Tuesday, June 27, 2023
[RECOMMENDED READING] The Hitler Dilemma: A Mormon Boy in the German Army
The Hitler Dilemma: A Mormon Boy in the German Army
Saarbrücken, Germany 1938
Change is in the air in Max Adams's small village: The censorship of classic literature, the math and science courses, the addition of extra physical education classes. Along with thousands of other young men, he is forced into the Hitler Youth and is being groomed to become the next generation of Nazi soldiers. But as a faithful Latter-day Saint, how can Max serve the villain who destroyed his younger brother in his effort to create a Master Race a man who is bent on tearing apart not only a single nation also the entire world?
From the horrors of battle and the sorrow of separation from family to the privations of a prisoner of war, Carolyn Twede Frank's groundbreaking novelThe Hitler Dilemmais a poignant chronicle of one remarkable young man's struggle to reconcile his sense of duty with his staunch opposition to the evil tyrant destroying the country he loves.
Mormon Nazi resister Helmuth Hubener on Mormon Wiki
https://www.mormonwiki.com/Helmuth_Hubener
Helmuth Hubener
Helmuth Hübener was a teenaged anti-Nazi hero and a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was born January 8, 1925, in Hamburg, Germany. Helmuth's mother and grandparents were also members of the Church. His surname comes from his adoptive father. The family was not politically active.
Helmuth had been active in the Boy Scouts from a young age, but scouting was banned in Germany in 1935. He became a member of Hitler Youth until Kristalnacht, in which Hitler Youth participated. One of the leaders of Hübener's Mormon congregation, a new convert to the Church, sought to ban Jews from their meetings. There were about 2,000 members in the area, and only about 7 who were pro-Hitler. Five of those seven were in Hübener's congregation, causing much discussion among the members. Helmuth was one who opposed banning Jews and opposed Hitler.
In his teens, Helmuth began listening to BBC radio broadcasts (which was forbidden by the Nazis), and he determined that the British knew the truth about Hitler. He sought to spread the truth and reveal the evils of the Third Reich. He began to compose various anti-fascist texts and anti-war leaflets, of which he also made many copies. The pamphlets also predicted the war's futility and Germany's looming defeat. He also mentioned the mistreatment sometimes meted out in the Hitler Youth. [1]
In the fall of 1941, Hübener enlisted the help of fellow Latter-day Saints, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Ruddi Wobbe, and later Gerhard Duwer. They helped to distribute about 60 different pamphlets. On 5 February 1942, Helmuth Hübener was arrested by the Gestapo. On 11 August 1942, Hübener's case was tried at the Volksgerichtshof in Berlin, and on 27 October, at the age of 17, he was beheaded by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. His two friends, Schnibbe and Wobbe, who had also been arrested, were given prison sentences of five and ten years respectively.
The court decide to punish Hübener as an adult, because of his mature and sharp intellect. He was executed only seven hours after being told of his sentence. His lawyers and family had pleaded for life imprisonment instead of death for him. Since he was tried as an adult and an enemy of the State, he was subject to torture and difficult living conditions in prison.
Excommunication from the Church is often meted out to criminals, and after the sentence was revealed, local church authorities excommunicated Helmuth. As soon as the news reached church headquarters in Salt Lake City, however, church leaders immediately reinstated him into full church fellowship. Local leaders had not followed church policy, it was determined. The day of his execution he wrote to the fellow branch member, "I know that God lives and He will be the Just Judge in this matter ... I look forward to seeing you in a better world!" (Hübener at Dixie State College". 2005-03-14.) [2]
A youth centre and a pathway in Hamburg are now named for Helmuth Hübener. At the former Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, an exhibit about young Helmuth Hübener's resistance, trial, and execution is located in the former guillotine chamber, where floral tributes are often placed in memory of Hübener and others put to death by the Nazis there.
Hübener's story has been the subject of various literary, dramatic, and cinematic works. In 1969, German author Günter Grass wrote the book Örtlich betäubt ("Local anesthetic"), later translated into English, about the Hübener group. In 1979 Brigham Young University professor Thomas Rogers wrote a play titled Huebener, which has had several runs in various venues. Schnibbe, one of Hübener's co-accused, attended some of the performances on the BYU campus. Rudi Wobbe, another co-accused, attended one. Wobbe later died of cancer in 1992.
