Module H. A Brief History of the Mormons in the German-speaking (DACH) Countries

The first German to be converted to the LDS Church may have been an immigrant to the USA named Jakob Zündel, baptized in 1836.

The first Mormon to visit Germany was probably James Howard, a recent English convert, who took a job in a Hamburg foundry in September 1840. He tried missionary work, a recent book on the Mormons in Germany claims (Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany by David Conley Nelson, which I refer to frequently here), but soon became discouraged.

Gilbert W. Scharffs, recently deceased author of the first major book on Mormonism in Germany (and to whom I also frequently refer in this module), reminds us that Howard had received instructions from Brigham Young, then president of the British Mission, to pursue missionary work. But this first Latter-day Saint in Germany wrote, “As soon as I saw what sort of place it was I dropt [sic] my preaching directly. I durst not pretend to say anything about religion to them. Tell Brother Brigham Young how things are and that I am too weak a creature to do anything with them in Hamburg.”

Nelson reminds us that Joseph Smith himself always had a soft spot for Germans, possibly stemming back to his days living with Emma at the Peter Whitmer home in Seneca County, New York while translating the Book of Mormon. Peter Whitmer and his family were Pennsylvania Dutch; before their conversion to Mormonism they had belonged to the German Reformed Congregation, and German was their first language. (Some think Emma may also have attended a German school in Pennsylvania.)

A few years later, Nelson continues, Smith studied German under the tutelage of Mormonism’s first Jewish convert, Alexander Neibaur, who converted in England [Nelson incorrectly says in Germany] in 1838 and emigrated to America that same year.

A dentist who had studied in Berlin (after having interrupted his earlier rabbinical studies), Alexander capped Joseph’s tooth broken several years earlier when he was beaten, tarred, and feathered by a mob in Ohio. (Neibaur was also Hugh Nibley’s great-grandfather.)

On April 7, 1844, in his important funeral oration for his friend King Follett, Joseph said  “I have been reading the German, and find [the Luther Bible] to be the most nearly correct translation, and corresponds to the revelations which God has given me for the past fourteen years.”  He then translated into English while reading from the German Bible and added, “I know the text is
true. I call upon all you Germans who know that it is true to say, Eye [sic]. (Loud shouts of ‘Aye.’)”

A few days later he added, clearly referring to Martin Luther: “The old German translators are the most nearly correct, and the most honest of any of the translators.”

Then Joseph enlarged the scope of his remarks, Nelson continues, from German language scripture to the German people themselves: “The Germans are an exalted people.”

Whether or not this was a simple compliment to those Germans in attendance or whether, as Nelson believes, Joseph was referring to their unique gift for that form of exaltation to Godhood he had most recently described in the King Follett Discourse, in any event, from the beginning of missionary work in the mid nineteenth century Joseph was exceptionally mindful of the Germans.

And in fact, from the beginning until 1950, more German speakers joined the Latter-day Saints than any linguistic group other than English speakers.

German speakers also made up the third most populous group of immigrants to Zion after those from Great Britain and Scandinavia.

Nine months after James Howard’s missionary effort, LDS Apostle Elder Orson Hyde became the first Mormon leader to visit Germany. He did this on his way to and from Jerusalem in 1841 and 1842.

In his talk at the April 6th conference of 1840, Orson Hyde had referred to prophecy concerning the great work to be performed among the Jews. On the 15th of April 1840 he left Commerce, Illinois (later called Nauvoo) for Jerusalem.

On 1 May 1840, Elder Hyde wrote to Joseph Smith from Columbus, Ohio, in which he discussed his plan to write a set of lectures upon the faith and doctrine of the church, giving a brief history of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon and an account of its contents, together with the outlines of the organization and government of the church. He wanted to have the book translated into German, have it published when he arrived in Germany, and then distribute it throughout the German empire.

“The mission upon which we are sent swells greater and greater, “ he continued, “There is a great work to be done in Germany, as manifested to us by the Spirit.” Elder Hyde then asked, “Should we consider it necessary to translate the entire Book of Mormon into German, and Doctrine and Covenants too, are we or are we not at liberty to do so?”

One week later, on 8 May, Joseph Smith replied, “I entirely approve” of the plan.

In January 15, 1841, Orson Hyde and John E. Page, who were to meet up in New York City, were informed that the Lord was displeased with them for delaying their mission and were instructed to hasten their journey towards their destination.

Leaving the absent John Page behind, Orson Hyde set sail from New York for Liverpool on February 13, 1841.

From another letter to Joseph Smith, we know that Hyde had completed his book by June 15, 1841. He left London for Rotterdam on June 20. In July, he was in Regensburg on the Danube waiting to get a visa and decided to spend his time studying German.

In Regensburg he became acquainted with a lady who spoke French and German and who was anxious to speak English. He gave her English lessons and in return she gave him German lessons.

Upon his arrival in Palestine, on Sunday, October 24, 1841 he dedicated the Holy Land. In November, he was in Alexandria, Egypt and in January in Triest, Italy.

