CHAPTER VII. THE ROCKS AND SHOALS OF MORMON MEMORY IN NAZI GERMANY, PART 1: THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH
One Sunday morning in December 1943, while serving as a Wehrmacht occupation soldier in Denmark, Herbert Klopfer felt an overwhelming desire to attend Mormon religious services. But he did not know where the local branch met. Dressed in his full military uniform, he walked the streets of the Jutland peninsula town of Esbjerg, humming an LDS hymn loudly enough to attract attention. A young girl approached and asked in Danish if he were a Mormon. Klopfer accepted the youth’s invitation to follow her to sacrament meeting, where he surrendered his gun belt to the branch president at the door. Invited to address the small congregation, he avoided the use of German—as he perceived that his coreligionists loathed the language of the invaders. Instead, he delivered a spiritual message in English, which another congregant translated into Danish. His remarks struck sympathetic chords with the small LDS congregation. Klopfer told of how he had lost his home, the Mormon mission headquarters across from Berlin’s Tiergarten Park, and all of his possessions to Allied bombing raids. But he was grateful that his family had been spared. He professed his love for his fellow Mormons and his belief in Joseph Smith’s “restored” gospel of Jesus Christ.1
Karl Herbert Klopfer is a memory beacon. He typifies the kind of German Mormon who is treasured in the collective wartime memory of the faithful, when Latter-day Saints became combatants, survivors, and victims. As the president of the Mormons’ East German Mission during the Second World War, he presents a stark contrast with some of his American predecessors. Unlike Alfred C. Rees, who aggressively tried to ingratiate the Mormon Church with Adolf Hitler’s regime, Klopfer gained privileges for the church without his predecessor’s lofty pretentiousness. After being drafted into the German Army in February 1940, while serving as a paymaster with the rank of a junior officer, Klopfer convinced his superiors to grant him a private room with a telephone line. From Fürstenwalde military base east of Berlin, Klopfer ran the affairs of the mission by phone and through weekend visits to Berlin until he was deployed abroad in 1943.2
Before the war, Klopfer was a well-loved, faithful, full-time employee of the Berlin-based Mormon mission. A skilled English and French linguist, Klopfer often received the flattering praise of his fellow countrymen, who complimented him on his command of German. His English skills were so proficient that Germans often thought he was an American who had acquired a remarkable fluency in German. When Klopfer was reported missing in action on the Russian front late in the war, German Mormons reacted with sadness. They recalled that he—like so many others among them—had missed his chance to avoid the war by emigrating. In 1928, Klopfer had intended to migrate to Utah but postponed his plans when German-Austrian Mission President Hyrum Valentine called him to serve a mission.3 Then he fell in love and eventually married a girl he had met on his mission, after a four-year courtship by correspondence. After Hitler took power, going to America became impossible, as the law prohibited emigration by a military-age Arian male. He instead served as a trusted confidant and translator for the American mission presidents based in Berlin. After the war, the Salt Lake City Mormon leadership tried to learn the fate of its favorite German son.4 It was not until 1948 that Klopfer’s widow learned that her husband had died of starvation in Russian captivity in March 1945.5
Klopfer’s installation as a Mormon memory beacon occurred during the last decade of the twentieth century, when the church’s collective memory of the Nazi epoch shifted. After November 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and the reunification of Germany began, LDS leaders no longer felt compelled to restrain the writing of church history in consideration of the 3,700 German-speaking Mormons who lived behind the Iron Curtain. As Chapters Ten and Eleven recount, the church hierarchy lifted a twentyfive year proscription on dramatic works and scholarly publications written by Brigham Young University scholars concerning seventeen-year-old Hamburg Mormon Helmuth Hübener. In 1942, a red-robed Nazi tribunal had condemned Hübener to death and sentenced three other adolescents, two of whom were Latter-day Saints, to prison terms. They distributed anti-Hitler leaflets, produced with a church-owned typewriter, based upon information derived from listening to forbidden BBC broadcasts.
As European communism began to fall, so did the Mormon Church’s reluctance to glorify its few resisters and its many dutiful former Wehrmacht soldiers. In June 1990, the church-owned Deseret News, through its full-color Saturday religious supplement, the Church News, introduced Herbert Klopfer as an example of a righteous Latter-day Saint who bravely fought and died for Germany in the Second World War. “Enemy Soldier in the Pulpit,” written by Klopfer’s son, emphasized the danger that the European Mission President accepted when he worshiped in uniform with Danish civilians and relinquished his pistol to the congregational leader. Rather than engage in outright defiance against Hitler and overtly violate the Twelfth Article of Faith, as Hübener and his co-conspirators did, Klopfer obediently answered the call of his country while trying to maintain ties with his church. The faith-promoting article also emphasized that religious ties trumped wartime enmity. Said one Danish Mormon who was in attendance that Sunday morning in Jutland, “It was wonderful to see a man in the uniform we hated speak with so much love for us.”6
Klopfer’s story illustrates the approach that believing Mormon historians and storytellers have adopted regarding their congregants who supported and fought for one of history’s most reprehensible regimes. In the new collective memory of the Second World War, all Mormons are victims. This story line has a degree of validity, as the war impacted Latter-day Saint life in Nazi Germany on the same scale that it affected most citizens of the Third Reich. Mormon fathers and sons fell on the battlefield. Civilians died or lost their homes in bombing raids, made perilous escapes from burning cities, and cowered in fear of advancing Red Army soldiers.7
The war also interrupted Mormon religious life. It cut the ecclesiastical chain of authority through the removal of American missionaries. Military conscription of priesthood leaders disrupted the replacement German leadership structure. The loss of civilian life and church meetinghouses from aerial bombing also disturbed the normally fastidious Mormon record-keeping process. Apologetic author Gilbert Scharffs estimated that almost five hundred German Mormon soldiers and more than one hundred civilians died as the result of the hostilities.8 Earlier records revealed a lower total of German Mormon casualties, 184 killed in combat and 120 who died on the home front.9 If, instead of war, German Mormons had suffered casualties because of a peacetime calamity, such as a flood or a storm, carefully kept church records would have documented the losses precisely. Because of the catastrophe of war, no one can pinpoint an exact number of Mormon casualties.10
Instead of a detailed chronicle punctuated with statistics, the story of the Mormons in Germany during the Second World War unfolds through a series of memory beacons: courageous soldiers, resilient civilians, Germans who stepped into the role of the departed pre-war American leadership, missionaries who returned as gracious occupation soldiers, and a massive church-sponsored relief campaign that transpired as the American ecclesiastical leadership returned to impose Zion’s spiritual authority over its vanquished German congregants. The first such memory beacon appeared one week before the beginning of the Second World War.
