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135 from Aryanism to Anabaptism: Nazi Race Science and The From Aryanism to Anabaptism: Nazi Race Science and the Language of Mennonite Ethnicity BENJAMIN W. GOOSSEN* Abstract: This essay advocates a new approach to the study of “Mennonite ethnicity.” Rejecting older narratives of white Mennonite ethnic identity as generated by cultural isolation, it instead depicts ethnicity as contested and situationally contingent. Focusing on the emergence of a discourse of “Mennonite ethnicity” in the late 1940s, the essay traces the linkages between Nazi racial scientific practices— especially as appropriated by Mennonite genealogists in the Third Reich—and their reformulation by Mennonite Central Committee during the postwar era as a means of helping Mennonite refugees migrate from Europe to the Americas. Arguing that M.C.C.’s deployment of the language of “ethnic Mennonitism” constituted a systematic denial of the collaboration of tens of thousands of Mennonites with National Socialism, it suggests that similarly today, invocations of “Mennonite ethnicity” undergird notions of white supremacy within the church. In early 1950, the Mennonite church leader and historian Harold S. Bender published in these pages a review of the German-language periodical Reports from the Genealogical Association of the Danzig Mennonite Families (Mitteilungen des Sippenverbandes der danziger Mennoniten- Familien). Appearing in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1944, the Reports had provided detailed information on the research and activities of the country’s fast-growing Mennonite genealogical community. “One of the striking developments in Germany under Hitler,” Bender noted, “was the great growth in interest in family history and genealogical research.” As the longtime dean of Goshen College Biblical Seminary certainly knew— having himself spent significant time in the Third Reich, completing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Heidelberg in 1935 and serving as a Mennonite Central Committee liaison to the Nazi government as late as 1940—that explosion of ancestral studies in Hitler’s Germany had not been limited to Mennonite citizens. Across the Führer’s “racial state,” lllllllll *Benjamin W. Goossen is a Ph.D. student in the history department at Harvard University. The sources for this article were collected during the research process for his forthcoming book, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, with funding from the Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service, and Harvard University. For their comments, he would like to thank Rachel Waltner Goossen, Miriam Rich, John D. Roth, and two anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to James Urry for providing primary sources. Except where otherwise noted, all translations are the author’s. While all clarifications in brackets are also the author’s, all quotations in italics are emphasized in the original documents. 135 MQR 90 (April 2016) 136 The Mennonite Quarterly Review blood purity laws and racialist activism, as well as more than a decade of government propaganda, had elevated genealogy from the margins of social consciousness to a celebrated, nationwide practice. “This interest naturally had a strong response among the Mennonites,” Bender informed readers of The Mennonite Quarterly Review, “because in Germany as well as elsewhere the Mennonites have a strong sense of family loyalty, and Mennonites are members of the church largely because of their family ancestry.”1 Readers today might be surprised to learn that Bender was not critical of these developments. Decades of scholarship since then have demonstrated the close links between genealogical enthusiasm in the Third Reich and Nazi policies of racial exclusion, including the systematic persecution and murder of millions of European Jews.2 For most citizens of Nazi Germany, including the vast majority of its Mennonite population, genealogy provided a valuable means of proving Aryan ancestry, simultaneously granting individuals capable of demonstrating “pure” Germanic heritage access to generous political and welfare benefits, while also entrenching racism as a normal category of social division.3 And yet for Bender, family research as practiced under National Socialism could and should be disentangled from its cultural context, viewed as separate from and even superior to the unabashed racism, militarism, and anti- Semitism from which it had largely emerged. The seminary dean and avowed pacifist did not believe that ancestral research and fascist politics were inherently intertwined. Indeed, he found it “encouraging” to discover that Mennonite genealogical research had not fallen in 1945 with the Third Reich. Welcoming the transformation and incorporation of a major tenet of National Socialist ideology into mainstream Mennonite 1. H. S. Bender, “Mitteilungen des Sippenverbandes der danziger Mennoniten-Familien Epp- Kauenhowen-Zimmermann, Herausgeber: Dr. Kurt Kauenhowen (Göttingen, 1935-1944),” MQR 24 (April 1950), 170. On Bender, see Albert N. Keim, Harold S. Bender, 1897-1962 (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1998). 