Posted by:
soutskeptic
(
)
Date: March 03, 2016 01:43PM
This may me of Interest.
INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
DAVID CONLEY NELSON
Q: How did you become interested in researching the Mormons’ relationship with the Nazis?
A: Two people very close to me stoked my interest. My stepson learned in Sunday school that his Mormon forebears fled to Utah to escape American frontier persecution, and that missionaries had been oppressed abroad. In his seventh grade world history course, he discovered that prisoners in Hitler’s concentration camps wore different colored triangles to denote their reason for confinement and he asked, “What color triangles did the Mormons wear in the Nazi camps?” My dissertation adviser at Texas A&M, Arnold P. Krammer, was the progeny of a large Hungarian Jewish family, most of whom boarded boxcars for Auschwitz in June 1944. During one very emotional class, Dr. Krammer opened a shoebox and placed real Stars of David in our hands, ones that had adorned the clothing of condemned Jewish citizens of Germany. After completing my research, I wasn’t able to answer my stepson’s question. Most Mormons had little to do with concentration camps, but those who did were as likely to have been guards as prisoners.
Q: What doctrine did the Mormons in Germany use to justify accomodation with the Nazis?
A: By 1930, three years before Hitler rose to power, Germany had more Latter-day Saints than any country except the United States. LDS leaders had equity to protect in Nazi Germany. To introduce themselves to Nazi authorities, the Mormons resurrected an old catechismal statement—the Twelfth Article of Faith—their equivalent of the biblical admonition to “Render unto Caesar.” They let it be known—through well-educated and savvy American mission presidents, and through politically connected Mormons in the United States—that church members would obey Nazi law and support Hitler’s government. However, influential Americans would notice if Mormons were persecuted.
Q: In what ways did the German Mormons strive to fit into the Third Reich?
A: Church leaders exploited perceived commonalities between Mormonism and National Socialism, and members enthusiastically sustained the government—often beyond what was necessary for survival. Some imagined Nazi favoritism toward their small sect. Others believed Hitler had read the Book of Mormon or was secretly a member of the faith. Taking advantage of the Nazi penchant for documenting “racial purity,” the Mormons ramped up genealogical research and lay leaders established family history research callings in every congregation. Mormons also purged their hymnals and tracts of references to Zion, Israel, or any other wording that could be associated with Judaism and some Jewish converts were shunned. Mormon missionaries tutored the German Olympic team in basic basketball skills in preparation for 1936 Berlin games and kept the official scorebooks for the Olympic basketball games. German Mormons dutifully supported the regime but their American prelates overreached during the peacetime years—one mission president wrote an article in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi daily, extolling the parallels between Utah Mormon and German Nazi society.
Q: How did the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints “rewrite” this part of their history?
A: The church used “memory beacons,”—individuals and groups whose memorialization can be dialed up or down to fit the needs of the post-war church. A youthful Hamburg resister, Helmuth Hübener—beheaded by the Nazis—became the protagonist in a popular play staged at church-owned Brigham Young University in 1975. Concern for German immigrants in Utah and for Mormons in communist East Germany caused the church hierarchy to suppress subsequent performances of the play and suspend the research of BYU scholars. Later, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it became convenient for the church to rehabilitate Hübener as a genuine hero of the Mormons’ “struggle” against Nazi oppression—although some accounts failed to mention that his pro-Nazi congregational leader had excommunicated him for resisting. In recent years, books and videos have emphasized the suffering of German Mormons on the Second World War battlefield and home front. In the new collective memory, all Mormons were war victims. The collaborationist activity of the peacetime Nazi years is never mentioned.
Q: How did you go about researching this topic?
A: Individual Mormons shared private histories, pictures, and other memorabilia. One person told me about a father who courageously saved Jews, a Polish slave laborer, and a Russian prisoner of war, yet whose “memory beacon” has been dimmed because of his excommunication for marital infidelity. Another woman shared memories of her loving father, whom she discovered had run a “wild” concentration camp in pre-war Berlin, and later, as a military policeman, was on the scene of liquidated Jewish ghettos in Poland. All the while, he sent post cards home urging his Mormon children to say their prayers and attend Sunday school. He escaped post-war justice and remained a stalwart Mormon.
There are promising documents in the church archives that I was not allowed to see. I was assisted by historians, archivists, library staff, and patrons at the Church history department of the LDS church. Retired faculty members at Brigham Young University and members of the German-American immigrant community in Salt Lake City were also helpful. I chose not to name those who did help me for fear that some may encounter the professional and personal recrimination that occasionally befalls faithful Latter-day Saints who assist in scholarly endeavors that are not faith-promoting. I value their help considerably, as without it I would have been able to write this book.