not suffered through years of fear and hunger in the Soviet Union. Nor did Bolshevik agents come in the night to shoot my grandfathers or to deport them to gulags. My kindergarten cubby contained a nylon jacket, not some wrap of unknown provenance, perhaps taken from another five-year-old who happened to be born to a Jewish family. Nevertheless, the songs, the laughter, the shouts, and the joy of children at the Einlage kindergarten resonate with me. What a privilege it is to learn.
Precisely such familiarity of experience is what renders Mennonites' past in wartime Ukraine so chilling. Nazi officials did not hide Einlage's kindergarten. Unlike the blood-soaked pits virtually a stone's throw away, writers trumpeted the school in page upon page of propaganda. Education in Einlage was intended to show Nazism's radiant potential. It represented an alleged antidote to "Judeo-Bolshevism." It was what the Holocaust was supposed to enable not only in Ukraine, but for all children of "German blood." Today, historians sift laboriously through archival records to identify Mennonite death squad members. No such work is needed for Einlage's kindergarteners.
Collective memories of this Holocaust kindergarten have never left us. Mennonites who grew up in Ukraine during the Second World War continue to speak and write with grateful thanks for their generous treatment by the Third Reich. When Hitler's regime collapsed in 1945 and they became homeless refugees, their plight developed into a cause célèbre for congregations across Europe and the Americas. Their voices and their stories remain heard through film, books, and close family relationships, including my own. Leading Mennonite newspapers in North America still to this day credit Nazi officials with returning a "semblance of normal life" to Ukraine.38
Our denomination, as a Christian peace church, must grapple with our history in the Holocaust. This is first and foremost the tale of the Einlage kindergarteners, of Jews murdered so that Mennonites could flourish. Myths of happy wartime children shine with the light of latent anti-Semitism. It is a vital, urgent task to identify and to root out our anti-Semitic narratives. I have never once felt physically endangered because of my faith. But in my country, Jews are gunned down in houses of worship. If you are a Mennonite, if you attended a kindergarten, or if you ever experienced the wonder of singing around a Christmas tree, this story is for you. This is a task for our church.
Ben Goossen is a historian at Harvard University. He is the author of Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, published in 2017 by Princeton University Press.
"Die Brücke zur Heimat," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, January 9, 1943, 8; "Soldaten erfreuen volksdeutsche Kinder," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, December 29, 1942, 3. All of the newspaper articles cited in this essay are freely available online: https://libraria.ua/en↩
Leonhard Froese, "Die Brücke zur Heimat," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, July 11, 1943, 8.↩
Hans-Joachim Kunze, "Leistungen deutscher Kolonisten," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung<, August 8, 1942, 3; "Das Bluterbe der Väter," Ukraine Post, March 6, 1943, 3.↩
"Fürsorge für die Volksdeutschen," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, July 31, 1943, 3; "Es geht wieder vorwärts," Ukraine Post, August 10, 1943, 8.>↩
"Urlaub nach Chortitza," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, September 11, 1943, 3.↩
"Erweiterung des Reichskommissariats," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, September 2, 1942, 3; "Eingliederung in das Reichskommissariat," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, September 5, 1942↩
Rudolf Rümer, "Heimkehr in das Volkstum," Ukraine Post, October 31, 1942, 3.↩
"Alexanderstadt statt Bolschaja-Alexandrowka," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, May 9, 1942, 4.↩
"Neue Dienstpostämter," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, October 3, 1942, 3.↩
Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, November 15, 1942, 3.↩
"Deutsches Gericht in Halbstadt," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, April 2, 1943, 3.↩
"Amtliche Bekanntmachung," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, May 12, 1943, 6.↩
"Körordnung für den Generalbezirk Nikolajew," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, May 13, 1942, 4; "Aufbau der Pferdezucht," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, August 29, 1943, 3; "Deutscher Seidenbau in der Ukraine," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, August 31, 1943, 3; "Seidenbau in der Ukraine," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, July 24, 1943, 3.↩
"Volksdeutsche Bauern packen weider an," Ukraine Post, July 3, 1943, 7.↩
"'Der Kampf ist hart aber wir sind härter!'" Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, May 29, 1943, 4.↩
"Der Ruf des Reiches an die Volksdeutschen am Schwarzmeer," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, June 16, 1943.↩
"Kleider für 13000 Volksdeutsche," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, June 30, 1943, 3; "Kleidungsstücke für 13000 Volksdeutsche," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, July 6, 1943; "Die Hilfsaktion wird fortgesetzt," Ukraine Post, July 20, 1943, 8.↩
Rudolf Rümer, "Volksdeutsche sind unserer Hilfe sicher," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, August 22, 1942, 3.↩
"Nach deutschem Vorbild," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, December 2, 1942, 3; "Deutsche Art dringt durch," Ukraine Post, April 17, 1943, 5.↩
"Führung des europäischen Ostens größte Aufgabe unseres Volkes," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, June 21, 1942, 1; Hans-Joachim Kunze, "Festtag im deutschen Dorf am Dnjepr," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, June 28, 1942, 3; "Der Ruf des Reiches," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung; "Reichsleiter Rosenberg besuchte die Schwarzmeerdeutschen," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, June 22, 1943, 3-4.↩
"Aus der Volkstumsarbeit Kronau, Gebeit Alexanderstadt," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, July 11, 1942, 4; "Der Generalkommissar in Alexanderstadt und Nowibug," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, August 1, 1942, 4.↩
"Erzähl uns von Deutschland," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, August 25, 1942, 3; "HJ-Tagebuch in der Ukraine," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, September 5, 1942, 3; "Abschluss der HJ-Fahrt durch den Generalbezirk," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, August 26, 1942, 4; "Jugend als Sendboten des Reiches," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, August 19, 1943, 3; "Harzer Hitlerjungen im Generalbezirk Nikolajew," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, July 24, 1943, 3; "Regelung des studentischen Osteinsatzes," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, October 4, 1942, 3.↩
"Umschulungslager volksdeutscher Lehrer," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, April 24, 1942, 3.↩
"Umschulungslager für volksdeutsche Lehrer," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, April 8, 1942, 4.↩
"Volksdeutsche Lehrer im Schulungslager," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, May 13, 1942, 4.↩
"Der Lehrernachwuchs in der Ukraine," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, June 2, 1942, 3.↩
"Zwei neue deutsche Hauptschulen," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, February 13, 1943, 3.↩
"Schülerheim in volksdeutschem Dorf," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, February 16, 1943, 3.↩
"Der Ruf des Reiches," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung.↩
"Volksdeutsche Jugend an der Arbeit," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, May 21, 1943, 3; "Jugend im Gleichschritt," June 5, 1943, 7.↩
"Volksdeutsche Jugend in froher Gemeinschaft," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, August 17, 1943, 3.↩
"Ausleselager in Chortitza," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, October 15, 1942, 3; "Aufgeschlossen, begabt, einsatzbereit, kameradschaftlich," Deutsche Bug-Zeitung, July 3, 1943, 2.↩
"Die Kinder der 'Kulaken,'" Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, November 9, 1943, 3.↩
"Für die Volksdeutsche Jugend," Deutsche Ukraine-Zeitung, January 3, 1943, 3.↩
Rümer, "Heimkerh in das Volkstum."↩
Froese, "Die Brücke zur Heimat." ↩
Rich Preheim, "From 'Tauferkammer' to Burkina Faso," Mennonite World Review, December 3, 2018, 6.↩
Posted in Essays	| Tagged Holocaust, Mennonite Education	| 3 Replies
Mennonites and the Holocaust: "Neighbors, Killers, Enablers, Witnesses"
Posted on March 17, 2018 by JoelHNofziger
Bookending Doris Bergen's lecture "Neighbors, Killers, Enablers, Witnesses: The Many Roles of Mennonites in the Holocaust" was the call for more scholarship. Her talk, the keynote of the Mennonites and the Holocaust Conference and convocation for Bethel College, focused on the challenges of doing Holocaust scholarship. Bergen—who is Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto—explored five specific challenges, increasing in difficulty, with the note that "like those nesting dolls", each opens new issues even as the resolve others.
The first challenge looked at insider/outsider scholarship, including its costs and benefits. Mennonite scholars come with some advantages–they have access to some sources, especially oral memories–that could not be found by outsiders. Insiders also make special note of details others might miss: Bergen recounted being at a talk about the nature of the guards at Auschwitz, and in the general spreadsheet of place of origin and other statistics was a column on religion; one Mennonite was listed. "As an insider you notice and care," noted Bergen. However, insiders face disadvantages. She singled out the push and pull of mythologies, especially "the myth of Mennonite innocence," as a factor that can lead scholars to attack, defend, or censor themselves.