On November 22, 1841, he wrote to Joseph Smith telling him of his plans to go back to Regensburg where some friends were willing to help him “publish our faith in the German language.” Following his travels in the Middle East, Orson Hyde spent seven months in Regensburg, from January 30 to August 1842. “I found it appropriate to stay in this city for a season or two, to enjoy the flowers of German literature, after I had been wandering through the thistles and thorns of the uncivilized world.”

To sustain himself he taught English to students, some of whom may have helped him complete his translation of the 115 page book, and he submitted it to the censors, who did not approve it for publication, however.

He then went on to Frankfurt where he received permission to publish it sometime later in 1842, as the title page indicates: im Selbstverlage des Verfassers (self published by the author). This book,  Ein Ruf aus der Wüste (A Call from out of the Wilderness), was the first LDS document published in German:

http://www.mormonentum.de/literatur/hyde1842/ruf.jpg

My friend and colleague, Dr. Marvin Folsom, an expert on the German language, especially the language of the Bible (and on whose summary of the events described above I rely), has done a careful analysis of the language of Ein Ruf aus der Wüste. He determined that Hyde must have had some help translating his work into German, but, based on errors clearly caused by his reliance upon English, Hyde had obviously not simply turned the job over to a translator but had kept his own hand deeply involved in the matter.

At the end of the book, Hyde wrote (in German): “Let no one ever think of holding the principles in this work up to derision or of ridiculing them, for it will not be of any benefit to him or his listeners. I do not claim that this work is technically perfect; I do not understand the German language perfectly, but the principles which it emphasizes are true and good ...”

In a letter to Joseph Smith dated July 17, 1841 Hyde had written: “From past experience I know that the keen edge of any work translated by a stranger, in whose heart the spirit of the matter does not dwell, is lost – the life and animation thereof die away into a cold monotony, and it becomes almost entirely another thing... It appears to me, therefore, that some person of some little experience ought to know this language so as to translate himself, without being dependent on strangers ...”

Professor Folsom concludes his study: “Now we see clearly the dilemma Hyde faced: he needed and wanted help with the mechanics of the language but he did not want to leave the work of translating to someone who did not understand the sacred principles of the restoration and who did not possess the ‘spirit of the matter.’ According to Hyde, the ideal would be someone who had both the linguistic skills and the right spirit. He was willing to accept a few deficiencies in the language, if he could infuse the text with his testimony and an understanding of true principles. If you read the entire book, you will see that Orson Hyde made the right choice.”

In 1852, ten years after Orson Hyde departed Germany apparently without having again mentioned his original idea to translate the Book of Mormon into German, another member of the Quorum of the Twelve, Elder John Taylor, arrived in Hamburg with a plan to publish the Book of Mormon there. (The following relies heavily on Gilbert Scharffs.)

(An interesting side light is that because of his brief apostasy and removal from the Quorum, Elder Hyde had forfeited his seniority, reentering the Quorum upon his repentance, at a more junior level to Elder Taylor, who then subsequently became President of the Church.)

John Taylor had gone to France in 1849 as the first church mission president in the country. While in France, Taylor published a monthly newspaper called L’Etoile du Deseret (the Star of Deseret) with the help of one Louis A. Bertrand. He also supervised missionary work in Germany, but did not yet himself go to any of the countries that would later form Germany.

In 1852, the Book of Mormon was published in French, with John Taylor and Curtis E. Bolton credited as translators. Taylor supervised the translation, which was apparently carried out by Bolton, Bertrand, Lazare Auge, and a “Mr. Wilhelm”.

On his way home from France to the US, but while still sojourning in his native England, John Taylor received a letter from Brigham Young instructing him to stay in Europe for one more year. Elder Taylor wrote in his journal, “It immediately occurred to my mind to go to Germany.”

In London Elder Taylor happened to meet a missionary named George Parker Dykes who was also returning home from a mission, namely to Denmark. His last area, known as Schleswig-Holstein, is a province in northern Germany which was at that time under Danish rule.

The first two German convert baptisms for which there is any record took place on 15 September 1851 in this province that had earlier belonged – and would later revert – to Germany. The two baptisms were performed by none other than this Scandinavian missionary, George Parker Dykes, who Scharffs claims knew the German language well.

Elder Dykes was subsequently banished by the Danish police from this area and was on his way home to Utah, stopping in London, when he met Elder John Taylor.

(This portion of the story gets even more interesting to me, as George Parker Dykes was my maternal great-great-great-grandfather. Apparently a gifted language learner, he had earlier served a mission to Norwegian settlements along the Fox River in Illinois, had learned Norwegian, and after having served as a Lieutenant in the Mormon Battalion – the only Mormon to have commanded a Company of the Battalion – he had gone to England as a missionary. There, in 1850, discovering that he spoke Norwegian, Elder Erastus Snow of the Twelve took him to Denmark as one of the first four missionaries in Scandinavia.)

Elder Taylor first stopped in Paris to check on his flock. George Dykes arrived in Hamburg the latter part of September 1851. John Taylor arrived days later, in October, bringing with him a German schoolteacher, George (Georg?) Viett, who had been converted in Paris. The three began the translation of the Book of Mormon into German.