Schnibbe wrote the first-hand account When Truth Was Treason. The book Hübener vs. Hitler; A Biography of Helmuth Hübener, Mormon Teenage Resistance Leader, by Richard Lloyd Dewey was published in 2003; upon selling out the first edition, a second, revised edition with new material and corrections was released in late 2004.
Rudolf Wobbe (Hübener's other co-resistance fighter) wrote the book Before the Blood Tribunal. Published in 1989, the book provides a personal account of his own trial before the Volksgerichtshof, the infamous "people's court" of Nazi Germany. Rudi, as he was known, was charged with Conspiracy to Commit High Treason and Aiding and Abetting the Enemy. Chief Justice Fikeis sentenced him to 10 years for his participation in the resistance. The account also describes events leading up to the trials of the three German youths and Rudi's own experience as a prisoner. [3]
The 2008 juvenile novel The Boy Who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti, while fictional, is based on Hübener's life. Bartoletti's earlier Newbery Honor book, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow (2005), also covers Hübener's story. Hübener's story was documented in the 2003 movie Truth & Conviction, written and directed by Rick McFarland and Matt Whitaker. The movie, later released on DVD, was sponsored by the BYU College of Humanities. Truth & Treason A major motion picture based on the Hübener Group is currently being produced by Russ Kendall, Micah Merrill & Matt Whitaker of Kaleidoscope Pictures. Whitaker will also direct the film.
Christian Science under Hitler
Newspaper Comment on Nazi Edict Against Christian Science
[PAID ARTICLE] Christian Science in Nazi Germany by William Stillman
Nazis Hit Christian Science for Refuting Race Doctrine
Nazi Party Condemns Christian Science As Non-German, Liberal and Pacifist Sect
Time Religion: Nazi Ban on Christian Science
Lady Astor, Christian Science, Hitler and Danville, Virginia Mark Tooley
Thankfulness during Nazi wartime struggles Christian Science
Nazi opposer raised Christian Scientist
OUR JEWISH BRETHREN: CHRISTIAN SCIENCE RESPONSES TO KRISTALLNACHT
Christian Scientist Charles Gratke reports on the rise of Hitler
Christian Scientist Charles Gratke reports on the rise of Hitler
From the Collections: Charles Gratke reports
on the rise of Hitler
November 26, 2019
Daily morning news conference of The Christian Science Monitor editorial staff, circa 1945-1949. Left to Right: Saville Davis (American News Editor), Donovan Richardson (Chief Editorial Writer), Charles Gratke (Foreign News Editor), Edward Mills (City Editor), Erwin D. Canham (Editor), Paul Deland (Managing Editor), and Harry Hazeldine (Head of the Copy Desk). P08940. Unknown photographer. Courtesy The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
Our collections offer insights into the work of reporters for The Christian Science Monitor. Archival accounts from the newspaper’s staff portray a compelling incident involving correspondent Charles Edward Gratke (1901–1949). It took place in 1933, during the time of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power.