The second challenge was the question of definitions, specifically "what is a Mennonite" and "what is the Holocaust?" For the former she gave two guidelines. First, a warning to avoid "the temptation to define to distract" where you become so caught up in the words that you lose sight of the matter at hand. Second, she stressed the importance of having a functional definition of identity, not one based on fluid individual identities, but one that accounts for accounts for all ages and genders, covers communal bonds and how Mennonite identity can be constructed. She also included an admonition not to forget the women, "as defining, narrating, and performing Mennonitism has largely been the work of women." For the latter, she noted that a proper definition of the Holocaust would consider a chronological range, encompassing both the prewar years and the immediate postwar period, as well as being constructed by the identity of the perpetrators not the victims.
Bergen's third challenge was to maintain a clear focus on the way Jews maintained a particular place of destruction in the Holocaust, being mindful of anti-Semitism. It is especially important for Mennonites to examine how Jews and anti-Semitism are built into our narratives. As one example, she recounted hearing how "Mennonites were [like] Jews" being told as the description of their experience; an inversion common across genocides where people take on the identity of victims "as a way of erasing their memory of their roles as victimizers." She also noted how in Mennonite literature, especially in texts in the 1920s and 1930s, Jews become narrated as villains. The solution to this held up by Bergen was to incorporate literary scholars into the research to help analyze texts deeply, as opposed to taking them at face value. She also highlighted the need to have multiple sources, not just Mennonite and German ones, but Jewish, Roma, and more as well.
The fourth challenge was the questions "how do we avoid writing scholarship that is moralistic or judgemental?" Bergen's response was to start by noting that studying genocide does not imply that she would personally have done better had she lived in a genocidal context, but "scholarship is about analyzing and understanding–how could people like us behave certain ways?" She also warned against the tendency to use avoiding judgement as a way to avoid discussion. This also gets caught up with the maintenance of Mennonite mythology. One solution given was to use the tools of genocide scholarship, which use comparison. "Mennonites were not unique, though distinctive, many of the issues we explore have been and are being confronted by many other people," said Bergen, "These can be humbling and extremely liberating."
The final challenge, as articulated at the beginning, was the need for more scholarship, particularly work "that will contextualize the topic, that will be discipline, that will look for unknown unknowns" an use a broad range of sources and tools. While this is an impossible task for an individual, it becomes possible if many become involved. Specific topics of research named included the Stutthoff concentration camp (situated among Mennonite communities), interactions between Mennonites and Roma, pre-war relations with Jews, and the role of singing and music.
Professor Bergen's research focuses on issues of religion, gender, and ethnicity in the Holocaust and World War II and comparatively in other cases of extreme violence. During the keynote, she confided that she had not grown up with an innate interest in Mennonite history–indeed she actively avoided it–but it found her nonetheless via the topics she researched; at every turn, Mennonites popped out of the archive. Bergen's books include Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (1996); War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (2003); The Sword of the Lord: Military Chaplains from the First to the Twenty-First Centuries (edited, 2004); and Lessons and Legacies VIII (edited, 2008).1
http://history.utoronto.ca/people/doris-bergen ↩
Posted in Events, Research & Writing	| Tagged Conferences, Holocaust, Mennonites and the Holocaust Conference	| 2 Replies
Mennonites and the Holocaust: An Introduction
Posted on February 7, 2018 by Ben Goossen
Mennonites entered Nazi consciousness in 1929, when 13,000 refugees descended on Moscow, clamoring to leave the Soviet Union. In Germany, the National Socialist Racial Observer took up their cause. Blaming Jews and Bolsheviks for oppressing Mennonites, the paper condemned Western democracies for ignoring their plight. In one front-page article, editor Alfred Rosenberg—who had led the Nazi Party while Hitler was in prison—offered what he considered a solution. "The National Socialist movement," he wrote, "recognized this danger [of 'Judeo-Bolshevism'] from the beginning and built that into its essence."1 Little more than a decade later, Rosenberg felt that the Second World War had vindicated his position. Traveling in 1942 and 1943 through Nazi-controlled Ukraine as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, he announced to crowds in the Mennonite colonies of Chortitza and Molotschna that tables were finally turned.2 Already, death squads had murdered most of Ukraine's 1.2 million Jews.
"Film footage of Alfred Rosenberg's visit to the Chortitza Mennonite colony in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, June 1942."
Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, the global Mennonite church has yet to confront its entanglement in this genocide. While stories have long circulated privately and in some academic publications, only recently have they garnered sustained public attention.3 In this light, the upcoming conference, "Mennonites and the Holocaust," to be held at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, on March 16 and 17, 2018, is a breakthrough. [EDIT 5/29/2018: coverage of the Mennonites and the Holocaust conference can be found here.] The event promises serious discussion of the church's relationship with Jews and Judaism, a topic vitally important to Mennonites around the globe. Sponsored by seven Mennonite religious and educational institutions, including Mennonite Church USA, this conference brings together leading scholars of Anabaptism and of the Holocaust from five countries. A film screening and the keynote lecture by Doris Bergen—who is Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto—are free and open to the public. Registration for panel sessions is now open.
Some of the 60,000 victims killed at the Stutthof concentration camp, a source of slave labor for Mennonite farms and factories. Credit: Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
Mennonite experiences of and involvement in the Holocaust differed widely. We know that a handful of individuals actively participated as executioners and concentration camp guards. We also know that a substantial percentage of Europe's Mennonites benefited from and often sympathized with aspects of Nazism. Around 120,000 people, or about one-fourth of the denomination worldwide, lived under Nazi rule at the height of Hitler's expansionism. Generally categorized as members of the Aryan racial elite, Mennonites sometimes received goods taken from murdered Jews or moved into their vacant homes. Others leased slave labor for their farms and factories, or otherwise profited from genocide.4 Yet many Mennonites also suffered. Life in wartime could be brutal, not least in German-occupied Western Europe, where some Mennonites joined the resistance.5 A number were executed or sent to concentration camps for political activities or for possessing Jewish heritage or cognitive disabilities.6 And a small but important subset—primarily in the Netherlands and France—hid Jews.7
A poster for the Nazi propaganda film, Frisians in Peril, re-released in 1941 as Village in the Red Storm. Here, the Mennonite congregational elder is portrayed as a stoic Aryan in the face of Bolshevik oppression.
Arguably more impactful than Mennonites' own actions, however, was the denomination's enrollment in Nazi propaganda. In 1929, popular opinion had pressured German politicians to help approximately 4,000 of the Mennonite refugees in Moscow relocate to Germany. The event became a founding myth of the Third Reich, inspiring novels and two of the Nazis' most important early films, Refugees (1933) and Frisians in Peril (1935). Both were re-released in 1941 during Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union.8 In general, Mennonites became symbolic of Aryans' supposed ability to maintain German cultural traditions abroad. Hundreds of books and articles by the Third Reich's leading experts on German speakers in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Paraguay, Galicia, Ukraine, the Volga region, and Siberia depicted the denomination in glowing terms. Many of these authors eventually translated their theories into ethnic cleansing by consulting for the Wehrmacht, East Ministry, and SS.9
As for Mennonites overseas, most remained unaware of or uninterested in Nazi flattery. But they were equally apathetic to the fate of European Jews.10 Moreover, certain communities developed robust fascist sensibilities. In Paraguay and Brazil, entire colonies hoped to "return" to the Reich.11 Leading Mennonites helped finance the German Paper for Canada, a pro-Nazi organ.12 And in the United States, Herald Publishing House of Newton printed the rabidly anti-Semitic Defender, whose monthly circulation reached 100,000.13 As a site for the upcoming conference, Bethel College is an appropriate choice, given that it was Bible professor J. R. Thierstein who, as editor of The Mennonite during the 1930s, gave that periodical its anti-Semitic slant. Readers of the Bethel College Monthly likewise learned from Thierstein that "harm done to the Jews was insignificant by comparison with the great service Hitler had performed in saving Germany from Communism and its Jewish adherents."14
In 1945 when the Third Reich collapsed, church institutions on both sides of the Atlantic worked to suppress allegations of Mennonite collaboration. The Pennsylvania-based Mennonite Central Committee, in particular, feared for the safety of 45,000 Mennonite refugees in postwar Europe. Administrators believed that these individuals might be denied humanitarian aid and—as actually happened to around half—deported to the Soviet Union. Under MCC auspices, prominent scholars and churchmen sent dozens of memos to military personnel, refugee organizations, and the United Nations. These documents portrayed Mennonites as "strict pacifists," as non-Germans, and as abhorring National Socialism.15 Receptive bureaucrats developed an erroneous impression that huge numbers had performed "slave labour" for the Nazis, while the New York Times reported that they suffered "as the Jews."16
Denialism has marked public discussions ever since. While other Christian denominations began self-scrutiny decades ago, conservative strategies—such as emphasizing Mennonites' own hardships, referencing "Germans" instead of "Nazis," and refocusing on Bolshevik atrocities—have depressed engagement for generations in Paraguay, Canada, and Germany.17 Little wonder, perhaps, that several of the twentieth century's leading white supremacists and Holocaust deniers wrote fondly of their Mennonite backgrounds.18 Even among well-meaning and respected church members, anti-Semitic tropes continue to circulate. In 2017, Mennonite periodicals carried pieces that alternately excused genocidal killings by invoking Jewish communists, and denied that Jews were murdered near Mennonite colonies.19 In fact, death squads' meticulous wartime reports are all too clear. 10,000 Jews were shot on October 13, 1941, for instance, fifty miles from Chortitza.20 And that was just one day.