These elders also undertook missionary work at the same time, converting John Miller (Johann Müller?), who then also helped with the translation. Elder Taylor said he asked some of the best professors in Hamburg to look over the early pages of the Book of Mormon translation as well as a German periodical publication that they started, and only few alterations were made.

Elder Taylor had to leave Hamburg when the first draft of the translation of the Book of Mormon into German was only half completed. Threatened with arrest in Germany, he returned to Paris on 18 December 1851, where he found France in chaos after Napoleon III’s ascendency to power. He soon left for England.

When Elder Taylor first decided to go to Germany, he had written to Brigham Young in Salt Lake City and asked him to send Daniel Carn, a native German presumably converted in the US, to be the mission president in Germany and to help with the translation. While still in London, John Taylor met President Carn on his way to Hamburg.

Elder Taylor briefed him about happenings in Germany, including the progress on translating the Book of Mormon. President Carn continued on to Hamburg, arriving on 3 April 1852, a date that marks the formal beginning of the German mission.

President Carn and Elders Dykes, Viett, and Miller worked to finish the translation project. Elder Dykes reported, “I continued my labors in Germany until the translating, revising, printing, and stereotyping of the Book of Mormon in the German language was completed.” He left Germany on 25 May 1852, the day the first edition of the German Book of Mormon and the second printing of the French translation were published side by side in one volume. (Separate French
and German copies were also printed):

http://img.deseretnews.com/images/article/midres/995401/995401.jpg

Publishing the Book of Mormon in German was a singular event, Scharffs reports, because little else went right for church members during the next 20 years. President Carn was arrested and banished several times, including on 22 January 1853, when five new elders arrived.

One of the new missionaries was Orson Spencer – first chancellor of the University of Deseret, later the University of Utah – who with his companion Jacob Houtz, tried to establish missionary work in Berlin but was surrounded by armed soldiers with bayonets. He tried to get an appointment with the King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm, to present him with a Book of Mormon but was banished from Berlin instead.

Three months after their visit, the Prussian interior ministry issued a Runderlass (an official government circular) denying the Mormons legal status in Prussia, which was in effect a standing expulsion order.

This failure was in sharp contrast to Orson Spencer’s earlier work as the British Mission president from 1846 to 1848, when membership there increased by 8,647 souls to 17,902, about the same Church membership as in the entire United States at that time.

While some German missionaries retreated to England to labor because of troubles with the police, others went to distant parts of Germany but still had no success.

On 3 October 1852 President Carn was again arrested in Hamburg and given “a choice of a $16 fine, eight days in jail, fifty stripes, or leaving.” He decided it would be unwise to remain and went north to Denmark, to German-speaking Schleswig-Holstein.

On 24 December 1853 Carn, the first German Mission president, returned to Utah with 33 German immigrants and about 300 from Scandinavian countries, counting as perhaps the most important accomplishment of his labors the publication of the Book of Mormon in German. The flyleaf of the book, however, informs us that it was translated into German by John Taylor and G. Parker Dykes.

Other missionaries soon left, and the work in Germany ended for a season. Because of such persecution of missionaries, the Swiss-Italian-German mission was formed in 1861, which was really a Swiss mission with the possibility of reaching out to Germany and Italy. Thereafter, whenever one missionary was banished, he left for Switzerland and another arrived to replace him, as church historian Bruce A. Van Orden explained.

Fortunately, in 1864, a decree of the Federal Council of Switzerland granted Mormons rights equal to those enjoyed by other churches with regard to holding meetings and baptizing converts. The relatively safe cities of German-speaking Basel and French-speaking Geneva became the centers of the Church from about 1861 to 1925, with some interruptions, one involving an unsuccessful attempt from 1898 to 1904 to reestablish a mission in Germany proper.

Despite good successes with conversions, the opening of the German mission resulted in a Prussian order of late 1902 called Ausweisung der Mormonen (Banishment of the Mormons) and a reaffirmation of the validity of the old 1853 Runderlass, the circular expulsion order. By this time, of course, Germany was unified under the hegemony of Prussia, so this new ban was even wider in scope than the old one had been.

Ironically, at a same time of that earlier peak persecution in 1854, 225 miles southeast of Hamburg, in the kingdom of Saxony, a prominent educator, Karl G. Maeser, was converted.

(Here’s a brief sidebar on Karl G. Maeser):  Maeser joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Dresden. He was baptized by Franklin D. Richards with William Budge, who had been sent in disguise from Switzerland to teach him, at his request, after he had become intrigued by a missionary tract despite its being filled with grammatical errors. At the time the church was banned in Germany, so he had to be baptized in the Elbe river at midnight.

At this time all Latter-day Saints were urged to gather together in Utah. Maeser and his family began the journey towards Utah, but in England he was called to serve as a missionary, serving both there and in Scotland, delaying their journey to Utah. Among other assignments Maeser served as a missionary among the Germans in London.

While they were in England, Karl and Anna’s second son was born, Karl Franklin Maeser. He died in port as they arrived in the US and they buried him on land on July 4, 1857. After living a few weeks in Philadelphia, Maeser was called to serve as a missionary to the German-speaking people of Philadelphia, and spent some time laboring in Virginia.