Gratke joined the Monitor staff in 1927, around the time he became a member of The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church). He had begun his reporting career in Astoria, Oregon, on his father’s newspaper, the Evening Budget. He worked in the Monitor’s New York bureau and in various other capacities, before taking over the duties of Berlin staff correspondent.1
During his time in Berlin, Gratke wrote several insightful articles on interwar Germany. He reported on a variety of topics, including how the Treaty of Versailles impacted the German economy, the state takeover of the German steel trust, and President Paul Von Hindenburg’s rejection of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in August 1932.2 Gratke interviewed Hitler in December 1931. Hitler then claimed that Germany’s economic problems, which were well documented, could be attributed to the weakness of the German government. According to Hitler, the fact that other countries did not “respect” Germany meant that it would be at a disadvantage in negotiations with other nations. Closing the article, Gratke directed the reader’s attention to the divisions of opinion surrounding Hitler, suggesting that his ambitions held ominous implications:
The last question pertained to [Hitler’s] attitude toward Parliament. “Whether I would govern with a Parliament depends on the Parliament,” he said, rising from his chair. A quick clap of the hand, and a short bow, and the man of whom millions of Germans expect a new ascent of their nation, and in whom other millions foresee disaster, left the room.3
While this interview may have been one of his most noteworthy reports from Germany, Gratke also wrote a series of articles about the challenges facing average citizens. Appearing under the title “Diary of an Onlooker in Germany,” they explained the different political philosophies competing for dominance, the role of tariffs, and the impact of war reparations on the German economy. Illustrating the connections between the government’s position and the citizen’s experience, he interviewed “Hans,” whom he described as invisible but ubiquitous:
“And suppose,” [Hans] continues, “you demand 1,000,000 marks. I cannot pay. Suppose you demand 100,000 marks. I cannot pay. Even if we negotiate and agree on 50,000 marks, still I cannot.”… [T]he definiteness with which Hans has come to regard his incapacity to pay has provided the Government with the backing to demand complete cancellation of reparations.4
Gratke’s efforts to provide accurate on-the-ground reporting in Germany took him to a March 2, 1933, rally at Berlin’s Sportpalast in Potsdamer Straße (today’s Potsdamer Platz), to hear Hitler speak about the problems of the national government. The speech was scheduled to be broadcast throughout Germany.5 He attended the rally with John Emlyn Williams, the Monitor’s Bureau Chief for Berlin,6 and two other colleagues. During Hitler’s speech, Nazi Brownshirts (part of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, or “storm unit”) attacked and beat Williams and Gratke. Williams described the experience in a letter to John S. Braithwaite, the European managing editor for The Christian Science Publishing Society:
Immediately after Hitler had spoken, while he was being cheered down the main aisle, I got up with the rest of the people [and] followed the rest of my neighbours in climbing on a chair to have a peep at him. Most of them had their hands up in the Nazi salute others were shouting “Heil Hitler” and similar things. I did not put my hand up. Then suddenly up came a youngster of about 18 years, hit me across the nose, at the same time saying, “Why don’t you put up your hands?” and a lot of similar stuff, and told me to get out. At the same time, some more uniformed Nazis appeared and dragged me to the side aisle, and then carried me out, administering kicks and hits on the way. After a great deal of this kind of thing, a Nazi who spoke English imperfectly was found who took me away in a corner. There we waited until the crowd subsided a little, and he told me “to be off home out of it.”… I may also add that the police just looked on while all this was going on, and one of them to whom I tried to show a police credential, in the course of being rushed out, just turned aside and ignored it.7
The subsequent characterization of this attack and various attributions of responsibility reveal the challenges the Monitor faced during the rise of Nazism during the 1930s. In an initial letter to Braithwaite, Alfred Bode, the newspaper’s German Advertising Manager, believed that the Monitor staffers bore responsibility for the situation:
It has been indisputably ascertained that the demeanour of Mr. Gratke had been provoking and that he had got his beating and was kicked out only in consequences of these provocations. It has also been ascertained that particulars of him have been recorded by the officials.8
Williams offered another interpretation:
The only incident I can think of is this, but it seems so absurd that I must laugh at it. During the course of Hitler’s speech, Gratke on one occasion asked me if I had understood what Hitler said as he had not been able to write it down. I said to G[ratke] that I had it in my head…. I touched the side of my head with my forefinger to indicate this the better. (According to what Ch[urchill] said afterwards this was taken by some Nazi uniformed people, who were watching from a stairway about thirty yards away, as a disparagement of the speaker—Hitler).9