Beacons of Memory: The Pre-War Evacuation of American Missionaries
For most combatants in Europe, the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Hitler’s Army invaded Poland. For Mormons in Germany, the war effectively started one week earlier on August 23. From his office in Salt Lake City, connected by a phone line to his former State Department colleagues in Washington, D.C., First Counselor J. Reuben Clark monitored shocking events happening half a world away. The Mormons’ second-in-command, a former undersecretary of state and ambassador, listened with apprehension to reports of a bilateral treaty being signed in Moscow. For the veteran diplomat and keen observer of international affairs, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Germany could only mean one thing: war was inevitable. The unlikely alliance of a fascist and a communist state meant that Germany and the Soviet Union would divide the spoils. Several hours later, Clark dispatched a telegram to his European mission presidents. In the name of the First Presidency, he ordered all missionaries in Germany to evacuate.11
Having practiced the evacuation drill one year before, in the midst of the Sudetenland crisis, the elders who staffed the two German missions were well prepared to leave. Missionaries from the Berlin-based East German Mission began boarding trains. Within two days, all had arrived safely in Copenhagen. Joseph Fielding Smith, a member of the Council of the Twelve who was traveling in Germany at the time, took charge of the arrangements in Denmark. Within weeks, he dispatched the young Americans across the Atlantic to the United States from various European ports. Alfred C. Rees had returned to Utah one week prior to the evacuation because of ill health.12 Despite the fact that his designated replacement, acting East German Mission President Thomas E. McKay, was in Basel, Switzerland, when Clark’s telegram arrived on August 24, 1939, the mass exodus from the Berlin-based mission occurred without incident.13
That was not the case regarding the evacuation of American missionaries from the West German Mission in Frankfurt, which by 1939 also included the mission districts in Austria. Shortly after Mission President M. Douglas Wood’s elders began traveling north, the Dutch government limited entry by foreigners. Relying on its experience during the First World War, when The Netherlands had absorbed a flow of refugees that had taxed resources, Dutch officials denied passage to any non-citizen who did not have adequate funds and proof of onward passage. Later, a few days before the war began, Dutch officials closed their border altogether. The Netherlands LDS Mission in The Hague had been designated as a primary staging area for missionaries, as it had been during the September 1938 “fire drill” evacuation. The Mormon evacuation plan had called for missionaries to receive their steamship tickets at their staging areas; thus, when they could not show evidence of a ticket out of the country, the Dutch border authorities denied them entry.
Traveling in small groups and running short of funds, many missionaries had to improvise. A German law that prohibited taking more than ten marks out of the country aggravated the missionaries’ financial situation. Many, expecting the same kind of routine, uninterrupted journey they had enjoyed one year earlier, had made last-minute expenditures on souvenirs and consumer goods in order to comply with the currency export law. When thirty-one young elders did not report on schedule to their designated rendezvous points, Mission President Wood assigned a senior missionary, Norman George Seibold, to search for the missing young Americans amid the confusion of a country mobilizing for war, and to provide funds for their travel to alternative destinations—such as Denmark. He dispatched Seibold with a wad of cash and a handful of steamship tickets to roam German border cities and rail depots, looking for stranded Mormon missionaries.
Another group of missionaries, detained by Dutch authorities at the border, managed to communicate by telephone with the mission president in The Hague. Franklin D. Murdock sent a young elder, John Robert Kest, with funds that would allow the detained missionaries to make other travel arrangements. Kest arrived at the border, only to find that the young Mormons he sought had been deported back into Germany. On impulse, Kest decided to pursue them into Germany despite the fact that he did not have a visa to enter the country. Despite a confrontation with German authorities, during which Kest was searched and ordered to leave the country—instructions he disobeyed—he located the missionaries he sought at a hotel.14
Although most of the missionaries found their way out of Germany without assistance, later accounts described their chance encounters with Seibold and Kest as “miraculous.” Seibold and Kest became memory beacons in the scholarly and popular literature of the missionary withdrawal from the Third Reich. The evacuation of Mormon missionaries became an important nexus for the research of a Brigham Young University professor of religious education, David F. Boone, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject and has published several articles and a book chapter on the missionary evacuation.15
The evacuation also inspired a faithful Mormon freelance writer Terry Montague to undertake a research project that resulted in the publication of a 148-page, softcover book, Mine Angels Round About—based entirely on the few days of confusion that resulted from the Dutch government’s decision to limit passage through its territory. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the author searched extensively for veterans of the West German Mission evacuation. She interviewed a few who lived close to her home in rural Idaho, many who lived in Utah, and queried others as far away as Israel and New Zealand.16 The result was a faith-promoting chronicle of escape from the rapidly tightening clutches of war; every obstacle in their path generated an opportunity for God to intervene miraculously.