While in Virginia Maeser earned keep for himself and his family by giving music lessons. Among Maeser’s students in Virginia were the daughters of former United States President John Tyler.

Maeser returned with Anna to Philadelphia, where he was called to serve as Conference President. Maeser and his family left Philadelphia and traveled across the country in Patriarch John Smith’s company, arriving in Utah Territory on September 1, 1860.

He was called to serve a Mission to Switzerland in 1867 and appointed mission president in 1868. He founded the church magazine Der Stern (the Star), possibly by analogy to the Millennial Star, in January 1869. He dropped the word Italy from the mission’s title. Over six hundred conversions occurred in the 30 months of his mission. When he returned to Utah, he brought 85 emigrants with him (bearing Swiss family names like Hafen, Reber, Schwendimann, Ballif, Tobler... all of whom established large faithful, talented families in the church.)

In 1876, Maeser became the second principal of Brigham Young Academy in Provo, Utah, which was later to become Brigham Young University. He was the first superintendent of the Church Educational System from 1888 to 1901.

Once, during some difficult times as the school was struggling, Maeser pondered going elsewhere. He had a dream, or what he called a vision in which he saw “Temple Hill filled with buildings – great temples of learning.”

A moving story comes from when the old Lewis building, where the academy first met, burned down. Reed Smoot, a former student of Maeser’s approached him and said “Dr. Maeser, the academy is no more.” Maeser responded “no such thing, the building has burned but the academy lives on in us.”

World War One caught the Mormon mission leaders by surprise. They had not thought that the assassination of some Austrian Archduke in far-off Bosnia-Herzegovina could have had the effects it did. On August 1, the day Germany formally declared war on Russia, Swiss mission president Hyrum Valentine was touring German congregations with another Hyrum, Elder Hyrum Mack Smith of the Twelve (son of President Joseph F. Smith), European Mission President, who had come over from London.

On August 3, Smith’s London office received a cable from Salt Lake City instructing him to remove all missionaries from regions where they might face danger. He did not see the directive until he returned to London on August 22, because he and President Valentine and a younger missionary traveling companion were arrested on August 4th, the day England declared war on Germany, not a good day to be an English-speaker in Germany.

Valentine and the young missionary could produce their passports, but Smith could not immediately locate his and eventually the American Vice-Consul had to intervene to convince the authorities that Smith was not a British spy.

These men immediately directed the missionaries to seek safety in places like Switzerland, but passage was impossible: due to the mobilization, no trains were available for many days.

President LeGrand Richards in the Netherlands dispatched funds to some missionaries in northern Germany, who were able to escape via Holland.

After Valentine got back to Basel, he withdrew twenty-thousand Imperial marks from the mission’s bank account and returned to Germany, where he began tracking down the remaining missionaries, arranging for their passage home, and appointing native Germans in their branch leadership posts.

The Stern reported that by October 15, 1914, 152 American missionaries had been evacuated. Native German missionaries could not leave, of course.

Sister Rose Valentine, wife of the courageous mission president Hyrum, recorded in her diary in the summer of 1915 “In the evening Brother Edward Hoffmann came in. (Bro. Hoffmann had been an earnest local missionary before being called into the war.) I felt like taking him into my arms ... with a feeling of laughing and weeping, joy and sadness – a soldier who had lost his right leg (amputated under the knee), a soldier for truth and a missionary. ‘Not one shot have I fired on the enemy,’ he said, and this sentence brought a glorious light into his face. We talked and talked; he ate a bite and retired.”

Another missionary, Wilhelm Kessler, a native German who had emigrated to the US and then returned as a missionary, faced a stark choice: evacuate Germany, remain in Switzerland as a missionary, or answer the call to military service from his native country. He tried to contact President Valentine, who was in Germany and probably still under arrest at the time.

When President Valentine returned to Basel, he found a letter left for him by the tormented young man. “I could not look my countrymen in the face and stand here when they call me to render assistance. It is true that I have been sent here to do missionary work ... there is nothing here but turmoil. I don’t know but that tomorrow the French will rush over the border into Basel; they will discover I am a German citizen, and I will be taken a prisoner of war and interned. I don’t know but tomorrow the Germans themselves will cross over the border ... and could take me as a traitor to my country. I may be cast into prison. I may be executed. It matters not. I must go!”

Kessler was wounded in battle on September 19, 1914, and was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class. After recovery, he went to officer candidate school, graduating as a first lieutenant on June 16, 1916.

One month later, President Valentine wrote this dispatch to Salt Lake City: “Wilhem Kessler, a local elder of the Church, was killed in battle on the western front, near Mametz and Montauban, in France.” This was on July 1, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, in which the Germans eventually lost half a million soldiers, the British 400,000, and the French 200,000.

After his return to Utah, on April 8, 1917, President Valentine made Wilhelm Kessler the subject of his General Conference talk, though it was only one day after America entered the war and it might have seemed problematic to some to hear Valentine extol the patriotism of a German soldier.

The new Swiss mission president after the war, Angus J. Cannon, cabled the Church leaders on September 2, 1919: “Eight thousand Saints of this mission are in immediate need of flour, corn-meal, condensed milk, fats, dried fruits, beans, peas. Can the Saints at home send such supplies immediately?”