This incident took place against a rising tide of anti-internationalism in Germany. Bode argued that Gratke had failed to consider the sentiments of the German people in his articles; that, in combination with his demeanor at the Sportpalast, was the reason he was attacked. He went on to blame Gratke’s Monitor coverage for the publication’s having been placed on a list of newspapers hostile to the German government.10 Williams wrote that such sentiments were representative of the political climate in Germany at the time:
I am forced to the conclusion that it is almost impossible at the present moment to get many of those who “ought to know better” to see anything that happens here except under the influence of the “revolution of national uplift.”11
Braithwaite reviewed the letters he received and responded to Bode on April 24, 1933. While he acknowledged that it may have been unwise for Gratke to attend the rally in the first place, he defended him:
[Gratke] is the one who is attacked, and he is the one who needs our help and support at this time, for however mistaken his actions may have been, they have been done in good faith, and he is [a] loyal Christian Scientist.12
The discussion in these archival documents surrounding the March 2 attack on Gratke and Williams reveals some of the perils Monitor reporters faced in trying to bring truth to their reporting. It also suggests the paths the participants would subsequently take. Bode was dismissed from his post with the Monitor in 1935, and in 1936 he denounced both the newspaper and The Mother Church for the Nazi periodical Der Judenkenner, claiming that the church was involved in a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy.13 Gratke was relocated to London and then returned to Boston, where he served the Monitor as General News Editor and then Foreign News Editor.14 He received the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Française for his work in organizing news out of France during the Nazi occupation. He also won the annual award of Sigma Delta Chi for his survey of Germany under occupation in 1946.15 Gratke remained with the Monitor until July 12,1949, when he was one of 13 American news reporters killed in a Royal Dutch Airlines crash in Bombay, India.16
Throughout his career with the Monitor, Gratke showed appreciation for its mission. In an article for the Christian Science Sentinel, he pointed out that Mary Baker Eddy had not intended for the Monitor to be “just another newspaper.” It was not enough to merely “record” the news; instead, he referenced the Monitor’s coverage of the German invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece, which had begun on April 6, 1941:
And the human news certainly was not encouraging. Yet what appeared most important, after that day was over, was not the fact that we had achieved a fairly lucid and balanced account of what was happening. Nor was it that we were saved from the pitfalls of overstatement and sensationalism. It was rather an article which appeared in the Monitor…. “There is always a danger lest in times of stress thought should become so concentrated on the pressure of immediate circumstances as to render the whole picture of events completely out of focus…. Truth alone restores all things to their proper perspective.”17
Bode – Braithwaite letter
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”Charles Edward Gratke,” undated, Church Archives, Box 20228, Folder 121887.
Charles E. Gratke, “Reich Erects Sign on Road to Recovery,” The Christian Science Monitor, 10 June 1932, 1; Gratke, “German Golden Relief Chain Grows Long and Burdensome,” Monitor, 27 June1932, 1; Gratke, “Hindenburg’s Emphatic ‘No’ Blocks Hitler,” Monitor, 15 August 1932, 1.
“Hitler Defends Strong Reich As Basis of French Accord,” Monitor, 22 December 1931, 1. While Gratke’s name does not accompany the article, Erwin Canham attributes the article to Gratke in Commitment to Freedom: The Story of The Christian Science Monitor, (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958), 291, 446.
Gratke, “Diary of an Onlooker in Germany,” Monitor, 18 July 1932, 18.
Alfred Bode to John S. Braithwaite, 5 April 1933, Church Archives, Box 20241, Folder 119875.
Elaine Follis, “Weapons of Our Warfare: Christian Science in the Third Reich,” 2001, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Archives, Box 540637, Folder 201455674, 55.
J. Emlyn Williams to J.S. Braithwaite, 5 April 1933, Church Archives, Box 20241, Folder 119875.
Alfred Bode to John S. Braithwaite, 5 April 1933, Church Archives, Box 20241, Folder 119875.
Williams to Braithwaite, 5 April 1933, Church Archives, Box 20241, Folder 119875.
Bode to Braithwaite, 5 April 1933, Church Archives, Box 20241, Folder 119875.
Williams to Braithwaite, 5 April 1933, Church Archives, Box 20241, Folder 119875.
Braithwaite to Bode, 24 April 1933, Church Archives, Box 20241, Folder 119875.
Elaine Follis, “Weapons of Our Warfare: Christian Science in the Third Reich,” 2001, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Archives, Box 540637, Folder 201455674, 46, 78.
”Charles Edward Gratke,” undated, Church Archives, Box 20228, Folder 121887.
“Careers of Dead in India Air Crash,” The New York Times, 13 July 1949, 3.
“13 American Newsmen Killed When Plane Crashes in India,” The Christian Science Monitor, 12 July 1949, 1.
Charles E. Gratke, “The Christian Science Monitor News,” Christian Science Sentinel, 12 July 1941, 904.
[BUY] Hubener vs. Hitler: A Biography of Helmuth Hubener, Mormon teenage resistance leader
Hubener vs. Hitler: A Biography of Helmuth Hubener, Mormon teenage resistance leader
Provo: American Research Foundation, 2003. First printing. Hardcover/dust jacket. 594 pp. In print @ $27.95.