The first perceived miracle occurred prior to the evacuation. When John R. Barnes, secretary for the West German mission, contacted the U. S. consulate general in Frankfurt regarding plans to send missionaries to neutral countries in anticipation of war, the diplomat was skeptical: “Mr. Barnes, if our military attaché has no knowledge of such [mobilization] activity on the part of the Nazi army, from what source did your church president get such information?” Barnes, apparently unaware of J. Reuben Clark’s diplomatic sources, replied: “I know he got the information from the Lord!” He then lectured the diplomat on the Mormon Church President’s gift of prophesy.17
When Mission President M. Douglas Wood first learned of the evacuation order, he was in Hanover, a six-hour drive from mission headquarters in Frankfurt. Wishing to fly instead, Wood received discouraging news from his hotel desk clerk, who said all flights were booked and that airline tickets must be reserved weeks in advance. Miraculously, according to Montague’s chronicle, Wood was able to obtain the last two seats on an airline flight leaving that afternoon.18 When Emma Rosenhan, one of the few single female American missionaries assigned to the Frankfurt-based Mormon mission, learned she must evacuate, her German branch president was “inspired” to advise her to purchase a ticket for trans-channel passage to London. Thus, when she arrived at the Dutch border, her onward ticket allowed her entry into The Netherlands that her male missionary companions were denied.19 Missionaries sent to search for stranded colleagues in crowded, chaotic train stations, according to Montague, seemed to sense when they should sing or whistle the first few notes of well-known church songs, such as “Do What is Right.” That attracted the attention of missionaries who would not have otherwise met their rescuers.20
Although Montague’s book primarily serves the needs of faithful readers seeking religious inspiration, the oral history interviews she conducted produced two important historical insights into the days that preceded the onset of the Second World War. Both occurred in train stations. The first revealed the pandemonium that accompanied the mobilization of Germany’s army for war and the rush of civilians to escape the hostilities. Mormon missionaries pushed and shoved their way onto overcrowded trains that offered standing-room-only accommodations to passengers, some of whom— because of age or infirmity—found themselves trampled or crushed. Taxi drivers, railroad porters, and restaurateurs engaged in price gouging, and helpless passengers found themselves at the mercy of ill-tempered soldiers who used the power of their uniform to enforce their own boarding priorities. Often, passengers would travel in cattle-car conditions from one town to the next, perhaps only twenty miles away, only to be evicted from the train when authorities commandeered it for military transport. Confusion reigned among the deposed passengers when no official at the next Bahnhof could predict the arrival of the next train headed north, nor whether space would be available.21
In a tragic series of historical vignettes, Montague’s missionaries described the desperate plight of many Jews who tried to escape the Third Reich at the last minute by using the German rail system. Missionary Frank Knutti remembered a conversation with a small Jewish boy, who told him that his family had been traveling for days, trying to escape Germany—but had been repeatedly turned away at border crossings with Germany’s neighboring countries. They would try Denmark next, but it would be their last hope.22 On the Dutch border that adjoins the Rhineland city of Emmerich, missionaries negotiating their way into The Netherlands observed the plight of several Jewish families seeking freedom from Hitler’s empire:
The Jews were hysterical; they argued loudly and many wept, but the guards refused to allow them to leave the train. One Jewish man, his wife and children looking on in despair, got down on his hands and knees, clasping a Dutch guard’s feet, and pleaded in vain that the guard take mercy on his family, but to no avail.23
In the city of Rheine in Westphalia, missionaries Richard Poll and Burt Horsley encountered an 18-year-old Jewish woman, the daughter of a wealthy foreign banker. Despite her possession of a valid Swiss passport and sufficient funds, she could not buy a ticket out of Germany. Stationmasters refused to sell tickets to a Jew. The missionaries agreed to help her but were stunned by her proposed solution. She asked one of them to marry her, arguing that the Germans would never refuse passage to the wife of an American citizen. She offered to pay handsomely for this special favor. When each missionary incredulously refused, she proposed another harebrained solution. The three of them would buy a car with her funds and they would run a border checkpoint at high speed. Finally, Poll and Horsley suggested a more sensible resolution. They went to the ticket window, and with her funds purchased rail passage for her, along with a ferryboat ticket to England. Grateful, she departed.24
Compared to the plight of Jews trying to escape the Nazis, the evacuating Mormon missionaries were never in danger. The greatest threat they encountered was a shortage of funds. If they had remained in Germany after the onset of hostilities, there is no evidence that they would have been in immediate peril. The United States did not enter the war for more than two years after Germany’s invasion of Poland. Undoubtedly, American citizens were able to leave Germany after the war broke out. The greatest impediment was obtaining reservations on sold-out transatlantic ocean liners, not antagonism by the German government. Nevertheless, the relative ease with which Mormon missionaries were able to book steamship passage back to the United States became another reason to credit God’s favorable intervention. J. Reuben Clark, predominantly responsible for formulating and triggering the evacuation plan, did not hesitate to thank divine providence for the success of the endeavor. Speaking in April 1940 at a church general conference, he said:
The whole group was moved from the disturbed areas in Europe to the United States . . . without one accident or one case of sickness. The entire group was evacuated from Europe . . . when tens of thousands of Americans were besieging the ticket offices of the great steamship companies for passage, and the Elders had no reservations. Every time a group was ready to embark there was available the necessary space, even though efforts to reserve space a few hours beforehand failed.25