Senator Reed Smoot, also an Apostle, realized that raising funds, acquiring goods, shipping them across the Atlantic, etc. was too cumbersome. He hit upon the idea of purchasing provisions from the American Expeditionary Forces that had joined the war in late 1917, provisions already in Europe. Smoot sent a cable to Salt Lake: “War Department wired Judge Parker, United States Liquidation Commissioner, Paris ... I have guaranteed payment. Wired Cannon to get in touch with Parker. Have given him the address of the Commissioner.”

President Cannon appointed Elder Johannes Borkhardt to take charge of distributing relief supplies. No record remains of the total amount, but one invoice from the American military garrison in Koblenz provides an idea: Church funds purchased fifty thousand pounds of flour, fifteen thousand pounds of rice, five thousand pounds of oleomargarine, twenty thousand pounds of prunes, and twenty thousand cans of condensed milk.

The First World War had served as a rehearsal for the evacuations that would have to take place again exactly one world war later. In the meantime, however, the Weimar Republic seemed a relief to the Saints and to the missionaries after the repression of Imperial Germany. They were no longer often arrested or forced to flee the country.

And yet, when the great inflationary spiral struck, when unemployment rose astronomically, when Adolf Hitler, then, finally came to power in 1933, it made the good old days under Prussian repression seem like a picnic.

At first, Church leaders in Germany tried to assure the Nazis that Mormons believe in being subject to Kings, Presidents, Rulers, and Magistrates, and in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law. Mission President Oliver Budge said as much to a Gestapo (Secret Police) agent at the mission home in Berlin one day in September of 1933, who had come to inquire.

The next day, Budge wrote a multi-page letter to the Gestapo, reaffirming in more detail what he had told the officer the day before. Budge, and his counterpart in Basel, President Francis Salzner, sent messages to their missionaries warning them not to make any political statements, even in their letters home, which were being routinely opened by the Nazis. (Some ignored the advice and were imprisoned.)

Some Nazis came to the mission home and confiscated certain pamphlets, like the one entitled “Signs of the Great Apostasy”, but most of the censorship was self-censorship. Hymns like Israel, Israel, God is Calling or Hope of Israel, were simply not chosen any more. Similar lesson topics that could be construed as relating to Judaism were dropped. Gestapo spies sat in the back row in some meetings in their long leather coats, but the Mormons were smart enough to avoid giving offence.

As difficult as it is for us to imagine, some Mormons went beyond careful defensiveness and began to show outright enthusiasm for the new state. Since this is difficult to get our heads around now, in America, in 2015, it will help to briefly review here some reasons such Mormons may have been misled by Hitler and the National Socialist movement, especially when it was new and appeared to be doing positive things. For example, Hitler had created full employment and a stable economy after a time of astronomical unemployment and hyperinflation.

Not many grateful people who now had jobs again wanted to focus on the fact that the economy was being driven by a vast rearmament industry and by strategic building projects like the Autobahn, intended to allow the quick movement of motorized armies from one side of the country to another. As H.L. Mencken once pointed out, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.

Hitler restored a sense of national pride which had been so badly wounded by the harsh Treaty of Versailles after World War One. He had cracked down on public behaviors left over from the roaring twenties which made the middle class uncomfortable, such as transvestite bars, street prostitution, vandalism, graffiti, pornography, offensive panhandlers, public intoxication, and petty criminals.

Even today, one can sometimes hear an older German reminisce in an unguarded moment: “Well, you can say what you want, but in those days at least a woman was safe on the streets! And he gave us the Autobahn!” (Environmentalists have humorously turned this canard upside down: “Well, Adolf wasn’t so bad, he just shouldn’t have built that stinking Autobahn!”)

In this climate it was easy for people to overlook the fact that the streets were safer only for certain Germans because Hitler had begun to throw the annoying people, including gays, Jews, Communists, Socialists, Labor Unionists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses into concentration camps.

Mormons who hadn’t thought clearly about it or who were whistling past the graveyard, so to speak, might have had additional, theological, reasons to embrace Hitler, though here it gets a little subtle. Those who saw in him a man called of God to help prepare the world for the millennium saw significance in a phrase like das tausendjährige Reich, the thousand-year realm.

German saints were not the only Mormons captivated by the romance of Hitler, especially early on. Statements by enthusiastic but not always prescient American church members, including one or two leaders, made their way to Germany. Some of these Americans were strongly antisemitic – we tend to forget today how wide-spread antisemitism was in the US in the prewar years.

There is also evidence that German saints were aware of the contents of an unsigned editorial in the British church magazine The Millennial Star which enthused about Hitler and the New Germany, saying der Führer had surely been raised up by God and was preparing the world for the millennium. All these factors contributed to the sense among some German saints that Hitler had been sent by God to save Germany and the world from the evils of his time: communism, socialism, Jewry, and homosexuality.