2. On Nazism and racial science, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the role of genealogy, Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 76-142. 3. On Mennonites in the Third Reich, see Diether Götz Lichdi, Mennoniten im Dritten Reich (Weierhof im Bolanden: Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein, 1977); Testing Faith and Tradition, ed. Hanspeter Jecker and Alle G. Hoekema, (Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 2006), 123-130; James Irvin Lichti, Houses on the Sand? Pacifist Denominations in Nazi Germany (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Astrid von Schlachta, “‘in unbedingter Treue’…‘keine Verfechter der Wehrlosigkeit:’ Volksgemeinschaft, Staatstreue und das Bild, das von den Mennoniten herrschen sollte,” Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter 72 (2015), 117-132. Nazi Race Science and Mennonite Ethnicity 137 culture, he reported with approval that “a permanent interest in family history remains among the Mennonites in Germany, even after the Hitler regime has long since passed away.”4 What explains Bender’s enthusiasm for genealogical research in the Nazi era? This article argues that it was neither anomalous nor anachronistic. Placed in the context of the immediate postwar years, it rather appears symptomatic of a larger effort on the part of high-profile Mennonite leaders across Europe and the Americas to generate and popularize notions of global Anabaptist peoplehood, especially as encapsulated in the discourse of “Mennonite ethnicity.”5 Noting that the vast majority of the world’s Mennonites were directly descended from the Anabaptists of the sixteenth-century Reformation, supporters of this project maintained that their church was bound not merely by theological ties but also by an inherited culture, and even, perhaps, by hereditary bonds of blood. Like the members of other ethnically-defined communities—whether whole “nations” and “races” like the Germans, Czechs, or Jews, or smaller “tribes” and “clans” such as Kashubians, Schwabians, and Cherokees—Mennonites’ historical experiences or common genes had supposedly predisposed them to exhibit a set of collective characteristics, ranging from emotional qualities such as thrift and severity to proclivities for certain professions and activities like agricultural work and four-part singing. In addition to a host of other factors, the emergence of the racial sciences in Germany and elsewhere directly influenced such thinking. Although leaders like Bender often expressed open political and theological opposition to Nazism and sometimes to racial science as a whole, they nevertheless found themselves in a world deeply shaped by these systems—one in which 4. Bender, “Mitteilungen des Sippenverbandes,” 173. 5. I refer to descriptions of Mennonites as “ethnic” or “ethnical” as a discourse of “Mennonite ethnicity.” Scholarly accounts of “Mennonite ethnicity,” both positive and critical, include E. K. Francis, “The Russian Mennonites: From Religious to Ethnic Group,” The American Journal of Sociology 54 (Sept. 1948), 101-107; James C. Juhnke, “Mennonite History and Self Understanding: North American Mennonitism as a Bipolar Mosaic,” and Donald B. Kraybill, “Modernity and Identity: The Transformation of Mennonite Ethnicity,” in Mennonite Identity: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Sam Steiner and Calvin Redekop (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988); Rodney J. Sawatsky, “Mennonite Ethnicity: Medium, Message and Mission,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 9 (1991), 113-121; Daphne Naomi Winland, “The Quest for Mennonite Peoplehood: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Dilemma of Definitions,” Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology 30 (Feb. 1993), 110-138; Hans Werner, “Peoplehoods of the Past: Mennonites and the Ethnic Boundary,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 23 (2005), 23-35; James Urry, Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood: Europe—Russia—Canada, 1525 to 1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2006), esp. 205-228; Royden Loewen, “The Politics of Peoplehood: Ethnicity and Religion Among Canada’s Mennonites,” in
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