Members of a Mennonite Waffen-SS squadron in Ukraine's Molotschna colony, 1943. Credit: Harry Loewen, ed., Long Road to Freedom: Mennonites Escape the Land of Suffering (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2000), 106.
The "Mennonites and the Holocaust" conference will provide a crucial step in our denomination's journey toward recognition and atonement. Already, strongly-attended conferences in Germany and Paraguay have raised aspects of Mennonites' involvement with National Socialism, and since 2015, three edited volumes and numerous journal articles have brought the subject to a wide readership. Yet almost none of this literature has broached the Holocaust specifically—a sign that major soul-searching remains for Mennonites. On a global scale, Mennonite World Conference and its member entities have recently participated in dialogue with Lutherans, Catholics, and others. Such deliberations have resulted, to much fanfare, in Mennonites accepting apologies for the persecution of sixteenth-century Anabaptists during the Reformation. Whether our church is willing to extend the same grace toward victims of a much larger and more recent outpouring of violence, remains to be seen.
Register for "Mennonites and the Holocaust," North Newton, Kansas, March 16-17, 2018.
Alfred Rosenberg, "Das deutsche Bauernsterben in Sowjetrußland," Völkischer Beobachter, November 24/25, 1929. For context, see John Eicher, "A Sort of Homecoming: The German Refugee Crisis of 1929," German Studies Review 40, no. 2 (2017): 333-352. On Rosenberg, see Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Blessing, 2005). ↩
Alfred Rosenberg, "Besichtigungsreise durch die Ukraine vom 18.6. bis 26.6.42," Captured German and Related Records, T-454/105, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland; "Aus dem Zeitgeschehen," Deutschtum im Ausland 26, no. 5/6 (1943): 115-116. ↩
For an overview of early scholarship on Mennonites and Nazism, see John D. Thiesen, "Menno in the KZ or Münster Resurrected: Mennonites and National Socialism—Historiography and Open Questions," in European Mennonites and the Challenge of Modernity: Contributors, Detractors, and Adapters, ed. Mark Jantzen, Mary S. Sprunger, and John D. Thiesen (North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 2016), 313-328. ↩
Gerhard Rempel, "Mennonites and the Holocaust: From Collaboration to Perpetuation," Mennonite Quarterly Review 84, no. 4 (2010): 507-549; Doris L. Bergen, "Protestant, Catholics, Mennonites and Jews: Identities and Institutions in Holocaust Studies," in Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations, ed. Christopher R. Browning, Susannah Heschel, Michael R. Marrus, and Milton Shain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 142-156; Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 121-173. ↩
See the contributions in Jelle Bosma and Alle Hoekema, eds., "Doopsgezinden tjdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog," Doopsgezinde Bijdragen 41 (2015), as well as Alle G. Hoekema, "Niederländische Taufgesinnte während des Zweiten Weltkriegs," in Mennoniten in der NS-Zeit: Stimmen, Lebenssituationen, Erfahrungen, ed. Marion Kobelt-Groch and Astrid von Schlachta (Bolanden-Weierhof: Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein, 2017), 173-184. ↩
This is one of the least studied aspects of Mennonite-Nazi interactions. Examples include Gerlof Homan, "'We Must and Can Stand Firmly': Dutch Mennonites in World War II," Mennonite Quarterly Review 69, no. 1 (1995): 7-36; Christiana Duschinsky, "Mennonite Responses to Nazi Human Rights Abuses: A Family in Prussia/Danzig," Journal of Mennonite Studies 32 (2014): 81-96; "David P. Boder Interviews Anna Braun," September 20, 1946, Voices of the Holocaust Project, online. ↩
Gerlof Homan, "Friends and Enemies: the World War II Origins of MCC Work in France," Mennonite Historical Bulletin 71, no. 2 (2010): 7-14; Gerlof Homan, "From Danzig to Down Under: A Mennonite-Jewish Family's Escape from the Nazis to Australia," Mennonite Historical Bulletin 73, no. 1 (2012): 13-18; Alle G. Hoekema, "Dutch Mennonites and German Jewish Refugee Children, 1938-1945," Mennonite Quarterly Review 87, no. 2 (2013): 133-152. ↩
David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema: 1933-1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 108-109, 207-213. ↩
Part of this history is discussed in Benjamin W. Goossen, "Mennoniten als Volksdeutsche: Die Rolle des Mennonitentums in der nationalsozialistischen Propaganda," trans. Helmut Foth, Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter 71 (2014): 54-70. ↩
Jack Fischel, "An American Christian Response to the Holocaust," Bearing Witness to the Holocaust 1939-1989, ed. Alan L. Berger (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 127-139. ↩
John Thiesen, Mennonite and Nazi? Attitudes Among Mennonite Colonists in Latin America, 1933-1945 (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1999); Uwe Friesen, ed., "Die völkische Bewegung und der Nationalsozialismus bei den Mennoniten in Paraguay," Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Kulture der Mennoniten in Paraguay 18 (2017). ↩
James Urry, Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood: Europe—Russia—Canada, 1525 to 1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2006), 236-237. ↩
James C. Juhnke, A People of Two Kingdoms: The Political Acculturation of the Kansas Mennonites (Newton, KS: Faith and Life Press, 1975), 139. ↩
Fischel, "An American Christian Response to the Holocaust," 134. ↩
Peter Dyck, "Mennonite Refugees in Germany," July 1946, FO 1050/1565, The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. For context, see Goossen, Chosen Nation, 174-187. ↩
Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, "Memorandum: Mennonite Refugees from Soviet Russia," ca. December 1946, AJ/43/49, Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France; "Mennonite Issue in Germany Ends," New York Times, February 15, 1947, 8. ↩
Ted Regehr, "Of Dutch or German Ancestry? Mennonite Refugees, MCC, and the International Refugee Organization," Journal of Mennonite Studies (1995): 15-17; Ted Regehr, "Walter Quiring (1893-1983)," in Shepherds, Servants and Prophets: Leadership among the Russian Mennonites (ca. 1880-1960), ed. Harry Loewen (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2003), 329-330; Diether Götz Lichdi, "Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Schuldbekenntnisse der Mennoniten nach 1945," Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter 64 (2007): 39-54; Daniel Stahl, "Wie die Fernheimer lernten, über die 'Völkische Zeit' zu sprechen: Zur langen Nachgeschichte eines Konflikts," Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Kulture der Mennoniten in Paraguay 18 (2017): 161-186; Benjamin W. Goossen, "From Aryanism to Anabaptism: Nazi Race Science and the Language of Mennonite Ethnicity," Mennonite Quarterly Review 90, no. 2 (2016): 135-163; Goossen, Chosen Nation, 187-194; Benjamin W. Goossen, "Ending the Silence," Mennonite Historian 43, no. 4 (2017): 10-12. ↩
James Urry, "Fate, Hate and Denial: Ingrid Rimland's Lebensraum!" Mennonite Quarterly Review 73, no. 1 (1999): 107-127; Damon T. Berry, Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017): 74-101. ↩
Although both statements are publicly available in print and online, I am choosing not to cite them here, as my aim is not to shame individuals but to point out the continued circulation of certain forms of anti-Semitism among Mennonite communities. ↩
SD, "Ereignismeldung UdSSR Nr. 135," November 19, 1941, R 58/219, Bundesarchiv, Berlin, Germany. For context, see Helmut Krausnick, Hitlers Einsatzgruppen: die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 1938-1942 (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), 166-175. ↩
Posted in Essays, Events	| Tagged Conferences, Holocaust, Russian Mennonites	| 4 Replies
Half of the Story, Honestly Told: Review of Benjamin Goossen's "Chosen Nation"
Posted on August 4, 2017 by Guest Contributor
William Yoder, Ph.D.
Benjamin W. Gossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a German Era (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 2017). ISBN: 978-0-691-17428-0. Cloth $49.50; eBook $34.99.
The "invention" of a Mennonite nation is one outstanding theme in Benjamin Goossen's dissertation, Chosen Nation. Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, published by Princeton University Press in June 2017. This Mennonite from Kansas with Russian-Ukrainian roots points to the fact that the theory of a Mennonite "nation" was based on the assumed existence of a Jewish one. In both cases, a religious-ethnic grouping present in many cultures was seen as part of a larger nation transcending traditional cultural and linguistic boundaries. In the fascist-controlled, post World War I-regions of Europe, Mennonites even of Dutch heritage had celebrated themselves as champions of "Germandom." But for obviously opportunistic reasons, the concept of a transnational Mennonite "nation" kicked in after 1945. It was used as a crux for obtaining exist visas to the Americas in post-war, anti-fascist Europe.
The Mennonite icon Peter J. Dyck (1914-2010) was honest enough to admit in 1988 that the claim of being a nation had been "a temporary cloak woven from the wool of political expediency." The refugees from Russia had "changed their identity when it suited them. They became chameleons" (199). Dyck himself had under Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) tutelage helped fashion this construct at the end of WW II. The claim was used to spare once-Nazi Mennonites who deserved retribution. But of course, Dyck's motives were somehow humanitarian.
