The Mormons in Nazi Germany

THE MORMONS IN NAZI GERMANY: HISTORY AND MEMORY A Dissertation by DAVID CONLEY NELSON Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, Arnold P. Krammer Committee Members, Chester S. L. Dunning Walter D. Kamphoefner Peter J. Hugill D. Michael Quinn Head of Department David Vaught December 2012 Major Subject: History Copyright 2012 David Conley Nelson ABSTRACT This dissertation studies a small American religious group that survived unscathed during the Third Reich. Some fifteen thousand members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, lived under National Socialism. Unlike persecuted Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other small American-based sects that suffered severe restrictions, the Mormons worshiped freely under Hitler’s regime. They survived by stressing congruence between church doctrine and Nazi dogma. Mormons emphasized their interest in genealogical research and sports, sent their husbands into the Wehrmacht and their sons into the Hitler Youth, and prayed for a Nazi victory in wartime. Mormon leaders purged all Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans and liturgical practices, and shunned their few Jewish converts. They resurrected a doctrinal edict that required deference to civil authority, which the Mormons had not always obeyed. Some Mormons imagined fanciful connections with Nazism, to the point that a few believed Hitler admired their church, copied its welfare program, and organized the Nazi party along Mormon lines. This dissertation builds upon Christine Elizabeth King’s theory of a common Weltanschauung between Mormons and Nazis, and Steven Carter’s description of the Mormons’ “accommodation” with National Socialism. Instead of a passive approach, however, the Mormons pursued aggressive and shameless “ingratiation” with the Nazi state. This work also examines memory. Mormons later tried to forget their pandering to the Nazis, especially when large numbers of Germans immigrated to Utah in the post- ii war period. When the story of a martyred Mormon resister, Helmuth Hübener, emerged in the 1970s, church officials interfered with the research of scholars at Brigham Young University. They feared that Hübener’s example would incite Mormon youth to rebel against dictators abroad, hurt the church’s relations with communist East Germany, and would offend recent German Mormon immigrants in Utah. A few Mormons shunned and harassed Hübener’s surviving coconspirators. In recent years, Hübener— excommunicated for rebellion against the Nazis but later restored to full church membership—has been rehabilitated as a recognized hero of Mormonism. A new collective memory has been forged, one of wartime courage and suffering, while the inconvenient past is being conveniently discarded. iii To the children of my first family: Wendy, Berkley, Bradley, Jeffery, Amy, Michael and Angie. May faith never stifle your intellect, and may you find the courage and compassion to round religion's sharp corners. To the children of my second family: Brittany, Kyle and Megan. May you find the same comfort and sense of belonging in your faith as have your predecessors, while avoiding those sharp corners. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation began with a question posed two decades ago by my adopted son Jeff, then a thirteen-year-old junior high school student taking his first world history class. He learned that prisoners in Hitler’s concentration camps wore triangular symbols on their armbands. The color corresponded to their reason for confinement. Common criminals wore green triangles, political prisoners red, the “work shy” black, homosexuals pink, Jehovah’s Witnesses purple, and the Jews a yellow Star of David-- which could be seen as one yellow triangle atop another. Jeff’s adolescent logic sought to forge a link between this new knowledge and what he had been taught in Sunday school. A descendant of the Mormon pioneers, he learned the orthodox interpretation of his denomination’s history: his nineteenth century coreligionists trekked west to escape American persecution and their missionaries had often been mistreated in foreign lands. Certainly, he thought, Mormons must have suffered the same fate in Nazi Germany. One evening, as our typically large Latter-day Saint family gathered around the kitchen table, Jeff asked: “Dad, what color triangles did the Mormons wear in the concentration camps?” That question became my impetus for a research paper several years later, subsequently an award-winning presentation at the Mormon History Association’s annual conference, and ultimately my shift of emphasis from French to German history. My dissertation advisor took up where Jeff’s inspiration left off. Arnold P. Krammer understands concentration camp insignia in a way unmatched by many academics. Most members of his large, extended Hungarian Jewish family perished v after they boarded boxcars for Auschwitz in 1944. When he cracks a shoebox lid and places carefully hand-stitched Stars