From Nazi Germany came one of the most intriguing, gut-wrenching events of the century, when a group of teenage Germans waged their own war against Adolf Hitler.
Master biographer Richard Lloyd Dewey recounts the compelling true story of Helmuth Hubener - the brilliant and bold teenager who daringly formed the youngest resistance group to face the Nazis.
Learn how young Hubener recruited others, how his group eluded the SS, played cat-and-mouse with the Gestapo, and, amazingly, outsmarted all the Nazi authorities who sought to hunt them down.
This is a mesmerizing account of the entire group and its operations, and how they exposed the Third Reich, which thought hundreds of British agents were involved when they were actually just a band of determined German teenagers. But they sacrificed all for the truth.
"What the Hubener group did. . . is simply inconceivable. Only someone who himself was active in the resistance movement can grasp what it means." - Franz Ahrens, Noted German RESISTANCE FIGHTER and author. Condition: Very good. Item #10378
ISBN: 9780929753133
Price: $14.00
Monday, June 26, 2023
[PAID ARTICLE] PLAY ABOUT MORMON YOUTH'S WAR ON HITLER STIRS CONFLICT IN CHURCH
PLAY ABOUT MORMON YOUTH'S WAR ON HITLER STIRS CONFLICT IN CHURCH
A Latter-day Saint in Hitler’s SS The True Story of a Mormon Youth Who Joined and Defected from the Infamous SchutzStaffel
A Latter-day Saint in Hitler’s SS
The True Story of a Mormon Youth Who Joined and Defected from the Infamous SchutzStaffel
- By Alan F. Keele,
In researching and writing the story of Helmuth Hübener, the Latter-day Saint youth who was executed for distributing anti-Nazi literature in Germany during World War II,1 I learned of several other Hübener-like people in Nazi Germany.2 One such person, whom I shall call Bruno to preserve anonymity, was a young Latter-day Saint man who joined Hitler’s infamous elite force, the SS, and then had a change of heart. I had the privilege, a number of years ago now, to interview this gentleman at his home in Germany.
The Early Years
Bruno’s story begins with his father, Johann Kusmin S., a native of Riga, Latvia, who supported the czar on the side of the White army in the Russian civil war against the Bolsheviks. He died in a battle in Lithuania in 1923. His pregnant widow, Olga Viktoria Romanovska, fled to Königsberg, now Kaliningrad in Russia, where Bruno was born on November 7, 1923. Olga had had six other sons, all of whom had died young, either from an illness such as typhus or by accident; one was sliding in the snow while hanging onto an automobile, and he got hooked onto the car somehow and was dragged to death. After the death of her husband, Olga found herself staatenlos (without citizenship in any state) and could not legally work. She eked out a living as a cleaning lady. One can only imagine her emotional state.
There was a Latter-day Saint sister in the town who was also a part-time fortune teller (Kartenlegerin), to whom Olga went to have her fortune told. In what must be one of the strangest conversion stories on record, she learned from this woman about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1936, Olga and her thirteen-year-old son, Bruno, were baptized in the Memel River.
They became members of the Tillsit Branch in the Königsberg District,3 a branch of between one and two hundred members presided over at the time by President Otto Schulzke, reportedly a professional prison warden but not a Nazi. Bruno was made a deacon. He remembers hearing President Heber J. Grant speak at a conference in Königsberg.4 All the district members reportedly traveled to the city and stayed with other members there, often five to a bed. Some children slept at the church on the bellows of the organ.
Bruno remembers the article by the president of the East German Mission in the official Nazi newspaper stating that Mormons and Nazis had some common experiences and values.5 But Bruno also recalls that most of the Latter-day Saints in the area were not pro-Nazi; on the contrary, when he later joined the SS, most of them looked at him suspiciously. He and his mother were both philosemites, he said, with many Jewish friends. When he performed his Landjahr (an obligatory year working in the countryside) near Elbing, East Prussia, he attended the branch there, an indication that he must have also been somewhat committed to the Church at that time.
Bruno had a strict upbringing and had to work hard to help his mother make ends meet. When he was growing up, he reported, she often had two jobs and had to lock him in the apartment for the day. When he was a bit older, he helped by gathering mushrooms and berries in the forest.