In the course of the past several centuries, Mennonites had insisted on privilege. Privilege—in taxation for example—was very much a part of their decision to move to Russia (now eastern Ukraine) in the 1780s. When it was convenient, Mennonites promoted their state of privilege either by citing their Germanness or their supranational nationhood. Goossen points out that the ethnic and racial criteria prevalent during the Nazi period survived into the post-war era. Agnostics and Catholics posed as Mennonites in hopes of obtaining equal privilege for emigrating to the Americas. The criteria remained cultural and racial. He asks on page 182: "What were MCC's refugee operations, after all, but an elaborate exercise in ethnic nationalism?" It was the Cold War's transition from anti-fascism to anti-communism which in 1951 finally opened Canada's gates even for Mennonite members of the Waffen-SS (181).
A particularly strong point of this book is its descriptions of Nazi fascination for the Mennonite colonies of Eastern Europe, an appeal underscored by Heinrich Himmler's landmark visit to the Molotschna colony in October 1942. Mennonites in the USSR were one of "Germandom's" most impressive specimens and "groundbreakers for Germandom." Though scattered across the globe, Mennonites' "church discipline and religious racial defense system have protected (them) one-hundred-percent against the dilution of their blood through the infiltration of foreign elements. There is likely no other confession in the world that demonstrates such a racially uniform character as the Mennonites" (131, from Benjamin Unruh, approx. 1939). Supposedly the most Aryan of all, this characteristic made them prime targets for Nazi anthropologists and Eugenicists. According to the author, Mennonites "relished the attention" these researchers showered upon them.
Goossen is to be thanked for pointing to the questionable, racist character of genealogical research as practiced by ethnic Mennonites. Though it had been strongly propagated by fascist circles, Mennonite theologian Harold S. Bender (1897-1962) wrote in 1950: "It is encouraging to learn that a permanent interest in family history remains among the Mennonites in Germany, even after the Hitler regime has long since passed away" (201).
The book points to the direct linkage between pacifism and Mennonite quietism. The Mennonite understanding with Czarist authorities assumed that freedom from the draft would be conceded if the colonies did not proselytise. Numerical growth had to be restricted to procreation; to do otherwise would have exceeded the limits of Russian tolerance.
The pacifism issue was also a source of long-term tension between Mennonites in Germany and the diaspora. Germany had no Mennonite conscientious objectors after the 1870s, and in 1912 the Danzig "modernizer" Hermann Mannhardt (1855-1927) was very much opposed to the repatriation of Ukrainian Mennonites to Germany. After all, "Mannhardt and his associates had spent the last half-century ridding pacifism from their own congregations. At the very moment that charges of cowardice were finally dissipating, it would be madness to import 100,000 colonists" (102). At the turn of the twentieth century, the pacifists were rural and traditional, located primarily in Russia and North America. It was the urban Mennonite middle-class in Germany and Holland that had by then opted to "modernize."
It was also the rural and traditional who best resisted the enticements of Nazism. After a trip to Paraguay in the 1930's, the pro-Nazi geographer Herbert Wilhelmy (1910-2003) complained that Mennonites there viewed the Third Reich as "too militarist and too worldly." These "religious fanatics consider (pro-Nazi Mennonites) as being traitors to the Mennonite cause" (142). In North America, South German- and Swiss-rooted "Old Mennonites" and Amish expressed little admiration or interest in Hitler. Yet this is not the entire story: Pro-fascist sentiment among the low-German Mennonites of Manitoba in the 1930s also included the rural.
Goossen's treatise includes tidbits of information worthy of further exploration. Numerous Mennonites were active in Germany's liberal "Vormärz" revolution of 1848. Krefeld banker Hermann von Beckerath (1801-1870) served as the German Reich's first minister of finance. Indeed, Krefeld's industrialist Von der Leyen family had been active in German politics and finance since the 1650s. (The current German minister of defense, the Lutheran Ursula von der Leyen, is married to a member of this Mennonite family.)
A particularly unsavoury set of anecdotal clips refers to Mennonites caught up in the fascist war. Heinrich Wiens, a Molotschna native and member of an SS-Einsatzgruppe, was involved in the elimination of Jews with gas vans (159). Jakob Reimer from Halbstadt/Ukraine participated in a massacre near Lublin (apparently the "Aktion Erntefest" of November 1943—see 162).
No less questionable were persons mentioned by Goossen as the close allies of Mennonites. Adolf Ehrt (1902-1975), the head of the Nazi "Anti-Comintern," wrote his dissertation on the Mennonites. Georg Leibbrandt (1891-1982), a "long-time scholar of Mennonitism" (163), participated in the "Wannsee Conference" of January 1942 and was co-responsible for the mass extermination of Jews. Leibbrandt also served as an advisor to German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1955 (see German "Wikipedia").
Erected in a region of dense Mennonite settlement near Danzig, Mennonite contractors were involved in the construction of the Stutthof concentration camp in 1939. Mennonites served there later as guards. A small consolation: Mennonite youth visiting from Germany helped rebuild Stutthof as a memorial in 1973-74 (193).
Mennonite encyclopedic or Wikipedia entries do not mention the pro-fascist dealings of Benjamin H. Unruh (1881-1959) or the militarism of Hermann Mannhardt. Ben Goossen can therefore be thanked for inching their biographies closer to reality. Along with Peter Dyck, Cornelius F. Klassen (1894-1954) was a second icon of mid-twentieth century Mennonitism. Yet Goossen quotes on page 143, that Klassen "aligned himself with Hitler's Germany, railing against social-democratic rot, the Communist insanity, and the machinations of the Jews." Apparently, a part of the essential story on C.F. Klassen remains untold.
My primary criticism of Goossen's treatise pertains to the fact that he only tells half the Mennonite story. Though the book's title refers to "Mennonites in Germany," solely the low-German story is told. More seriously, the story is told from the perspective of the Mennonite émigré, not also from those who "remained behind." Surely there were Mennonites who did not desert the Red Army. I—not a specialist in Mennonite history—have not heard their story. Goossen reports that after WW I a "subset" of Mennonites joined the Bolsheviks and attempted to foment class struggle (110). That is a story which, to my knowledge, has yet to be told.
Most importantly of all, the book does not tell the Mennonite story as perceived through the eyes of their Slavic neighbors. Why, in 1920, did the anarchists and Bolsheviks of eastern Ukraine react as they did? Bolsheviks included Mennonites among the most counter-revolutionary of Russia's minorities.
The mass Soviet deportations eastward in August 1941 were motivated by the suspicion that ethnic Germans were potential turncoats. As it turned out, those suspicions were completely justified. The communist position was, among other things, also a reaction to the German and German-Mennonite position. (These words are no defense of Stalinist behavior; they are only an attempt to understand it.) Western Mennonites have produced hundreds of treatises describing communist guilt; it is now time to hear the other half. We must hear more than only how Mennonites have interpreted themselves.
Though untold here, Ben Goossen understands that another Slavic narrative exists. Indeed, he has taken initial steps. When Mennonite farmers moved into Russia or the American frontier, they "seized the land." No amalgamation with native forces took place—they were simply displaced (211). Slavs were welcome as field laborers, not as co-owners. Concerned little about the good of the whole, these colonists intended to remain an ark in a Slavic sea. (Of course, there were exceptions, and prejudice ran both ways.) The author relates: Christian farmers opposed heathen nomads. Mennonite writers portrayed their colonies as "blossoming islands in the middle of Russian barbarianism" (102). Yet by 1920, Russia's Mennonite colonies had clearly entered the globe's post-colonial age.
Goossen refers in several instances to the Mennonite narrative's bias: refugees were "lost" until MCC located them. Mennonites were "rescued out" of Russia—an interpretation still far from dead. The author describes the "lost" Baltic homeland as "a place of mystic tragedy." Mennonites and other Germans have "constructed an intricate memorial culture;" minute details of their former lives are "obsolete and therefore fascinating" (191). Sadly, as we can observe since 1990, this "outpouring of minutiae" has not automatically resulted in interest for the present and future well-being of these Slavic societies. Why have almost no Mennonite refugees from Eastern Europe and their offspring chosen to move back to the "homeland"?
A further problem involves the fact that this study harbors an ideological agenda not requisite to the story. The author rejects mission as a colonial enterprise and places the word "heathen" in quotation marks (33). Gender issues, hardly ever a part of the historic Mennonite narrative, crop up in several instances. According to him, the denunciation of a Jewish neighbor in Nazi-occupied Ukraine or the shaming of the "queer" in the USA are "at least as Mennonite as bonnets, buggies and pacifism" (211).
Due in part to my perusal of the current Russian political and theological scene, I remain wary of the libertarian, individualist, pro-abortion, gender-neutral, essentially secular agenda grafted into western Mennonitism during the past three decades. Its present ideology may well be a result of the old desire of the intellectual to "be modern," to conform. They are interested in worldly fashion, in keeping up with the Joneses. The venerable Mennonite theologian Myron Augsburger expressed to me in early 2017 his concern that Mennonite thought is no longer non-conformist: "Mennonite thinking should be with Kingdom priorities and Christ-centered in distinction from the liberal, secular agenda."