The success of the Mormon missionary evacuation from Europe at the onset of the Second World War can be attributed to fastidious planning, a successful rehearsal during the Sudetenland crisis, and disciplined execution. Its only hitch resulted from the failure of J. Reuben Clark to study the history of Holland’s reaction to the flood of refugees that besieged its borders during the First World War, and his inability to anticipate that the Dutch would limit passage when war threatened again. Nevertheless, the evacuation was an overall success. Rather than relying on divine intervention, Mormons followed the counsel of St. Augustine—later incorporated into the Catechism of the Catholic Church—which Latter-day Saints subsequently attributed to Brigham Young: “Pray as if everything depends on the Lord, but work as if everything depends on you.”26
Battlefield Beacons: Courageous and Faithful Mormon Wehrmacht Soldiers
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Jared Kobs was the kind neighbor every resident of suburban Salt Lake City cherished. A retired furniture upholsterer and salesman, and a veteran of the Second World War, Kobs kept a neatly manicured lawn and a garden planted with colorful flowers. He attended church regularly, spoke cheerfully to his neighbors, and doted over his seventeen grandchildren. Visitors to his house in Sandy, Utah, were struck by the bicultural humor of this German-American immigrant. On his front porch, readable from the sidewalk, was mounted a nameplate: The Kobsens. In German, many nouns take their plural forms by adding the suffix, “en.” In English, most add the letter “s.”27 The linguistically hybrid sign announced to passersby that Jared Kobs belonged to two worlds, one American and one German.28 The nexus was Jared’s membership in the Mormon Church, where the collective memories of the Second World War cast no aspersion on a veteran who fought valiantly and unashamedly for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
In the pecking order among former soldiers in Utah, an American veteran of the Normandy D-Day invasion or the Battle of the Bulge enjoys no advantage over a combat veteran who served the enemy. At sacrament meeting or stake conference, America’s so-called “Greatest Generation”29 shares an equal degree of respect with Wehrmacht veterans like Kobs, who courageously fought to relieve Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus’ encircled Sixth Army at the Battle of Stalingrad.30 These faithful German Army veterans hold comparable ecclesial rank in the Mormon priesthood. The immigration of hundreds of German Latter-day Saints after the war added this particular demographic to the Mormon Culture Region.
Jared Heinz Bruno Kobs is a memory beacon. He appears in the work of author Frederick Kempe, whose book Father/Land set out to examine inherited guilt for the Holocaust among the postwar generations of Germans.31 The book’s plot took a surprising twist when Kempe discovered a particularly reprehensible Nazi criminal in his own Mormon family tree, Erich Krause, who ran a “wild” concentration camp in Berlin.32 Kempe found himself confronted by the same inherited guilt that beset German descendants of the Nazis. For Kempe, his uncle Jared was, by contrast, one of the good Germans from the wartime era—apolitical but cognizant of the role that ordinary Germans played in supporting the Nazi regime. Jared told his nephew that his fellow Germans of that era seldom opposed Hitler, and that members of his own family were members of the Nazi Party, to which they owed their employment.33 Likewise, in correspondence with the author of this study, Kobs was blunt: “I don’t think I liked the government in Germany but I had to obey the law and shut up!”34
Kobs also contributed to the research of Steven Carter, who before this study had written the only doctoral dissertation on the Mormon Church in Nazi Germany.35 Carter discovered Kobs in Kempe’s book, and the affable Jared readily agreed to an oral history interview. When two Brigham Young University scholars, Robert C. Freedman and Jon R. Felt, began to research their book, Saints at War,36 they found in Kobs a faith-inspiring example of a teenage German soldier sent into combat with miniature copies of the New Testament and the Book of Mormon sewn into his uniform jacket. Jared’s mother had stitched them into the lining, positioned to cover her son’s heart.37
Kobs is a Mormon memory beacon because he was not only a good German soldier but also a good man. He took shelter from the Russian winter in peasants’ houses, shared in the household chores, treated the owners kindly, and never inspired fear that he would rape their daughters.38 The most important aspect of Kobs’ story is that he remained a faithful Latter-day Saint throughout his years of wartime tribulation and afterward, reconnecting with the church after his release from a POW camp in 1947. Later, he immigrated to the American Zion and became a patriotic American, but he never questioned the church leadership’s role in ingratiating itself with Hitler’s regime during the pre-war period. More than half a century later, he still had no doubts. Said Kobs in a letter to the author in 2005: “Latter-day Saints should support the government!” With that letter, Kobs enclosed a photocopy of a 2004 LDS Church Sunday school lesson manual. Entitled “The Teachings of Heber J. Grant,” it stressed compliance with the Twelfth Article of Faith and Section 134 of the Doctrine and Covenants.39
Kobs was not the first German combatant in the Second World War to become a Mormon memory beacon. However, in the days before the Iron Curtain fell, faithful Latter-day Saint authors were careful about commemorating the battlefield bravery of Mormon soldiers who fought honorably for a fascist cause. One of the first examples was a self-published book by Frederick H. Barth, born in Romania, who became a naturalized German citizen prior to the outbreak of war in 1939.40 Barth’s autobiography, Guided and Guarded, released in 1981, received an unusual degree of approval by the Mormon hierarchy for the time. Mormon Apostle Howard W. Hunter, who later became the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator for a brief period before his death in 1995, wrote the foreword. Barth had become acquainted with Hunter because of Barth’s full-time church employment as an Eastern European genealogical research specialist, one of the few LDS Church employees at the time who was fluent in Romanian.
Barth’s story was a relatively safe one to recount at a time when the LDS Church was still negotiating with the government of the communist German Democratic Republic on behalf of Mormons who lived in East Germany. Barth had not been born in Germany, nor was he a member of the Mormon Church when he served in Hitler’s military forces during the war. His conversion to Mormonism began in 1953 when two female missionaries rang his doorbell in Stuttgart. The bulk of his account, however, concentrates on the close calls and perceived divine intervention that spared his life during the war. For example, one night shortly after Barth had joined a Luftwaffe communications unit in 1941, he was not in his barracks, having received permission to make a phone call. Suddenly, in the mobilization for war with the Soviet Union, his unit received a deployment order that it executed within in a matter of minutes. When Barth returned to the barracks, he found his rucksack, rifle, and gas mask in the middle of the floor. His comrades were already gone. Rather than being sent to catch up with his unit, Barth received a posting to another outfit. He later learned that all of the men in his platoon had been killed in combat, except one who survived with an amputated leg.41
On another occasion, after having been deployed to the Russian front, Barth received a transfer when officials took belated action on an application he filed for an intelligence specialist’s position many months previously. Barth spent the next two years decoding messages for the ministry of aviation in Berlin. Meanwhile, his former Luftwaffe communications unit suffered heavy casualties inflicted by the Soviet Army and Russian winter.42 The pattern is familiar to readers of faith-promoting Mormon chronicles. God intervened at the last moment to preserve one of his faithful servants— in this case, someone who would render obedient service in the years to come. Barth wrote: “I began to recognize that some supernatural power was at work preserving my life and influencing my circumstances.”43 The divine intervention in his life became clear to him in the 1950s, when after his conversion to Mormonism he decided to immigrate to Utah and subsequently found his linguistic skills in demand at church headquarters. God preserved him as a Nazi soldier in order to do divine work after the war.
Although published testimonies like Barth’s were rare until after the demise of European communism, two forces conjoined afterward to facilitate the recognition of faithful Latter-day Saints who had fought for the Third Reich. First, German Mormons living in the former German Democratic Republic became citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. Thus, the LDS Church leadership no longer worried about the effect of glorifying fascist warriors in resolutely anti-fascist, communist East Germany. Second, the nostalgia that surfaced in the western world for the aging veterans of the Second World War propelled an effort to recognize Mormon members of America’s “Greatest Generation.” Brigham Young University scholars Robert C. Freedman and Dennis Wright answered that demand by founding the Saints at War Project, a research effort that has produced more than three thousand contacts, and many detailed interviews, with Mormon veterans of the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. But this was not an objective oral history project. Their research recounts no tales of hard-drinking, profane, pin-up posting soldiers who forsake their religion in the throes of war. One byproduct of their work was the publication of German Saints at War, an unapologetically faith-promoting effort resembling an academic book yet issued by Cedar Fort Media, a purveyor of Mormon spiritual publications.44
It features no Nazi-saluting devotees of Hitler. Instead, Hitler’s soldiers in German Saints at War pull the trigger sparingly but seldom encounter trouble with their superiors because they lack enthusiasm for war. Instead, miraculous series of events spare their lives, allowing them to live while the less faithful perish. They all survive the war in order to serve the church as obedient members in the post-war years. Eugene Dautel, for example, was a nineteen-year-old draftee into an army medical unit who received an untimely transfer to an infantry battalion. However, just before deployment to the front lines, he experienced an allergic reaction to an inoculation, which allowed him to be transferred back to his original medical unit. The very next day, every member of the infantry platoon was killed or seriously wounded on their first day on the battlefield. The miracles did not stop there. Toward the end of the war, Dautel deserted his unit, survived an artillery barrage that killed many others, and then suffered the pangs of conscience—which compelled him to return to his outfit. An officer told him he would be shot, a common fate encountered by deserting Wehrmacht soldiers toward the end of the war. However, the officer then became pensive, reconsidered, and stamped Dautel’s orders to allow him to return to his unit. Said the author: “Once more the blessing was answered.” Dautel’s post-war actions also followed the faith- promoting paradigm. He married his Mormon sweetheart, became a branch president in the early 1950s, and subsequently immigrated to the American Zion.45
The remaining stories trace the same pattern. Wilhelm Krisch was a member of one of the first Wehrmacht units to cross into the Soviet Union when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941. During one battlefield engagement, he sought refuge from an artillery attack with a group of other German soldiers. Fate intervened in his favor. In Krisch’s words, “I ran only a few steps toward the men, when a soft, quiet voice called me by name, telling me I should go back.” Krisch obeyed the “spiritual prompting,” and as soon as he found a different hiding place, an artillery shell exploded in the middle of his first intended refuge. His comrades were either killed or seriously wounded.46 In another vignette, Walter Kindt related the story of his miraculous, three-hundred-mile hike from his last battlefield at the end of the war to his home in Hamburg. During the trek, he eluded Allied troops who would have captured him and German soldiers who would have implored him to continue fighting.47
The most unusual story involved a young Mormon assigned as an administrative clerk to a Luftwaffe colonel who ran a training school for aircraft mechanics. Oskar Starke developed a close friendship with his commanding officer, who seemed to take an unusual interest in the young man’s career, promoting the young Mormon regularly through the ranks from private to sergeant. One day, when Starke surreptitiously read the colonel’s private journal, he learned that he was being groomed to fill two positions. The colonel wanted his young clerk to attend officer candidate school and then marry his half-Mischling daughter. The diary contained a compelling story of the colonel’s marriage to a Jewish woman during the pre-Nazi period, the birth of their daughter, and his subsequent abandonment of his wife after Hitler took power. Starke was interested in neither of the colonel’s propositions, as he was engaged to a Mormon girl from his hometown of Plauen. He had no desire to marry a girl he had never met, one who did not share his religious beliefs, nor did he want to become a military officer in a war that he knew his country was losing. Through fastidious prayer and contemplation, according to the narrative, Starke convinced the colonel to sign papers that allowed him to marry his fiancée.48 That only occurred after the colonel had refused to grant permission for his clerk to marry each day for one week. The reader can thus conclude that God protected this observant young LDS man by providing him with a relatively safe wartime assignment, during which he proved his spiritual mettle by remaining determined to marry within his faith.