His mother did not speak German well and relied on him as her translator. Possibly for this reason, among imaginable others, she did not want her only remaining family member out of her sight and was over-protective to the extent that she discouraged him from participating in Church youth programs.
The Jungvolk
In order to break free of his clinging mother, Bruno reported, he began to get involved with the Jungvolk, the Nazi program for young boys.6 A friend of his mother, a man whose house she cleaned, sponsored Bruno and purchased his uniforms for him. When Bruno was old enough, he became a member of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth).7 Looking back on it, he recalls that he should have seen the inherent violence and injustice in the party, for as a Hitlerjugend member he had to do pushups with a leader holding a knife upright below his stomach. He also recalls the H.J. clearing out cafés at curfew time and then breaking curfew themselves by lounging in the cafés until late at night.
Although he began an apprenticeship as a Drogist, which is not quite the same thing as a druggist, Bruno became interested in the Feuerschutzpolizei, a voluntary Wre department of sorts that was a kind of pre-military training program rather than a full-time occupation.
In 1942, when Bruno was twenty or so, a committee of the Waffen SS8 (armed protective services) came to the Feuerschutzpolizei looking for likely recruits, and they mustered Bruno into the SchutzStaffel (protective echelon). He was sent to Debica in Poland, where he served as a guard at a Truppenübungsplatz (a troop-training facility). Of his memories there, he said only that the local governor in Poland (the Provinzleiter), was a notorious high-living “swine.”
Now comes the ugly part: While Bruno was in Poland, the SS were assigned to details to eliminate Jews. The SS were given Schnapps and drugs to make them fearless, Bruno reports, and then they were driven into the countryside to round up Jewish villagers in the shtetls.9 Bruno was uncomfortable talking to me about this episode in his life. I did not feel like pressing him for details about his participation; nevertheless, I got the impression that he did not do the horrible things others did. He particularly recalled how shocked he was when an SS man threw a baby into the air and shot it with his carbine. Women were stripped and their body cavities searched, ostensibly for hidden jewels. Bruno said, “Lest anyone argue that there was no persecution of the Jews, let me tell him that I saw it firsthand.”
One night after this horrible experience, Bruno and a Hungarian comrade buried their uniforms, dressed in their civilian clothes, and began walking southwest toward the British lines, as they imagined them. In five days they made it as far as the Carpathians, where they were captured by Germans at a small border crossing. Bruno and his companion suspected that a Pole who had befriended them earlier had alerted the Gestapo about them.
Dachau
Bruno was taken back to his unit and tried by the SS-und Polizeigericht VI (SS and Police Court VI) in Krakau, Poland. The judge reportedly said to him, “Der Alte Fritz hätte Sie erschossen!” (“Old Emperor Friedrich would have shot you!”) When he was sentenced to seven years, Bruno laughed. Apparently this was a nervous tick of his (he had laughed when a bomb had landed near him during the war).
He was first sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany, then was moved to a labor camp in nearby Allach that was making BMW aircraft engines.10 In 1944 he grasped at an opportunity to volunteer for a kind of suicide mission involving one-man submarines, but when he got to Berlin and party officials looked more closely at his record, he was sent right back to Dachau. From there he was sent to Budweis, Czechoslovakia, on a Bewährungsaufsatz (probationary assignment), but he left the train in Vienna to go to the amusement park at the Prater, as he recalls it, and overstayed his leave. When he finally arrived in Prague, he was tried again and given an additional three years of imprisonment in Dachau. In December 1944, he was sent to a labor facility in Neckar-Els bei Moosbach, near Heidelberg. Here he worked assembling Daimler-Benz aircraft engines in filthy underground tunnels that dripped cold water on him as he worked.
Illness and the End of the War
Having survived several bombing raids on the factory, he contracted tuberculosis from the terrible conditions underground. The Red Cross once visited his factory and sent him to a clinic in Rockenau bei Eberbach on the Neckar River, where the end of the war overtook him. Because the United States Army had no proof that Bruno had been a prisoner of the Nazis, they treated him as an SS man, for that is what someone told them he was, even though he did not have the SS blood-type tattoo under his arm.11
At first he was a prisoner of war in the former Grossdeutschland Kaserne (Greater Germany Barracks), then in a tent camp in Heilbronn, Germany, and later in Niederroden, Germany. Then, due to his failing health, the Americans put him in one of their own hospitals before freeing him, presumably to die. After he was released on April 22, 1946, he entered a German hospital at Heidelberg-Rohrbach, where his entire right lung was removed. (When I interviewed him in 1985, his chest was still very noticeably sunken in on the right side.) The left lung was infected, but he was given antibiotics to treat it.
Church, Family, and Career
While recovering in the clinic, Bruno saw a newspaper advertising an upcoming conference of the Church in Karlsruhe, Germany. He wrote to the address given in the paper and received visitors from the Church. About eight weeks after his operation, he boarded a train with his new-found Latter-day Saint friends, notably the Eugen Hechter family, for the conference. They propped him up with pillows to ease his pain. He reported to me that from that moment forth he has been a one-hundred-percent-devoted Latter-day Saint. He has served as a patriarch and a bishop, as a high councilor several times, and in many other callings; he projected to my eyes a saintly, even beatific spirit. Educationally, he finished his apprenticeship and became a Drogist. At twenty-seven he married a woman who was a war widow with two children. They had two sons together. (His two sons were inactive in the Church when I spoke to him; he thought he had been too severe with them when they were young.) When his wife passed away in 1978, he lived for a while with a stepdaughter and her family. He met his second wife at a Latter-day Saint singles gathering in Tirolia, Austria. Together they have served a mission in Pirmasens, Germany.
Regrettably, he was unable to locate his mother: though he had heard from her once while he was in Berlin briefly, he does not know what became of her in the confusion of the war, nor could the other Latter-day Saints from the Königsberg area tell him anything more about her fate. When he was asked to teach a class in Church after the war, he realized he knew the gospel better than he thought he did, thanks to reading to his mother aloud from the Book of Mormon and the Bible. Like many who had been in camps, he had a problem with the Word of Wisdom, which he soon overcame. After the war, he received some reparations money, but he had to pay some of it back when it was learned that he had been in the SS. He lived for two and one-half years in the United States, where he worked as a janitor in a Latter-day Saint stake center, but he returned to Germany after fasting and praying about it.
Conclusion
Bruno’s story leaves room for much conjecture: Why did he join the SS? His mother was anti-Bolshevik, but he says she was also philosemitic and anti-Nazi. I got the impression he had been, as a very young and impressionable man, simply motivated to get away from a possessive mother and have some excitement, a young man who did not have the perspective to see what Nazism really promised. Yet when he saw Nazism in its true light, he had the courage to flee from it. And when he returned to the narrow path of the gospel, he held onto the rod with the strength of a man who had literally been to hell and back.
About the author(s)
Alan F. Keele is Professor of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. In 1967 he received a B.A. from BYU, with a German major and a history minor. He earned his Ph.D. in German language and literature at Princeton University in 1971.
Notes
1. Blair R. Holmes and Alan F. Keele, eds., comps., and trans., When Truth Was Treason: German Youth against Hitler (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). See also Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, Alan F. Keele, and Douglas F. Tobler, The Price: The True Story of a Mormon Who Defied Hitler (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1984).
2. For a discussion of some of these, see my unpublished paper “Six Authors in Search of a Character: Helmuth Hübener in Post-War German Literature,” which can be read online at germslav.byu.edu/faculty/afkeele/authors.htm.
3. In 1899, Arnold H. Schulthess, president of the German Mission, recorded that “a fine opening has been made in Königsberg, East Prussia.” The area grew quickly, and Königsberg became its own district in 1901. Gilbert W. Scharffs, Mormonism in Germany: A History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany between 1840 and 1970 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970), 47. Though the district continued to grow, World War II took a severe toll on Church membership. For example, in 1937 there were 845 members in the Königsberg area. In 1947, the branch closed. Scharffs, Mormonism in Germany, 129.
4. President Heber J. Grant traveled to Germany in 1937. (For more information on President Grant’s European tour, see “A Long-Awaited Visit: President Heber J. Grant in Switzerland and Germany, 1937” by Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and Marc Alain Bohn, also in this issue.) Meetings were held in Frankfurt. Previously, in a First Presidency Message of 1929, President Grant counseled the European Saints to remain in their homelands despite the turbulent political and economic atmosphere rather than emigrate to the United States. Emigration among German members of the Church declined sharply in the years leading up to World War II. Scharffs, Mormonism in Germany, 78, 81.
5. Alfred C. Rees was president of the East German Mission from December 31, 1937, to August 16, 1939. Scharffs, Mormonism in Germany, 88–90, 92. As tensions mounted in Nazi Germany, President Rees wrote an article called “Im Lande der Mormonen” (“In the Land of the Mormons”) comparing German and Mormon history and praising selected efforts of the current government. His article was published in the Völkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi newspaper, on April 14, 1939. The following excerpts are from a translation of his article: “The Mormon people know what persecution and suppression mean. And the German people who have gone through the shadow of the valley since the World War; and who have been forced to rely upon their own strength and determination, and upon their undying belief in their own ability to restore their self-respect and their merited place among the mighty sisterhood of nations, reveal that same progressive character, which does not shun obstacles. For that reason, to a student of Mormonism, recent developments in Germany present a most impressive comparison. . . . The Mormon people, perhaps more than any other people in all the world, pay high tribute to the German government for its bold declaration of war against the use of alcohol and tobacco by the youth of Germany” (Joseph M. Dixon, “Mormons in the Third Reich: 1933–1945,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 7 [Spring 1972]: 72). Four months later, missionaries fled Germany, and on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War.
6. Jungvolk was a branch of Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), for boys ten to fourteen. Formally organized in 1931, Jungvolk saw immediate and exponential growth with the birth of the Third Reich. Gerhard Rempel, Hitler’s Children: The Hitler Youth and the SS (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1989), 9.
7. In 1933, Hitler voiced his conviction about the significance of the youth in the Nazi movement: “I am beginning with the young. We older ones are used up. . . . We are rotten to the marrow. We have no unrestrained instincts left. We are cowardly and sentimental. We are bearing the burden of a humiliating past, and have in our blood the dull recollection of serfdom and servility. But my magnificent youngsters! Are there finer ones anywhere in the world? Look at these young men and boys! What material! With them I can make a new world” (Rempel, Hitler’s Children, 1–2). The Hitlerjugend was Hitler’s youth organization created with this vision in mind in 1926, before the Nazis had even come to power. Peter D. Stachura, Nazi Youth in the Weimar Republic (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Clio Books, 1975), 23. As Hitler’s youth organizations expanded, the Hitlerjugend came to refer specifically to the organization for boys ages fourteen to eighteen. Rempel, Hitler’s Children, 9. The Hitlerjugend had close ties to the Nazi adult organizations such as the SA (the Storm Troopers), the SS, and the German army. Rempel observes, “The social, political, and military resiliency of the Third Reich is inconceivable without the H. J. It was the incubator that maintained the political system by replenishing the ranks of the dominant party and preventing the growth of mass opposition.” Hitler’s Children, 2.
8. The Waffen-SS, literarily, “the SS-in-arms,” was the combat wing of the SS, a paramilitary group used by Hitler as a secondary, politically motivated army. D. S. V. Fosten and R. J. Marrion, Waffen-SS: Its Uniforms, Insignia, and Equipment, 1938–1945 (London: Almark, 1972), 5, 8. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and anxious for more power to move forward with his sinister racial agenda, expanded the ranks of the SS greatly as the war progressed. Rempel, Hitler’s Children, 23. Because the SS could not draft soldiers, it recruited heavily from Hitler youth organizations. Rempel, Hitler’s Children, 200–201. By the end of 1942, the Waffen-SS had nearly 190 thousand men. Fosten and Marion, Waffen-SS, 12.
9. The correct Yiddish plural is shtetlach (small Jewish villages).
10. Allach was a branch camp of Dachau set up in close proximity to manufacturing sites. Bruno likely worked in the screw factory Präzifix along with up to four hundred other prisoners. Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43.
11. The blood type was tatooed on the inside of the left upper arm of SS soldiers. This mark—or any scar that might have suggested an attempt to remove the tattoo—was considered prima facie evidence of membership in the SS and often resulted in summary executions. See Karl Schnibbe’s account in Holmes and Keele, eds., When Truth Was Treason, 380, n. 40.
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Hitler and the Trinity - Table of Contents
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