It was the educated who brought down pacifism in Germany and Holland in the nineteenth century. Mennonite involvement in the wars of German nationalism and fascism ensued. Had German Mennonites remained "old-fashioned," they would not have been guarding the condemned at Stutthof. Pacifism keeps believers with pro-fascist leanings—or liberals currently supporting "humanitarian" wars in the Middle East—from involvement in greater mischief.
Non-pacifism means ethical anarchy in countries with an aggressive foreign policy. In the U.S. context it meant that Mennonites dropping pacifism in the late 1950s soon had their sons dropping Agent Orange on the hapless peasants of Southeast Asia. In the context of WW II, it was the world's rural and under-educated Mennonites who ended up prophetic, who stood the best chance of not compromising the Anabaptist witness.
The pacifists are almost always the prophets. Mennonites and Protestants in general, once they haven "broken free" of pacifism, don't have the political savvy or acumen ("politischer Durchblick") required to stay out of particularly questionable wars. Perhaps only some Marxists and Quakers are capable of choosing their wars carefully.
Mennonites have proven prophetic by accident. Their state was a gift of heaven, not a result of cool analysis. Connected to the wisdom of tradition, country bumpkins have proven to be the actual prophets. In Sarasota, Florida, it's the Amish steering their barely-kosher electric tricycles across baked asphalt parking malls that point to a saner and greener form of future transport. The world is a ball, and the Amish were so far behind the trend that they suddenly ended up out front. When the professors have lost their way, the stones will cry out (Luke 19:40).
We all so through a glass darkly. In hopes of learning from past mistakes, I encourage Ben Goossen and others to press onward with their diligent research.
Originally from Sarasota, Florida, William E. (Bill) Yoder (born 1950), has resided in Russia and Belarus since 2001. He received a Ph.D. in political science from West Berlin's "Free University" in 1991. He can be reached at "kant50(at)web(dot)de".
Posted in Book Review, Essays	| Tagged Holocaust, Russian Mennonites	| 1 Reply
Mennonite Fascism
Posted on April 27, 2017 by Ben Goossen
Fascism often begins with sex. It can rely especially on anxieties about men of color having sex with white women.1 The pattern holds for Mennonite fascism, a specifically Anabaptist political philosophy modeled on Nazism that during the 1930s found support among German-speaking Mennonites around the world. While there are many sides to Mennonite fascism, I will focus here on the writings of J.J. Hildebrand—a Winnipeg-based immigrant from the Soviet Union who in 1933 proposed the formation of a fascist "Mennostaat," or Mennonite State.2 This tale unfolds in a moment of global uncertainty, in which the legacies of the First World War and the shock of the Great Depression had sent democracy into retreat. Strongmen like Hitler and Mussolini drew praise even in places like Great Britain or the United States, and for many Mennonites, fascism's unabashed racism seemed both to explain why their church had experienced so much persecution and also to offer a buffer against fresh assaults.
J.J. Hildebrand, Mennonite fascist, ca. 1930. Credit: J.J. Hildebrand Collection, Photograph Ca MHC 303-6.0, Mennonite Heritage Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Enter J.J. Hildebrand: a successful businessman born in Ukraine, a longtime advocate for Mennonite rights, and an avid observer of Nazi Germany. Emigrating to Canada after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Hildebrand had spent the following decade promoting various settlement schemes for anti-Soviet coreligionists who, like himself, were seeking both refuge from communism and economic security in their new American homelands. According to Hildebrand, Mennonites constituted a pure-blooded "nation" or "race" that, since arising in Central Europe 400 years previously, had become scattered across the earth. Dispersed among foreign populations whom he described as Russian, Persian, Chinese, Mongolian, Polish, Mexican, Paraguayan, and Brazilian, members of the faith supposedly faced a global plague of racial defilement, that if continued, might lead to their ultimate demise. Writing for the widely-read Canadian denominational paper, Mennonitische Rundschau, or "Mennonite Review," Hildebrand emphasized the danger to his readers: "our Mennonite girls—to which we, Mennonite men, have the first and only right, and whom we approach only via the honest path to the altar—are now exposed to the sexual caprices of these and similar types." Such a reality "makes my Germanic blood boil," Hildebrand explained. "Yours too?"3
One can imagine the fifty-three-year-old Hildebrand in his Winnipeg office—fully bald, dark-rimmed glasses framing a face he fancied "Germanic"—fantasizing about the Mennonite girls whose sexuality he considered the property of his kind. The issue held significance against the recent backdrop of mass immigration from Eastern Europe; in contrast to the wealth and power of Anabaptist life in formerly tsarist Russia, many new arrivals faced unaccustomed hardship, to which hundreds of families responded by sending their daughters to perform domestic labor in Canadian cities.4 What bothered Hildebrand was not just the thought of brown men in dark alleyways forcing themselves on defenseless white women, as the racist stereotype held, but more insidiously the possibility that inter-ethnic relationships might be consensual—that Mennonite women in the diaspora might be led astray, allowing their wombs and thus their bloodlines to be lost to the race. Indeed, race: Hildebrand thought of Mennonitism as a distinct racial category, interwoven by centuries of intermarriage. A Native American or Indonesian convert—or even the Canadian "English"—could never be Mennonite in this sense. "There are no Slavic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Indian, Malayan, Chinese, or Japanese Mennonites," Hildebrand wrote. Even if converts practiced adult baptism, foot washing, opposition to oaths, and nonresistance, they would only be Christians. Mennonitism stemmed "from our racial origins."5
How to ensure that Mennonites preserved their racial stock, that the right women bred with the right men? Hildebrand's solution was the formation of a Mennonite State. Envisioning the "collection of our race from across the entire globe," he proposed the establishment of an autonomous, self-administered territory. The initial sketch was vague enough to be humorous: the world's 500,000 Mennonites could build a homeland on, say, one to seventeen islands. Their official languages would be Low and High German. Their currency, the Menno-Gulden would be pegged to the gold standard and worth 25 US cents. Each family would be given 120 acres to farm, and each household would elect one representative to the local "district assembly." Every district assembly (each with around 100 members representing 1,000 families) would then elect two representatives to the "state assembly." To fund the venture, Hildebrand recommended that proponents donate to a hypothetical "Menno-Collection-World-Union." Contributors would each wear small medallions showing doves with peace palms against a blue field—"external signs" reminiscent of Nazi armbands.6
My new book explores the origins, nature, and consequences of Mennonite fascism
Easily the oddest detail here is Hildebrand's inclusion of the peace dove. All the other elements conform to the typical trappings of 1930s-era fascism. Racial utopias and agrarian settlements were hallmarks of fascist movements across Europe and the Americas, as was the general activity of planning the obscure details of future political and economic systems—from which certain groups, usually Jews, would be excluded. Even the concept of an island state held fascist connotations. At least some readers of the Mennonitische Rundschau, where Hildebrand's piece appeared, were familiar with books like Aryan Race, Christian Culture, and the Jewish Problem (1931), an anti-Semitic pamphlet that advocated removing the world's Jews from their countries of residence and sending them to Madagascar.7 Despite frequently comparing themselves to Jews (in fact Hildebrand conceived his Mennonite State as a "solution" to the "Mennonite Problem," language evoking contemporaneous efforts to "solve" the so-called Jewish Problem), Mennonite newspapers and institutions across Canada and beyond were rife with anti-Semitism.8
But what about the dove? What made Hildebrand's proposal absolutely unique in the history of political philosophy was that it represented a strange but surprisingly popular brand of pacifist fascism. The "Mennonite Problem" that Hildebrand hoped to solve was certainly about persecution, sex, and racial defilement. It was also about military service. While nonresistance had been a major tenet of Anabaptist thought until the nineteenth century, the rise of mass conscription and especially the events of the First World War had quite literally brought the principle under fire. "Peaceful coexistence of nations," Hildebrand wrote, "the peace ideal—this Mennonite cultural inheritance—has been packed away in the travel trunk for protection, and in many states our freedom from military service has been trod under foot." With yet more wars and revolutions looming on the horizon, Hildebrand believed that as long as Mennonites lived in militarist states, their pacifism would not survive the night. The state "sends the police into our homes to conscript our sons for war; it sends the police to confiscate our horses, wagons, grain, and more for war; it dictates the impossibly high taxes to cover the costs of war."9
Hildebrand's idea of a "peace island" inspired discussion among Mennonites across Canada and beyond.10 Over the following year, his proposal generated a lively debate in the denominational press about the feasibility and desirability of establishing a separatist Mennonite State. "Where is it supposed to be built?" wondered one skeptic, before going on to lay out the difficulty of gathering a half million Mennonites from a dozen countries, convincing them all to live and work together, and then going about the tricky business of setting up a bureaucracy and establishing diplomatic relations with other countries. "And would we eventually have communists among us?" he went on. "What do we do with them? Gently reprimand them? Or throw them out so that they go to our neighbors and turn them against us? Or perhaps condemn them to death?" Some issues generated laughter. Would mustaches be banned in the Mennonite State? But the most serious concerns revolved around military service: how could a pacifist state ensure its independence without eventually raising an army—and thus abandoning nonresistance? In the case of an invasion, foreign occupiers might, ironically, "also be interested in our beautiful girls, so that Hildebrand's Germanic blood may once again be brought to a boil."11
The Mennonite State never materialized—at least as Hildebrand imagined. Brushing aside questions of feasibility, he reasoned that although an independent Poland had seemed impossible before the First World War, the conflict had forged nearly overnight this improbable victory. As for small, defenseless states that managed to avoid military engagement, Hildebrand dove into the history and political structures of Switzerland, Andorra, San Marino, and Monaco. The dreamer went so far as to reach out to foreign governments about granting "complete, treaty independence" for possible Mennonite States across Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. One response from Australia informed Hildebrand that his request was "quite impossible.12" Political will was also lacking within the denomination. This wariness reflected, in part, a skepticism of Hildebrand himself. Although prominent, wealthy, and relatively well-connected, Hildebrand had never been quite as influential as he would have liked. If many commentators felt a Mennonite State was in theory possible, constructing it would require a feat worthy of a Moses or a Hitler. "In any event, Hildebrand is not this Moses," one personal acquaintance assessed. "He may have Führer ambitions and Führer desires; Führer talent he does not have."13
When viewed from the long arc of Anabaptist history, it is perhaps tempting to dismiss Mennonite fascism as a hapless anomaly. "Why don't we relegate 'the Mennonite State' to the archive…?" suggested the editor of the Mennonitische Rundschau in an exasperated aside after one of Hildebrand's more fanciful articles. "All in favor, raise your hands!"14 By April 1934, the matter seemed sufficiently closed that another author could refer to Hildebrand's intervention as "unhappy and somewhat erstwhile."15 Nevertheless, the Mennonite State was not a laughing stock. And Hildebrand was a serious enough figure to spark thoughtful debate. Consider the 1935 response of B.B. Janz, a prominent Mennonite Brethren church leader—and also an immigrant from the Soviet Union—who criticized Hildebrand's proposal not for its implausibility but because it hit too close to home. "But wait," Janz wrote, "we have already attempted the Mennonite State, whole hog."16 Referring to the large semi-autonomous Mennonite settlements in the Black Sea region of the former Russian Empire, Janz noted that for more than one hundred years, Mennonites had exercised judicial, administrative, and educational independence. And what had it wrought? In his telling, conflict upon conflict—from tax and land issues to the persecution of one new religious movement after another: the Kleine Gemeinde, the Mennonite Brethren, the Templers.