Continuing with my list of what appears only on the surface to be the most trivial things, which nevertheless cumulatively contributed to the early pro-Hitler bias in the minds of some German saints, it is instructive to know that after years of being closed to the despised Mormon Sekte or cult, under Hitler all genealogy records of the state churches, Catholic and Lutheran, were suddenly thrown open to anyone. Unfortunately, most didn’t stop to think about the appalling back story: the Nazis wanted the archives open so that people could find out if one’s ancestor was a Jew.

Some Mormons saw significance in the fact that Hitler was a teetotaler and non-smoker. Because of these unusual habits for a German at that time (actually he was also a vegetarian) it was widely rumored among Mormons in Germany that Hitler had attended Mormon primary meetings as a child in Austria (in Haag am Hausruck about 15 miles from his hometown of Braunau am Inn) where he learned about the Word of Wisdom, or that he had even secretly been baptized a Mormon.

Such urban folklore was codified into an organized spiel by an intellectual “professional friend” of the church named Max Hähnle, a sociologist trained in Tübingen under the famous Max Weber. Hähnle had studied Mormonism as a sociological phenomenon and had made research trips to Salt Lake City. He went around Germany giving talks to Mormon congregations favorably comparing Mormonism to Nazism.

In 1939, just before Germany attacked Poland, something like Hähnle’s summary of favorable comparisons between Mormonism and Nazism found its way into an infamous article in a special number of the Völkischer Beobachter, the official Nazi party organ. Entitled “Im Lande der Mormonen,” (In the Land of the Mormons) the article did not bear Hähnle’s name, but rather that of Alfred C. Rees, the American mission president in Berlin at the time.

According to this article, to cite only one example, the idea of Mormon Fast Sunday had been borrowed by Hitler and turned into Eintopfsonntag, that one Sunday a month when German families were encouraged to have a simple one-dish meal and donate the cost difference to a worthy cause – after September 1st, 1939, that cause was the war effort.

As its author warms to his subject, however, he soon makes it sound like Mormonism was borrowed from the Nazis, not the other way around. He makes a long list of Nazi beliefs before coming to his most abhorrent conclusion: “Mormons are the ones who put these healthy doctrines into practice.”

I don’t wish to leave the impression that most Mormons were passionate Nazi enthusiasts. Far from it. Most Mormons were probably politically quite uninformed, concerned about putting bread on the table, and were not well prepared from their educational backgrounds to examine the truth claims of the Nazis. There were a few, some of whom then changed their minds as the war unfolded, who enthusiastically supported Hitler and his policies.

Many, including the working classes, had been taught to support socialistic, liberal democratic political movements more friendly to labor, although the Nazis tried to preempt these concerns by naming their party the National Socialist German Workers Party. I have the impression that very few Mormons were communists in this period, even though the communists were probably the most powerful opposition to Nazism, especially at first, before their ranks were decimated (and a large number of them, mostly beerhall thugs who really didn’t care what ideology was the reason for beating other people up) defected to the Brown Shirt thugs of the Nazi party.

Some Mormons saw that Nazism was absolutely counter to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. These included three young men in the St. Georg Branch in Hamburg. Helmuth Hübener, clearly the leader of the group, and his two friends Rudolph (Rudi) Wobbe and Karl-Heinz Schnibbe, decided to start a non-violent resistance to Hitler. In the end, Helmuth became the youngest person to be executed by the Nazis for resistance, and the others spent years in various forced labor camps.

They started to listen to forbidden BBC broadcasts on a French shortwave receiver Hübener’s older brother had brought back from occupied France. The Nazis had purposely supplied Germans with a radio receiver, the Volksempfänger or Peoples’ Receiver, which could not receive shortwave. After September 1, 1939, also the day the attack on Poland took place, it was a capital offense in Germany to listen to enemy radio broadcasts, punishable by death.

All throughout 1941, Helmuth listened to broadcasts, took notes in shorthand, which he learned for his job as a clerk at the municipal offices of Hamburg City, and then typed up carbon copies of leaflets, which he and his friends distributed by placing them in mailboxes, on bulletin boards, etc.

Eventually, Helmuth made an error and was caught. He attempted to recruit a young man in his office to help him and the young man turned him in. He was tortured by the Gestapo, eventually revealing the names of his friends.

They, too, were arrested. Eventually, the three of them – plus another acquaintance of Helmuth’s from work, Gerhard Düwer, who was caught up in the dragnet, so to speak – were charged with high treason and tried at the highest Nazi court in Berlin, the feared Blood Tribunal, the Volksgerichtshof or People’s Court.

Because he was of high intelligence and wrote and spoke like a “30-year old university professor” 17-year old Helmuth was sentenced to death on the guillotine. Rudi, the youngest at 15 received 10 years at hard labor because he had bragged about doing certain things to an inmate in his cell, and Karl, who was the oldest at 18, received 5. Düwer, also 18, was sentenced to 4 years.

The Gestapo refused to believe that there were no adults behind the group and they suspected the Mormon Otto Berndt, the district president, a known liberal. They interrogated Otto non-stop for three straight days, hoping to catch him in a fabrication. During the whole time he relied entirely on the Lord to know what to say. When the Gestapo finally let him go they told him: “When this war is over and we’ve eliminated the Jews, you Mormons are next! There’s no room in Nazi Germany for an American sect.”