of David into the palms of his students, the classroom becomes eerily quiet. Meant as badges of shame by the Nazis, those fragile, sixty-five-year-old yellow patches today constitute memorials of pride, crafted by a physically doomed yet spiritually resilient people who refused to allow fear of their impending fate to degrade their detailed workmanship. My mentor asks that his students draw insight and fuel their work ethic from the example of those who meticulously stitched and unashamedly wore such emblems. My deepest gratitude extends to Jeff, who got this project rolling with puerile curiosity, and to Professor Krammer, whose mature guidance helped my graduate education bridge twin chasms imposed by my airline career and my midlife divorce and remarriage. Without many others named subsequently, this work would have emerged in a different form. Without these two, it would not exist. Other members of Texas A&M University’s faculty taught me the entry-level skills of the historical profession. Masters and doctoral committee members Chester Dunning, Walter Kamphoefner, Peter Hugill, H. W. Brands, Lora Wildenthal, Harold Livesay, James Rosenheim, and Richard Golsan figure prominently among those. Two previous chairs, Cynthia Bouton of my M.A. committee and Sarah Fishman, who guided my undergraduate thesis at the University of Houston, deserve special gratitude. Professor Fishman’s Houston colleague, Robert Zaretsky, inspired me to become a historian. vi D. Michael Quinn, who journeyed from California to Texas for my examinations and stood ready to help by email during the interim, served as my Mormon history specialist, a billet that could not be filled in College Station. One of the best living scholars of Mormonism, Professor Quinn could be described as the Job of the historical profession. He has suffered prodigiously for the sin of writing Mormon history according to his primary sources, rather than in conformance with the faith-promoting paradigm necessary for survival among coreligionists in that field. The previously named scholars are my role models. Mike is my hero. German teachers at Texas A&M and the Goethe Institute in Munich struggled to help an older student undergoing a midlife language crisis--who had entered graduate school with a freshly minted B.A. in French, thinking that would be his primary research language. Norbert Feltes, a native German speaker from Luxembourg who married into my wife’s family, helped fill the gap. He shared budget accommodations with me while we mined the German language documents in the LDS church archives. The European Union Center of Excellence awarded a research fellowship that paid my hostel and campground bills in Salt Lake City, as well as many hamburger meals. The Department of History at Texas A&M demonstrated faith in an older, non- traditional scholar when it bestowed a generous research grant. I thank Johan Lembke of the EUCE and Walter Buenger of the history department for this valuable funding. I’m equally grateful to the late Robert Calvert, a Freedom Rider during the Civil Rights era and an inspiration to legions of graduate students since then, for admitting a man in his forties to a graduate history program normally reserved for younger scholars. vii I could not have persevered in this project without the loving support of my wife Ruth, my beautiful but precocious ten-year-old Megan, and the world’s two greatest stepchildren, Kyle and Brittany Ray. My second family adopted my dreams as theirs and unselfishly endured my weeklong sojourns that cut into planned home time between airline trips. “Daddy is doing research,” entered precious little Megan’s vernacular at too young an age, especially when her father would finish working a trip from Paris and then board a flight to Salt Lake--with intervening time for not much more than a kiss. My parents blessed me with a modicum of intelligence and copious doses of instruction in the art of discernment. My mother reared me to avoid prejudice despite my racist Louisiana roots in the 1950s. She also emphasized the difference between believing in God and adhering to the dictates of religion. My father, who has been searching for accommodation between spirituality and intellect throughout his long life, simply admonished me--on the eve of my decade-long sojourn into Mormonism--not to allow “the church,” any church, to do my thinking for me. To answer Jeff’s query after all of these years, most Mormons in Nazi Germany had little to do with the concentration camps. They avoided persecution by skillfully collaborating to a measured degree that ensured their survival but did not subject them to postwar retribution. In doing so, they emerged as the most successful foreign-based “new religion” during the Third Reich and inspired faithful historians who emphasized their heroism and suffering, while masking the less admiring aspects of their behavior. Thank you, Jeff, for inspiring me to write this story in a different way.

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