Mennonites in Canada, especially recent immigrants from the Soviet Union, often praised the Third Reich or modified fascism for their own purposes. Here, a Mennonite choir performs at a Nazi rally in Manitoba. "Hitler Salute: Local Germans Hail Re-birth of Fatherland Under Fuehrer," Winnipeg Free Press, January 30, 1939, 1.
Whether or not B.B. Janz was right about the deleterious nature of Mennonite administration in old Russia, during the years between the World Wars, he was surely in the minority of Mennonites from Eastern Europe who did not think back on the settlements with fondness. "As I was still a boy, I often and gladly looked over the green gardens and forest-filled villages of the Molotschna [colony]," volunteered a more nostalgic writer. "I loved the whole settlement, containing the whole Mennonite nation as I knew it. At that time, I too dreamed of the formation of a country where no Russian or anyone else would order us about and where Mennonitism could unfold in its full glory."17 Stripped of their wistful sheen, such notions found deep resonance in the new imperial projects of European fascists—movements that shared Hildebrand's racism but whose power was far greater. "Germany is fighting for its rehabilitation and for its lost colonies," reported an Ontario-based author in the Mennonitische Rundschau. "And when this moment arrives, then we may hope that we will be incorporated into that country, whose sons and daughters we are, whose spirit is our spirit, whose blood is our blood—as an independent Mennonite colony under German protection."18
Visions for racially homogeneous Mennonite settlements under fascist rule found realization in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Here, Heinrich Himmler (third from right), head of the SS and an architect of the Holocaust, at a flag raising in the Molotschna Mennonite colony, 1942
Why care about Mennonite fascism? One answer is that it was far more widespread than has generally been recognized. Well beyond statist debates in the Mennonitische Rundschau, similar ideas found adherents and interlocutors among populations across Europe and the Americas. Some pockets were remote and unexpected. Schoolchildren in Paraguay's Gran Chaco, for example, could read about "Mennonites as Genealogical Community" in one biology textbook: "They form a large family or clan. In their veins flows the same German blood."19 In other contexts, the ideology's influence was monumental. Across the ocean in the Third Reich, Mennonites found a special place in Nazi racial theory. During the Second World War, when Hitler's armies conquered large swaths of the Soviet Union, prominent fascists visited, praised, and supported the large German-speaking Mennonite colonies in occupied Ukraine. Harrowing experiences under communism had prepared the way for a warm reception. "I was no enemy of the Soviets," one local explained to Nazi occupiers, "but now that I've come to know them, you'll find I'm a true enemy. Now I'm a Hitlerite, a fascist unto death."20
Mennonites in Eastern Europe generally collaborated with Nazi colonizers—if not always fully supporting their ideology or policies, as historian Aileen Friesen explains in a recent post. While occupiers built up local settlements like Chortitza and Molotschna, providing aid and services not dissimilar from the visions of Hildebrand and his supporters, death squads—some with Mennonite members—massacred nearly all of Ukraine's 1.2 million Jews, including tens of thousands in and around the Mennonite colonies. This is what fascism looked like in its rawest form. Hildebrand's "peace island" was indeed an unachievable fantasy, but not because there was insufficient will to produce a racially-pure utopia. It was a fantasy because fascism is always built on racial exclusion—and hate is inherently violent. J.J. Hildebrand himself spent the Second World War in Allied Canada. While he was a decorated member of the Nazi German Canadian League, he did not personally participate in ethnic cleansing. Yet whether in democratic Canada, rural Paraguay, or the Third Reich, Mennonite fascism was never innocuous. Listen to the second stanza of Hildebrand's proposed anthem for the Mennonite State, set to the tune of Germany's own national song:
Our girls among foreigners
become ever more lost to us
Who however for our young men
alone have been predestined.
Have you for our girls
not a dear warm heart?
To wrest them from the yellow to-
bacco chewer's unwelcome jape?21
Lest we think that peace theology alone shields us from the dangers of racial nationalism, let it be said: pacifists can be fascists, too. In the 1930s and 1940s there were plenty of Mennonite fascists, pacifist or otherwise. As a denomination we have not yet come to terms with this past, nor have we fully examined which elements of Mennonite fascism slipped past the end of the Second World War, which snippets of our theology and worldviews remain influenced by the once prominent drive for Germanic racial purity in many Mennonite congregations. Paraguayan biology classes, to name one example, continued referring to Mennonites as a blood community well into the postwar years, while in Germany, a popular Mennonite history book authored by a former Nazi and emphasizing genealogical transmission remained in print as recently as 1995.22 In North America, too, we frequently hear claims that Anabaptism is a German religion or that Mennonitism constitutes a family church. Violence and exclusion, including oppressive uses of peace theology, can be tied up in such claims. We should ask: who is marginalized, demonized, or rejected in our own congregations—whether in the name of religion, nation, immigration status, or sexual orientation?
Were J.J. Hildebrand writing today, he would undoubtedly see justification for new nativist projects in the right-wing populism sweeping Europe, the United States, and the world. Nor would he be alone. Fascism as a self-conscious movement is once again gaining prominence. Indeed, immigration restrictions in the United States, power grabs in Asia and Latin America, and refugee backlash in Europe—along with a shocking spate of anti-Semitism, anti-Islamic sentiment, homophobia, and Holocaust denialism in both official and unofficial places—demonstrate that in essence, if not in formal name, the logic at fascism's core already holds political power.
Mennonites are not immune.
This article draws on research conducted for my book, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, out this month from Princeton University Press. Thanks to Uwe Friesen, Rachel Waltner Goossen, Conrad Stoesz, John Thiesen, James Urry, and Madeline Williams for their assistance.