The boys’ branch president, Arthur Zander, was an excellent, hard-working, caring individual who just happened to be a fanatical party member. He brought his radio to church so that the whole congregation could listen to the Führer’s speeches. He put a sign up on the door of the branch house reading: Jews not allowed to enter. This was probably to keep out a member who was considered a Jew, Salomon Schwarz, who was later killed in a concentration camp. His sister confided in me that she was convinced that it was Zander who had denounced her brother to the Gestapo. (For further reading I recommend my book: When Truth Was Treason, as well as the one-hour documentary film: Truth and Conviction.)

At the end of the war, refugees streamed west, fleeing the advancing Soviet forces. The Mormons miraculously found an abandoned mansion in Wolfsgrün, Saxony, which, with the help of the Soviet occupying force, was turned into a Mormon refugee center housing a hundred families.

When the Mormons tracked down a whole castle full of Church parish registers, which had been placed there by the Nazis for safekeeping (and which had already begun to be damaged by water, rodents, and be used as fuel for local stoves) they managed to organize a tractor with a wagon to bring them down the steep hill from the castle (on an icy street) and to procure the use of a number of rail cars to haul these tons of important genealogical records to safety and present them to their proper owners, the Lutheran and other churches.

When American servicemen began to arrive in Berlin, some who had been missionaries before the war sought out their old acquaintances and brought much appreciated care packages from America.

In March of 1946, then, Apostle Ezra Taft Benson arrived in Berlin to coordinate an extensive year-long relief effort. The first church-dispatched aid arrived in June by way of the Red Cross in Switzerland. In the Soviet zone, officials worried that Mormon aid would turn the hearts of the people away from communism, but gradually Soviet resistance to receiving the aid lessened.

A second major shipment occurred in October. Mormon wheat farmers in Canadian Alberta dispatched three massive shipments of cracked wheat. Forty-one freight car loads of clothing and ninety-nine freight car loads of food, valued with shipping at close to $2 million, made its way to Germany from the US in 1946-1947.

German migration to the US increased. Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudolph Wobbe both came to Salt Lake City after their release from labor camps, as did their erstwhile branch president Arthur Zander and their district president Otto Berndt.

As the Soviet Zone gradually became the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and as the wall went up after 1961, Church members in the east were cut off from much contact with the west. A remarkable person, Henry Burkhardt, became the defacto president of the Church in east Germany, and in tandem with Apostle Thomas S. Monson, quietly brought the east German leaders to the point of allowing the construction of a temple and allowing the exchange of missionaries.

Consider this exquisite irony: over nearly half a century, an American church widely known for its conservative politics (culminating in the anti-Communist rhetoric of prominent Apostle Ezra Taft Benson, who became Church President in 1985) actively and persistently seeks and eventually achieves a cordial peaceful coexistence with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), one of the most obdurate Communist regimes on the planet! Only had this happened in North Korea would it be slightly more astonishing.

One of the main characters in this non-fictional novel is Henry Burkhardt, whom we first meet as a very young, as yet-unmarried man. Eventually he becomes the de facto President of the Church in the GDR, in effect giving his entire life to the Church. To the political leaders of the GDR, Burkhardt is the face of Mormonism, and he becomes a trusted and respected face. Yet, as admirable and as faultless as Burkhardt had been in his work in East Germany, when he met with President Spencer W. Kimball in 1975, he was counseled to make a quantum leap ahead in his own thinking about how one interacts with one’s enemies.

President Kimball surprised this paragon of virtues – who had never offended anyone in the GDR hierarchy – by saying: “If you want to see a change of things in East Germany, it must begin with you personally. It must begin with you, because you are the leader there, and you must have a change of heart, which means you must force yourself to befriend the Communists. You cannot hold any grudges against them. You must change your whole outlook and attitude.”

Burkhardt’s (unstated) views were: “You don’t know the Communists. They are against religion, often threaten to throw me into prison, and constantly make trouble for me.” Looking back, however, from the vantage point of 2003, he said: “It took a long time before I came to realize that Communists were also children of our Heavenly Father, and that I should deal with them accordingly, in a friendly manner. And from that time forth, miracle after miracle occurred in the history of the Church in this country. They became friendlier and more receptive to me, as a representative of the Church.”

President Kimball said essentially the same thing to Burkhardt’s counselors, as they were also permitted by turns to travel to Salt Lake City to attend General Conference. Here is an account by Gottfried Richter: “While preparing to attend General Conference, members told me, ‘We will no longer accept such treatment from the government. We must hire a lawyer. We must resist.’ Since it was my turn to attend General Conference, Brother Burkhardt told me to discuss it with Elder Monson.

I did tell Elder Monson, and he said, ‘Come with me.’ He took me to see President Kimball, who listened carefully. Then he stood up, came to me, and said with his deep, sonorous voice, ‘Brother Richter, soften the hearts of these people. Don’t harden them.’ He repeated that once more. This was the calm advice of a prophet. While the other churches hardened the hearts of those people, we softened them over time. I now repeat that advice so casually, but Brother Burkhardt absolutely could not abide the entire Communist society. He didn’t like it at all, and it was not easy for him. He didn’t want to curry favor with them, but he began to do what President Kimball had counseled, ‘soften their hearts,’ and it worked.”

Crucially, however, this softening of the hearts of the GDR’s leaders did not involve pandering to them on their own political terms. True, the Mormons sought to find common ground with the GDR leaders whenever possible, emphasizing for example the important, courageous, and effective position on world peace the Church leadership under President Kimball had taken in 1978 involving the basing of the MX Missile in the Great Basin. The East Germans and the Soviets profoundly understood that the Reagan Administration in the US did not deploy the missile in that racetrack mode almost entirely because of the Church’s opposition to it. This was a huge plus for the Mormons in that part of the world.

Likewise the Mormons in the GDR shared freely with their political counterparts quotes from President Kimball’s momentous 1976 article on world peace “The False Gods We Worship.” But they did not pretend that Mormonism and Communism were somehow profoundly compatible, as some less enviable persons had done earlier by glowingly comparing the Church with the Third Reich. Nor did these heroic and Christlike Latter-day Saints back away from their own beliefs in the slightest. They boldly, persistently, but invariably diplomatically declared to an atheistic society their belief in a Supreme Being and reminded any and all that the Constitution of the GDR guaranteed freedom of religion.

One nagging major question lingers about our relations with the regime of the GDR: was it a mistake in the end to befriend a dictatorship which fell unexpectedly anyway not long afterwards? This question sometimes arose in the minds of some GDR Mormons and in some US anti-Communists and others, who criticized Apostle Thomas S. Monson, the designated Church representative to East Germany, for meeting and shaking hands with Head of State Erich Honeker. I am personally persuaded that it was not a mistake but rather that it is very strong evidence that the best way of dealing with one’s enemies world wide is to take such a Christlike approach.

I recommend for further reading two prize-winning books by Raymond Kuehne, the US-born son of immigrant German parents who earlier served a mission in Germany and returned with his wife to serve in the new Freiberg temple. He once asked Henry Burkhardt, who was then serving as the temple president, to enlighten the temple workers, many of them Americans, about how this miraculous thing had come about. Burkhardt gave them all some informal seminars and provided Brother Kuehne with some jottings he had made about the history.

Kuehne then plunged into the project with gusto, interviewing Burkhardt more extensively, and he began to interview many, many other witnesses, as well as to seek out documentary materials in all sorts of archives and libraries and private collections. The books originally appeared in German in the Leipzig University Press and have been ably rewritten/translated by the author into English, where they have appeared in the University of Utah Press: (Henry Burkhardt and LDS Realpolitik in Communist East Germany, and: Mormons as Citizens of a Communist State:  A Documentary History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in East Germany, 1945-1990)

Germany has never seen baptism rates as high as those in some parts of Latin America or the Phillippines, especially not in recent years, when some bean counters began to despair about the future of the Church here. War and emigration have also taken their toll on the numbers of Mormons in Germany, but quietly, behind the scenes, the Church in Germany has been gathering real strength, less of a quantitative nature, but more of a qualitative kind. Now that many German families have had the benefit of the Church for several generations, the kind of Mormons one is likely to meet in Germany is truly impressive.

On a lecture tour some years ago, I met many local leaders and at the end of our trip I said to Linda: “Do you realize how many Dieter F. Uchtdorfs there are in practically every German ward and stake now?”

We have invited a couple of such great German members to join with us for a day on the boat so that you can see first-hand what I mean. Frerich Görts and Karl-Heinz Scherer have consented to meet us in Rüdesheim and travel through the Rhine Gorge with us. They live in Düsseldorf and will leave us in Cologne that evening for the drive home. Their wives are also invited, but Sister Heide Görts informs us she has grandmother duty that day tending grandkids whose parents will be out of the country. I hope Sister Silvia Scherer can also join us.

Karl-Heinz Scherer, who happens to be a person I helped convert when I was a missionary in the early 1960s and he was a young teenager, is now a distinguished member of the Public Affairs Department in Germany, in fact until recently he was its Chair.

Frerich Görts is a former member of the cabinet of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whose portfolio included the German Bundespost and all the communications affairs in Germany, including telephone, cable, internet... and he was responsible for integrating all of those things when the Wall fell and the two Germanies reunited. Frerich is the official Spokesperson for the Church in Germany.

Frerich and Karl-Heinz and the other Düsseldorfers like to think outside the box. When they built a fine new Stake Center there a dozen years or so ago, they invited the Düsseldorf Symphony, which had a performance hall but no rehearsal hall, to rehearse weekly at the Stake Center. They built in special cabinets for the tympani, bass fiddles, etc. etc. It has been a great success.

To show their gratitude, once a year the symphony plays a benefit concert in the Stake Center. In 2012 they decided to pull out all the stops and put on a performance of Fiddler on the Roof, with the Mormons supplying the singers, the symphony supplying the players. Frerich grew a long beard – none of that sticky fake beard stuff for him – and took the role of Tevya the Milkman. That sort of gives you an idea...

We think it will be a delight for you to get to meet these people and get a sense of the truly remarkable Saints the Lord has raised up in Germany.