Women, Children, the Elderly, and Evacuees: The Wartime Home Front
As the Second Counselor in the presidency of the East German Mission in 1944, Paul Langheinrich served as the second-ranking ecclesiastical leader for German Latter-day Saints who lived within the boundaries of the Berlin-based mission. Mission President Herbert Klopfer had been deployed to the Russian front as a junior officer in the Wehrmacht. Too old for military conscription, Langheinrich and First Counselor Richard Ranglack remained. They cared for home-front Mormons who were losing their houses and apartments to a relentless Allied aerial bombing campaign, their husbands and fathers to the battlefield, and many of their children to evacuation from cities imperiled by air raids.
Langheinrich assumed another responsibility. Employed by a company that provided heating services to railway stations, he obtained access to three different government radios and a telephone line. That allowed him to furnish a unique air raid early-warning system to alert fellow Latter-day Saints. When a military radio announced that enemy bombers were on their way to a particular city, Langheinrich telephoned specially designated Mormon contacts in that locality. The church’s early-warning network often got the word to members in the endangered city sooner than the government’s civil defense warning system. In Berlin, Langheinrich monitored the local police radio network, which efficiently reported the addresses of newly bombed-out houses and apartment buildings. Langheinrich maintained a list of Berlin church members. When he learned that a member’s residence had been bombed, he quickly dispatched church members to render assistance.49
The Mormon mutual assistance network in Germany functioned well despite wartime travel restrictions, the disruption of peacetime telephone and telegraph capabilities, and the deployment of so many male priesthood leaders to the front lines. The solution, in the latter case, was the intervention of women whose natural leadership abilities had been suppressed or conveniently managed by domineering male ecclesiastical leaders during less troubled times. When East German mission leaders, Ranglack and Langheinrich, decided to establish clothing distribution centers for needy church members, they found three vacant buildings, each in a rural location that made them unlikely targets for destruction by aerial bombing. The first was located in northeastern Germany on a railway line near the obscure village of Kruez. The second was at Neuzage, near the university city of Cottbus in Brandenburg. The third was at Neuwürschnitz, near the Erzgebirge in Saxony.
The two male leaders of the East German Mission located and rented the warehouses but they tasked Mormon women with stocking the shelves. Despite the shortage of consumer goods in a wartime economy, clothing losses in the bombing campaigns, frequent Nazi winter relief drives, and special appeals to send clothing to ill-equipped, beleaguered German troops suffering in subzero temperatures on the Russian front—the “sisters” of the mission performed in excess of expectations. Within six weeks, all three storehouses were filled to capacity and the leadership had to request that members make no more donations.50
Women played an ever-increasing wartime role in performing official church business. Some, faced with a shortage of men in the branches, even took on traditional male duties by performing unauthorized liturgical ordinances restricted to the all-male Mormon priesthood. That commenced as early as the 1938 “fire drill evacuation” during the Sudetenland crisis. According to Donald M. Petty, when missionaries returned from a three-week absence, they found a few isolated cases in which women had blessed (consecrated) and distributed the sacrament (Eucharist).51 Otto Berndt, president of the Hamburg District, recalled that during the war, he assigned women to the traditional male job of collecting tithes—a duty they performed assiduously. As a result, Berndt said, German Mormons remained faithful wartime tithe payers. At the end of the war, he turned over the entire cache of donated money to the mission office in Frankfurt.52 Mormon women also assumed responsibility for maintaining an informal church congregational barter system. One branch used a blackboard to track items available for trading.53
LDS wives and mothers also assumed the role of protecting their families from the threat of violence perpetrated by invading enemy troops. As the Red Army advanced toward Berlin, stories of Russian soldiers raping German civilians in the eastern states became prevalent in Berlin. Faced with the dual threat of Allied bombing and physical violence by Soviet troops, German women coined the cynical expression: “Better a Russian (rapist) on the belly than an American (bomb) on the head.” Mormon women, at least in the faith-promoting stories that have emanated since the war, saw no humor in such remarks. Roger Minert, a professor of religious education at Brigham Young University, interviewed a number of LDS survivors of the Red Army’s advance on Berlin. Rape was a threat they were determined to escape. Although no records provide the number of Mormon women assaulted by the Red Army, author Anthony Beevor stated that two Berlin hospitals estimated the number of local rape victims to number between 95,000 and 130,000.54 One LDS mother successfully disguised her seventeen-year- old daughter as an old woman in order to protect her from marauding and raping Soviet occupation soldiers.55 Others sent their daughters to live with relatives in the countryside. The records of the East German Mission do contain accounts of Mormons raped during forced evacuations from East Prussia.
Women and girls, some just approaching adolescence, have been repeatedly ravished. One of the mothers was forced at the point of a gun to watch her daughter being ravished by a group of ten soldiers. Another girl, not yet twelve years old, has been raped several times. One of the sisters, whose husband was snatched out of his sick bed and deported to Siberia, was ravished three times in one night, resulting in the birth of a little Russian baby boy for whom she is now caring along with her other two children.56
For women caring for children and elderly family members, shelter became the next problem. Otto Berndt estimated that sixty to seventy percent of Hamburg’s Mormons lost their homes as a result of the horrific Allied aerial attacks in 1943, when the British Royal Air Force bombed by night and the American Army Air Force wreaked havoc by day. Only one Hamburg District branch meetinghouse, the rented Masonic Temple in Altona, survived the bombardment. By the end of the war, Hamburg’s Mormons were traveling on foot from all over the devastated city and its distant suburbs to attended services in Altona. Despite the hardships imposed by lack of shelter and a ruined public transit system, the city’s Mormons were able to operate their youth organization, the Mutual Improvement Association, throughout the war without interruption.57
Berlin’s Mormons had an additional problem. Not only did they have to provide shelter for bombed-out church members from their own city, but they also inherited the responsibility for accommodating German-speaking Latter-day Saints fleeing the relentlessly advancing Red Army from the East. In 1944, after one summer evening in which thirty-five Mormon families lost their homes to bombing of the former Prussian capital of Königsberg, Langheinrich wrote the city’s Mormon district president, advising Königsberg’s Latter-day Saint population to relocate. Because of Allied bombardment, Berlin was considered too dangerous to be a place of refuge, but it did serve as a way station for German-speaking Mormons being relocated to the towns of Zwickau and Erzgebirge in Saxony—where LDS families opened their homes to their fleeing coreligionists.58
The problem of finding temporary shelter for the refugees arriving in Berlin had been compounded in 1943 when the Berlin mission headquarters was destroyed in an air raid. The circumstances surrounding that attack provided another beacon in the collective memory of LDS wartime experiences. Mission President Herbert Klopfer, on leave from his military duties, tried to visit the stately building across from Berlin’s Tiergarten Park one evening but found himself locked out. Shortly after he left the premises, in search of his keys, enemy bombers raided the neighborhood, leaving much of the Hansaviertel suburb of Berlin in flames and ruins. As the postwar Mormon lore of Nazi Germany recounts, the Lord preserved Klopfer’s life by causing him to forget his keys.59
After the destruction of the mission home on Händelstrasse, Langheinrich moved all mission operations to his Berlin apartment. The limited space available would have proven inadequate for quartering evacuees in comparison to the former mission headquarters—except for the fact that many other tenants had chosen to abandon their flats. Believing that their apartments would never survive the Allied bombing campaign, many of Langheinrich’s neighbors handed over their keys and gave the Mormon leader permission to shelter refugees in their apartments. The building became the temporary refuge for evacuee Mormons from the east. Some thirty-seven church members took shelter there at one time, as they awaited placement with Mormon families in Saxony. Another problem surfaced when the newcomers learned that they needed Berlin ration cards. That required the short-staffed church leadership to accompany the refugees to their appointments with rationing authorities, to attest to their temporary residency in Berlin. Meanwhile, individual memory beacons continued to appear in the personage of Mormons who unselfishly shared scarce food with the needy transients. According to one account, a teenage girl, Ingrid Bendler, rode a bicycle “under fire” to Langheinrich’s apartment complex, bringing much needed margarine and cocoa to the hungry evacuees.60
The larger German cities proved no safer than the evacuated abodes of the eastern territories. Many Mormons who worked in essential industries continued to risk death by remaining in targeted metropolitan areas. Some worked exhausting day shifts, only to have their limited nighttime rest interrupted by air raid alerts. One Latter-day Saint later recalled that the prevailing attitude of defenseless civilians was that “today may be my last.” The physical and emotional strain of taking shelter each time the air raid sirens sounded began to wear on the populace. Langheinrich wrote that during the war years he had sought refuge in the air raid shelters a total of 395 times. The pressure was especially intense on the elderly. According to one account:
Eventually, the old and the weak, upon hearing the siren, pleaded to be left behind, resigning themselves to possible death rather than use up the strength of the younger people in carrying them to the shelters.61
Others were able to escape the threat of death that rained down from the skies. Some had relatives in rural Germany, where they could wait out the war in relative tranquility. A few with financial means paid to have their children placed in boarding schools or with families in small towns that were of no strategic interest to Allied aerial targeting planners. Max Reschke, an upper-level manager in a Hanover pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, could afford to send his eleven-year-old son, Horst, to a private school for well-connected German children in Austria in 1941 and 1942. Then, Max found Horst a suitable family with which to live in the medieval town of Hildesheim, located thirty kilometers southeast of Hanover. Even the relative safety of the countryside did not offer absolute protection, however. Once, when Horst was a passenger on a local train that he rode to school, the cars came under a strafing attack by an Allied dive bomber. A bullet penetrated his friend’s school satchel, positioned over the boy’s head on the luggage rack, and lodged in the boy’s books.62 If the machine gun round had found its mark in the child’s body, presumably this story would not have found its way into the trove of miraculous Mormon wartime accounts.
Wolfsgrün: A Beacon of German-Mormon Self-Help
The post-war period witnessed the continued diaspora of both German-speaking people from former German territories in the East, and of ethnic Germans from countries that the Third Reich had occupied. Understandably, many fled the advancing Soviet forces while the war raged, but even after the cessation of hostilities the migration continued because of forced expulsions. Altogether, some twelve to fourteen million German speakers, either Reichsdeutsche (German nationals) or Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) fled or were compelled to leave their homes between 1944 and 1950.63 Many died along the way because of exposure, starvation, or violence. Although Mormons fled along with other German speakers, relatively few perished. Their collective behavior while en route, sharing their limited provisions, preserved many lives. Some pushed their possessions in handcarts and wheel barrows, which many saw as emblematic of the Mormon “handcart migration” across the Great Plains from Nauvoo, Illinois to Utah almost one hundred years earlier.64 East German Mission leaders sheltered them upon arrival in Berlin. The Langheinrich apartments became a way station where, according to an American occupation soldier who once served as secretary of the German-Austrian Mission:
They received clean clothing from the mission’s reserve stock. They were seated around a long table and fed hot soup and nourishing food. Then the weary newcomers were allowed to sleep for as long as they wished. Then they were given a train ticket.65
The rail ticket took evacuees to the Saxon village of Wolfsgrün, situated several miles from the larger town of Eibenstock. There, a large manor house situated on a hill served as their refuge. From 1945 to 1947, the Latter-day Saints ran a home for displaced Mormons that housed as many as ninety-nine families.
How the East German Mission leadership obtained the property has become a beacon of memory in Mormon history and folklore. For many generations prior to the Second World War, the property belonged to the family of a turn-of-the-century industrialist named C. G. Bretschneider, who made his fortune in the paper industry. Between 1898 and 1902, Bretschneider constructed a large house that resembled a castle, complete with many bedrooms, an expansive dining hall, and a main portal that led to a grandiose reception area. He built the house amid a meticulously landscaped park with pathways, ponds, and lush, grassy lawns. During the National Socialist period, Bretschneider encountered financial difficulties because of his inability to court favor with the Nazis. Presumably, he would not join the Party. Eventually, the owner lost the property to the state, probably because of the inability to pay property or business taxes.66 The large manor house became the property of the Nazi Party social welfare organization, the Nationalsozialistich Volkswohlfahrt (NSV), who used it as a home for young mothers.67
The NSV, formed in Berlin in 1931 by a Nazi municipal counselor named Erich Hilgenfeldt, began with modest goals, to help Party members weather the economic difficulties brought on by the worldwide depression that hit Germany particularly hard. After the Nazis came to power, it absorbed various church and secular relief agencies, such as the German Red Cross. With sixteen million members in 1942, it became the second-largest Party auxiliary organization.68 Its programs to aid expectant mothers became known for its maternity and childcare workers, referred to as the “brown sisters”—in contrast to the “blue sisters,” Catholic nuns, who had run many of Germany’s pre-Nazi homes for unwed mothers.69 Ostensibly, the brown sisters had no objection to Hitler’s lascivious natalist policies, which cast no moral aspersion on women who wished to “give Hitler a baby” by engaging in premarital relations.
After the war, when the East German Mission leaders began looking for a place of refuge for its refugee members, the former Nazi property at Wolfsgrün was available. As the Mormons maintained good relations with the Soviet occupying authorities, the Red Army military commandant at Eibenstock granted permission for the Mormons to move in on the same day that the request was made, September 3, 1945.70 Because of the way that Donald C. Corbett worded his report, however, at least one historian and possibly other readers have mischaracterized the use of the Wolfsgrün property during the Nazi regime. Corbett said: “During the Hitler period, it had been used as a convalescent home for mothers.”71 That prompted Steven Carter to write: “Paul Langheinrich and Arnold Schmidt, a branch president from Krese, secured a former Lebensborn home in Wolfsgrün south of Berlin for an LDS refugee camp.”72 Schmidt confirmed that the Wolfsgrün had indeed been used as an NSV facility for mothers, but the property does not appear on the list of SS Lebensborn maternity homes.73 The Lebensborn program, according to differing historical accounts, served as either Heinrich Himmler’s pet project to allow Aryan women to bear their “racially pure,” outof- wedlock children without shame—or as an SS stud farm where black-shirted Nazis could have sex with genealogically screened German women in order to produce a “master race.” The Lebensborn project also became associated with the kidnapping of children from occupied countries, who were then adopted by SS families in Germany.74
Regardless of how the Nazis employed the Wolfsgrün facility during the war, afterward it continued to be embroiled in controversy. For the Soviet occupation forces, there was no problem with allowing a peaceful German religious denomination to use a former fascist facility to shelter refugees. For officials of the local government, though, the prospect of importing displaced war victims to their town threatened to tax limited food supplies. Others worried that the outsiders might pose a threat to law and order. During the period in which the Mormons operated the refugee facility, feeding its occupants and staving off local opposition remained a constant challenge.
Because local officials denied the Wolfsgrün occupants “grocery cards,” twiceweekly shopping trips for provisions had to be made to towns at least forty miles away. Occupants ground wheat into powder in order to make soup. During the winter of 1945- 46, the residents ate nothing but carrots. When Arnold Schmidt’s wife was able to convince a local farmer to sell her two pigs, Wolfsgrün’s residents anticipated a feast. However, after the hogs had been slaughtered, police from Zwickau arrived and confiscated the meat. Schmidt managed to hide a pot of lard, on which the residents subsisted for many days. In the spring of 1946, the residents planted a vegetable garden, but even this task was complicated by a lack of shovels.75
Throughout the Mormons’ stay at Wolfsgrün, they fought a constant battle against local authorities who were determined to close the facility. Between Christmas and New Year’s Day of 1946, the police commissioner of Saxony appeared with a notice to vacate within five days. Later in January, the local mayor, accompanied by four policemen, arrived with an evacuation notice. Several weeks later, Saxon authorities in Dresden sent a telegram that demanded the Mormons vacate the premises, along with their assurances that the refugees would be accommodated elsewhere. Enjoying the continued support of the Soviet military governor, Schmidt refused to comply with these edicts. In February 1946, under pressure from Russian military authorities, local authorities granted “food cards” to the residents, which allowed them to shop locally.76
The Mormon refugee home in Wolfsgrün operated until July 1947. A combination of factors led to its closing.77 Records of the East German mission indicate that government pressure to close the facility persisted throughout its twenty-two months of operation. Also, as food became more plentiful, complaints began to arise regarding the indolent work ethic of some of its residents. One report said residents had split into rival factions. Allegations of sexual improprieties arose.78 As economic conditions improved in Germany and Mormon assistance began arriving from the United States, the residents of Wolfsgrün began to find homes elsewhere. Through the effort of the mission office in Berlin, the majority relocated to cities under the occupation of the western powers. The remainder found places to live in the eastern zone under Soviet jurisdiction. Some thirty residents chose homes in the vicinity of Wolfsgrün, which allowed a small LDS branch to function for years afterward.79