For a brief introduction to fascism, see Robert Paxton's excellent, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Random House, 2007). On fascism and sex, see Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 10-63. ↩
The most extensive treatment of J.J. Hildebrand and his Mennostaat proposal is James Urry, "A Mennostaat for the Mennovolk? Mennonite Immigrant Fantasies in Canada in the 1930s," Journal of Mennonite Studies 14 (1996): 65-80. For Hildebrand's context among recent Mennonite immigrants to Canada between the World Wars, see James Urry, Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood: Europe—Russia— Canada, 1525 to 1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2006), 185-204. On the Mennonite paper, Die Mennonitische Rundschau, in which Hildebrand published his proposal, see Harry Loewen and James Urry, "A Tale of Two Newspapers: Die Mennonitische Rundschau (1880-2007) and Der Bote (1924-2008)," Mennonite Quarterly Review 86, no. 2 (April 2012): 175-204. On the generally German nationalist orientation of the immigrant Mennonite press in 1930s Canada, see Frank Epp, "An Analysis of Germanism and National Socialism in the Immigrant Newspaper of a Canadian Minority Group, the Mennonites, in the 1930's" (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1965). ↩
J.J. Hildebrand, "Zeichen der Zeit!" Die Mennonitische Rundschau, March 29, 1933, 4. ↩
Marlene Epp has emphasized how Mennonite immigrant families and church communities generated anxieties around the sexual safety of female domestic laborers while also asserting patriarchal control over these women's movements and earnings: Mennonite Women in Canada: A History (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2008), 42-51. ↩
J.J. Hildebrand, "Mennonitische Geschichte: 60 Jahre später," Die Mennonitische Rundschau, March 28, 1934, 2. For Hildebrand's views of many non-Mennonite Canadians as racially "English," see J.J. Hildebrand, "Our Flag is One Thing. Our Race is Another," Winnipeg Free Press, November 27, 1937, 24. ↩
Hildebrand, "Zeichen der Zeit!" 5-6 ↩
Egon van Winghene, Arische Rasse, Christliche Kultur und das Judenproblem (Erfurt: U. Bodung-Verlag, 1931). For a Mennonite review, see A. Kröker, "Zum Judenproblem," Die Mennonitische Rundschau, March 14, 1934, 2-3. On van Winghene's book and its context, see Magnus Brechtken, Madagaskar für die Juden (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997), 38-42. ↩
On Nazi sentiment among Mennonites in Canada, see Frank Epp, "Kanadische Mennoniten, das Dritte Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg," Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter 31 (1974): 91-102; Benjamin Redekop, "Germanism Among Mennonite Brethren Immigrants in Canada, 1930–1960: A Struggle for Ethno-Religious Integrity," Canadian Ethnic Studies 24 (1992): 20-42 ↩
Hildebrand, "Zeichen der Zeit!" 5-6. ↩
Argus, "O x O burg," Die Mennonitische Rundschau, May 10, 1933, 12. ↩
Incertus [probably elder Jacob H. Janzen], "Zur Hildebrand-Utopie," Die Mennonitische Rundschau, May 10, 1933, 11. ↩
Quotations from Urry, "A Mennostaat," 65 ↩
Incertus, "Zur Hildebrand-Utopie," 11. ↩
J.J. Hildebrand, "Ueber Mennostaat," Die Mennonitische Rundschau, May 10, 1933, 14. ↩
B.W., "Wanderungen," Die Mennonitische Rundschau, April 4, 1934, 2 ↩
B.B. Janz, "Woher und Wohin: Streiflichter auf die mennonitischen Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft," Die Mennonitische Rundschau, April 10, 1935, 3. ↩
J.B.W., "Mennonitisches Problem," Die Mennonitische Rundschau, April 26, 1933, 4. ↩
B.W., "Wanderungen," 2. ↩
Naturkunde, Erdkunde, Täufer und Mennonitengeschichte für die Volkschulen: 6. Schuljahr (Philadelphia, Paraguay; Druckerei "Menno-Blatt," 1943), 17. ↩
Franz Hamm, "Schilderung des Volksdeutschen Franz Hamm über ein Jahr Gefängnisleben," March 8, 1942, T-81/606/5396745-51, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. ↩
J.J. Hildebrand, "Zu meinen 'Zeichen der Zeit,'" Die Mennonitische Rundschau, April 19, 1933, 12. ↩
Naturkunde für die mennonitischen Volksschulen, 5.-6. Schuljahr (Philadelphia, Paraguay: Druckerei "Menno-Blatt," 1954), 32-33; Horst Penner, Horst Gerlach, and Horst Quiring, Weltweite Bruderschaft: Ein mennonitisches Geschichtsbuch, fifth edition (Kirchheimbolanden: GTS-Druck, 1995). ↩
Posted in Essays	| Tagged Holocaust, Mennonites and National Socialism, Mennonites and Race, Russian Mennonites	| 5 Replies
Soviet Mennonites, the Holocaust & Nazism: Part 1
Posted on April 25, 2017 by Aileen Friesen
Almost a year ago, an article appeared in the Canadian Mennonite that caused a brief, yet significant controversy. Ben Goossen, a scholar of global history, wrote an article entitled, "Becoming Aryan," in which he challenged Mennonite churches to acknowledge that Mennonites had benefitted from Nazi racial policies, which had also instigated and justified violence against the Jewish people. He chose the Soviet Mennonites as his case study to illustrate the sins of our Mennonite past, implying that not only had Soviet Mennonites profited from Nazism, but also that under German occupation Soviet Mennonites in Ukraine had "first learned to think of themselves as Aryan."1
Adelsheim choir at the church in Nikolaifeld, Molochna, Russia, during German occupation, ca. 1941. (Mennonite Library and Archives, Photo Collection, 2004-0071)
Members of the Soviet Mennonite community in Leamington, Ontario, objected to this version of their story. In a short response, Johanna Dyck, on behalf of other Soviet Mennonites, challenged Goossen's interpretation of their lived experience. As she wrote, "The choices we made in Ukraine were not motivated by Aryan, National Socialist or racist theories, but, rather, were based on the Stalinist extermination of Mennonites from 1937 to 1940. This oppression and persecution was not unlike that which our religious group faced in earlier historic times… Further, we confirm that we had not heard of Aryanism and other racial theories until well after the conclusion of the war."2
The role of Soviet Mennonites in the Holocaust has recently received much attention. I feel compelled to unpack these two narratives of Soviet Mennonites as either complicit participants and perpetrators (inspired, in part, by their treatment under Communism) or as unimpeachable victims of the policies and actions of both Soviet and Nazi governments. Both these narratives distort the past and are unhelpful in forging a path towards atonement for Mennonite churches. It should be noted that the issue of atonement with regards to the Holocaust is not new within the Canadian Mennonite community. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Canadian government levelled accusations of Nazi collaboration against Jacob Luitjens, Mennonites debated issues of collaboration, accountability, forgiveness, and atonement in the pages of the Mennonite Reporter.3 One letter writer, Alfred Heinrichs, offered a path for Mennonites to show contrition: "First, we need to draft a statement that takes ownership of our involvement in the Jewish solution. Second, we need to stage a public meeting with the Jewish community as we seek forgiveness. Third, we need to find ways of doing service projects together with the Jewish community as it seeks to build a bond of fellowship."4
Like Heinrichs and Goossen, I view this not as a hunt for the guilty, but rather an opportunity for Mennonites in Europe and the Americas to exercise a collective acknowledgment of our failings during this period. Notice that I say "our" failings. To engage in a conversation of atonement, it is important for those of us who were not placed in untenable positions, not forced to make compromised choices, to acknowledge that faced with same dilemmas we also might not have emerged morally unscathed. It is time to heed this call for collective responsibility.
While I appreciate that Goossen presented a simplified narrative in order to make a broader point, we need to be cautious in our use of the Soviet Mennonite story.5 Within the Canadian Mennonite community, the experience of the 1940s refugees has been marginalized and appropriated in service of the Russlaender (or the 1920s Mennonite immigrants) narrative of the horrors of Communism. I fear that now the Soviet Mennonite story is once again being co-opted, only this time into a narrative that has its foundations in the Mennonite experience within Germany. In reality, relatively little academic research has been conducted on the Soviet Mennonites.6 Before we can truly unpack this encounter between Soviet Mennonites and Nazism, we must develop a better understanding of what happened to Mennonites in Ukraine during the 1920s and 1930s. The suffering experienced by Soviet Mennonites under Communism did make them susceptible to Nazi ideology during the Second World War. But this narrative is too simplistic. It neglects the communal suffering experienced by Mennonites and their Ukrainian and Jewish neighbours as well as the role of 'the terror' in shaping relations within Mennonite communities.7 It also underestimates how Soviet nationality policy influenced the development of Mennonite identity. Over my next several posts, I would like to explore elements of Soviet Mennonite history before and during German occupation to add nuance to the positions that Goossen and Dyck expressed in the Canadian Mennonite.
For this discussion to proceed, one point needs to be made clear: some Soviet Mennonites participated directly in the Holocaust, which means they took part in 'actions' in which Jews were murdered (including men, women and children). In Ukraine, the Holocaust unfolded in a very public and brutal way, with the execution of Jews outside of towns and villages, often, though not exclusively, with help from the local police.8 Mennonites participated in these police forces in a variety of functions (as did other Soviet Germans and Ukrainians). Such a statement is still controversial for some Mennonites; this denial cannot continue. Direct Mennonite participation in the Holocaust is a fact. Even before Gerhard Rempel published an article attesting to this point in the Mennonite Quarterly Review, the first chair in Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Harry Loewen, who also was a Soviet Mennonite, published the following: "Some [Soviet] Mennonite young men joined the German forces voluntarily and gladly, or at least did not resist induction…Some Mennonites even took part in "actions" against Jews…"9 Stories told informally among Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union confirm this reality.10 Nonetheless, at this moment in time, we simply do not know the extent of the direct participation of Soviet Mennonites. This issue requires digging through memoirs, survivor accounts, German archives as well as those in the former Soviet Union to write micro histories of these "actions" and of the villages, towns and cities where Jews and Mennonites lived together in Ukraine.11 This is painstaking, but necessary work before we can assess whether these perpetrators were a few lost souls or a significant number of young Mennonite men.12
Goossen draws our attention beyond the issue of direct participation in atrocities into the realm of complicity. As a result of their elevated position within the Nazi racial hierarchy, we must question whether the designation of 'bystander' is entirely appropriate for Soviet Mennonites living under occupation in Ukraine. This is a difficult question. Mennonites benefitted from their Volksdeutsche status given to them by their Nazi "liberators". Yet it is hard to read Susanna Toews' account and view her as anything but a woman faithful to God, who survived, despite experiencing unimaginable hardships. In fact, the role of women in keeping the Mennonite faith alive in Ukraine and in defining what it meant to be 'Mennonite' has been overlooked within the recent academic literature.13 She presented a basic, but in many ways unflinching view of her life under German occupation and her participation in "The Great Trek" in 1943. Her account is straightforward and filtered through a distinctly Christian lens. She expressed her "disappointment" in the attitude of German soldiers towards the Christian faith. She interpreted the murder of Jews by German soldiers as an example of how "unbelief reign[ed] in Germany."14 She judged people (including other Mennonites) by their kindness and compassion towards others. Anyone who helped her and her sister during the Great Trek, regardless of their ethnic background, was remembered with gratitude, including Russians, Poles, and Germans. She recalled her appreciation that the Polish people were "kind to us" despite having been "evicted from their homes" to make room for this caravan of Volksdeutsche.15
This eviction is just one example of how Toews benefitted from the Nazi racial policies; yet the question remains, how did this privilege influence her identity? At least some sources indicate that Mennonites felt uneasy and ashamed of their treatment by the German occupiers in comparison with that of their Jewish and Ukrainian neighbours. This shame, one might argue, stemmed from their shared suffering during collectivization, dekulakization, and the 1932-33 famine. We must remember that the Soviet Mennonites, more than previous generations, had the language skills necessary to communicate with their neighbours. (These language skills, of course, are one of the reasons that the German occupiers so eagerly integrated them into the administrative system). As John Sawtazky from Osterwick recalled,
"We soon heard that Jews were being killed. At first we didn't believe it, but it wasn't long before we learned it was true. Some of my best friends were Jews. We had worked side by side and shared the same hardships. Now we were different. They were targeted, and their lives were in jeopardy, all due to their nationality. I could not face the Jews anymore. I was ashamed."16
Interactions with the realities of the Holocaust formed deep impressions in the memories of Soviet Mennonites. In her 1946 interview with David Boder, Anna Braun, a 40 year-old woman from Einlage, confirmed that Mennonites were strongly affected by what was happening to their Jewish neighbors. She claimed to have challenged German soldiers on this topic, telling them "…it is wrong the way you treat the Jews, murdering the Jews, who are the chosen people."17 Another woman, Helen Rempel Wiens Franz, recalled the plight of one family in her village. A Russian woman, Vera, who was married to a Jewish man, was given the choice of living or dying with her husband and children: she chose to die. As Franz wrote, "I saw Vera walking across the yard with her baby in her arms. She had been given a chance to save herself, but her husband and his children would be shot. Knowing what happened to Vera made a deep impression on me to this very day. She had chosen to die with her family…"18 John Sawatzky confirmed this event in his memoirs, adding that Vera's choice had "touched all people in [Osterwick]."19
While one can find examples of Soviet Mennonites who embraced Nazi ideology, we can also find those who disapproved of these ideas and the actions they justified. This story, however, is complex. In my next posts, I will attempt to unpack the meaning of "Mennonite" in Ukraine as well as address the more troubling aspects of Mennonite encounters with Nazism, including the issue of antisemitism and the persistence within the Mennonite community of the idea of Judeo-Communism as an explanation and justification for the fate of Jews in Ukraine.
"Becoming Aryan," accessed April 1, 2017, http://www.canadianmennonite.org/becoming-aryan. ↩
"Readers Write: November 7, 2016 Issue," accessed April 1, 2017, http://www.canadianmennonite.org/stories/readers-write-november-7-2016-issue. ↩
For example, Gerlof Homan, "Luitjens should apologize and seek forgiveness" Mennonite Reporter (21 November 1988), 8; Edward Enns "Disappointment in coverage on Luitjens" Mennonite Reporter (26 September 1988), 7; John Miller "We must quit hatred of Nazis and repent of our wrong-doing" Mennonite Reporter (19 April 1993), 6; Ruth Heinrichs "Letters: Luitjens must face his day in court" Mennonite Reporter (26 September 1988), 6. Similar processes of uncovering and deporting those accused of Nazi collaboration also occurred in the United States. See Eric C. Steinhart, "The Chameleon of Trawniki: Jack Reimer, Soviet Volksdeutsche, and the Holocaust," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23, no. 2 (October 1, 2009): 239–62. ↩
Alfred Heinrichs, "Move from Damage Control to Cooperation" Mennonite Reporter (6 April 1992), 8. ↩
In his broader work, Goossen has recognized that more research needs to be done on how Mennonites interpreted these categories. See Benjamin W. Goossen, "Measuring Mennonitism: Racial Categorization in Nazi Germany and Beyond," Journal of Mennonite Studies 34 (January 2016): 240. ↩
Two exceptions are Colin Neufeldt and Peter Letkemann. See, for example, Peter Letkemann, "The Fate of Mennonites in the Volga-Ural Region, 1929-1941," Journal of Mennonite Studies 26 (January 2008): 181–200; Peter Letkemann, "Mennonite Victims of 'The Great Terror,' 1936-1938," Journal of Mennonite Studies 16 (January 1998): 33–58; Colin P. Neufeldt, "Separating the Sheep from the Goats: The Role of Mennonites and Non-Mennonites in the Dekulakization of Khortitsa, Ukraine (1928-1930)," Mennonite Quarterly Review 83, no. 2 (April 2009): 221–91; Colin Peter Neufeldt, The Public and Private Lives of Mennonite Kolkhoz Chairmen in the Khortytsia and Molochansk German National Raĭony in Ukraine (1928-1934) (Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh, 2015). ↩
Thanks to James Urry for bringing this point to my attention ↩
For more about the role of the local police in the Holocaust in Ukraine and the participation of Soviet Germans in their ranks, see Martin Dean, "Soviet Ethnic Germans and the Holocaust in the Reich Holocaust in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine," in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 248–71; Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-44 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003). ↩
Harry Loewen, "A Mennonite-Christian View of Suffering: The Case of Russian Mennonites in the 1930s and 1940s," The Mennonite Quarterly Review 77, no. 1 (January 2003): 55. ↩
See, for instance, Doris L. Bergen, "Protestant, Catholics, Mennonites and Jews: Identities and Institutions in Holocaust Studies," in Holocaust Scholarship: Personal Trajectories and Professional Interpretations, ed. Christopher R. Browning et al. (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 149. ↩
Omer Bartov draws our attention to the importance of understanding local dynamics, including the "cultures, languages, traditions and politics" of Jewish victims and of their neighbours. He also emphasizes that relatively little work has been done on the "triangular relationship between Jews, local gentiles, and the German perpetrators." Omer Bartov, "Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide," The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 3 (2008): 561–62. ↩
Harvey Dyck, for instance, writes that "a handful of youthful Mennonites in the Soviet Union undoubtedly participated in the persecution and murder of Jews during World War II." See Jacob A Neufeld, Path of Thorns: Soviet Mennonite Life under Communist and Nazi Rule, ed. Harvey L. Dyck, trans. Sarah Dyck (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 48. ↩
For more on this role of women, see Marlene Epp, Women Without Men: Mennonite Refugees of the Second World War (University of Toronto Press, 2000). ↩
Susanna Toews, Trek to Freedom: The Escape of Two Sisters from South Russia during World War II (Winkler: Heritage Valley Publications, 1976), 19–20. ↩
Ibid., 31. ↩
John Sawatzky, "The Fate of a Jewish Friend," in Road to Freedom: Mennonites Escape the Land of Suffering, ed. Harry Loewen (Kitchener: Pandora Press, 2000), 61. Helen Rempel Wiens Franz recalled that these Jewish families could all speak Low German. There are, of course, strong similarities between Yiddish and Low German. See Helen Rempel Wiens Franz, "My Memoirs," Preservings, no. 23 (December 2003): 116. ↩
Thanks to James Urry for providing me with this source. David Boder, "David P. Boder Interviews Anna Braun; September 20, 1946; München, Germany : Voices of the Holocaust Project," accessed March 29, 2017, http://voices.iit.edu/interview?doc=braunA&display=braunA_en. ↩
Franz, "My Memoirs," 116. ↩
Sawatzky, "The Fate of a Jewish Friend," 61. ↩
Posted in Essays	| Tagged Holocaust, Mennonites and National Socialism, Russian Mennonites, Soviet Mennonites	| 3 Replies


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First, let's be clear. Live streaming isn't a fad, it's the future. It's like going to back to the 1950's and saying that the television is a fad and the radio…

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl