Part 1 of 3
CHAPTER III. THE GREAT WAR AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC: LESSONS LEARNED IN THE CRUCIBLE OF COMBAT AND A NASCENT DEMOCRACYThe beginning of the First World War caught Germany’s Mormon missionaries by surprise. When compared to building God’s kingdom on earth or saving souls for the afterlife, an obscure, far-away world event such as the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire seemed of little consequence. As the tension of the July Crisis of 1914 unfolded, at first quietly among diplomats and generals’ staffs, and only later in the consciousness of the European population, the Swiss and German Mission’s leadership paid little heed—even as the world spiraled precipitously down into war. Only in the final week of the crisis did the Mormon leadership in Basel, Switzerland become aware. On July 25, as the German government urged Austria to take immediate military action against Serbia, Rose Ellen Valentine, the wife of Swiss and German Mission President Hyrum Valentine, wrote in her journal as she sat safely across the Swiss border: “There are rumors of war in Germany.” One day later, as Russian Tsar Nicholas II ordered partial mobilization in four large cities, she added: “War seems inevitable.”1
Her husband, Mission President Hyrum Valentine, encountered more than rumors of war; he observed firsthand the reaction of Germany’s populace to the outbreak of Europe’s first continent-wide armed conflict since the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. On August 1, when Germany formally declared war on Russia, Hyrum Valentine was touring the German congregations in the company of Hyrum Mack Smith, the Mormons’ European mission president, who had come to Germany from his headquarters in Liverpool, England. On August 3, the day Germany declared war on France, Smith’s European mission office in Liverpool received an overnight cable dispatched from Salt Lake City the previous day. It instructed mission presidents to remove missionaries from all regions where they could face danger.2 Smith was not there to read it; he would not view that directive from his superiors in the LDS hierarchy until he returned to England on August 22.3 The declaration of war caused communications between the United States with Germany to be severed. Events had overtaken the church leadership’s ability to respond.
The war declarations quickly stoked patriotic fever and nationalist hysteria throughout the combatant nations. By the time Great Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, anyone caught speaking English on the streets of Germany risked attracting suspicion at best and risked mob reprisal at worst.4 Indeed, German police arrested the two mission presidents, Valentine and Smith, together with a young companion missionary, and charged them with being spies. Valentine and the young missionary were able to produce their American passports but when Smith could not do so immediately, it required the intervention of the American vice consul to convince the German authorities that the European Mormon mission president was not engaged in espionage for the British.5
In the absence of guidance from Salt Lake City, the two mission presidents suspended all meetings between the American missionaries and their German congregants. American diplomats advised the missionaries to seek protection in neutral countries, but overland passage proved impossible. Germany’s soldiers jammed all available trains, enacting a mobilization plan for fighting a two-front war against the French and the Russians. Valentine could not book passage back to Switzerland until twelve days after the war started.
Meanwhile, some missionaries in northern Germany, aided by funds dispatched by Mission President LeGrand Richards in The Netherlands, were able to arrange travel through that country on their way to Liverpool.6 Nevertheless, for more than a month after the outbreak of hostilities, Mormon missionaries remained haphazardly scattered about wartime Germany, forbidden to carry out their duties for fear of provoking reprisals against foreigners and cut off from their source of financial support by the suspension of postal and telegraphic service.
It was only upon Valentine’s arrival back at mission headquarters in Basel, following receipt of cables from church headquarters in Salt Lake, that the Swiss and German Mission president received what he considered to be the proper ecclesiastical authorization to cancel missionary work and evacuate the young Americans. That required a potentially hazardous, ten-day trip back into Germany. Valentine withdrew twenty thousand Imperial Marks from the mission’s bank account and began tracking down the remaining dispersed missionaries, arranging for their safe passage home, and appointing native German convert members to assume leadership posts in the congregations and in the missionary work. Valentine found most of the American missionaries secure, unaffected by the war, and protected by German members.7 By October 15, 1914, the German-language Mormon periodical published in Basel, Der Stern, The Star, had compiled a list of 152 evacuated missionaries, including fifteen who arrived at mission headquarters in Switzerland on the same day.8
After the removal of all American missionaries from Germany, the next challenge became maintaining contact with the membership. Foreign mission work had relied on regular visits by the mission president and his assistants who toured the various branches and districts on a regular basis in order to ensure compliance with proper liturgical practices and church directives issued in Salt Lake City. Although some progress had been made in the first decade of the twentieth century regarding the installation of convert German members into positions of authority on the local level, often young American missionaries had assumed the position of branch or district president in the absence of competent local priesthood authority. This became impossible upon the evacuation of missionary personnel and necessitated trust in native German leaders who would henceforth receive only sporadic counsel from higher authority.
Attempts to reenter Germany, even to visit with soldiers who had made their way to the Swiss border, or with members in neighboring German towns, proved to be frustrating and dangerous. Rose Valentine, wife of the mission president, wrote of such an approach early in the war, when a local missionary serving on the Swiss side of the border tried to cross into Germany:
Sister Bart and I walked to the bridge but it was heavily guarded with armed soldiers. Brother Bowman tried to cross and was arrested and taken to jail. He has previously tried to cross the border into Germany, but one of the soldiers struck him with his gun and he came back to the office with blood all over his face.9
From time to time, despite great odds and potential penalties, a German soldier would succeed in crossing the border for a visit to the mission president. An entry in Rose Valentine’s diary in the summer of 1915 tells of one such encounter with a recently discharged army veteran:
In the evening Brother Edward Hoffmann came in. (Bro. Hoffman 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.10
Mail service between combatant Germany and neutral Switzerland eventually resumed, allowing Valentine to coordinate with appointed German ecclesiastical leaders by postal dispatch. Communication was intermittent at first but then flowed more regularly. The first full reports of branch conferences, held in 1915, indicated a resumption of normal church functioning. Those reports appear in a January 2, 1916, entry in the Swiss and German Mission Manuscript Histories as a consolidation of the previous year’s events.11 By Easter of 1916, from the safety of his office in Basel, the mission president directed Sunday school conventions in Berlin, Zwickau, Freiberg, Frankfurt, Hannover, Königsberg, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Breslau, Stuttgart, and Spandau.12
The mail also brought unwelcome news of Mormon deaths on the battlefield, which the Latter-day Saints would subsequently exploit to demonstrate their loyalty to the government. Beginning shortly after hostilities commenced, the mission office in Basel began compiling a list of faithful Mormon priesthood holders who had fallen on the field of battle for the Fatherland. Most surviving records of these losses reveal only the name of the soldier, his local congregation, and his date of death. Some contained a few sparse details. For example, Friedrich Wehnes of Frankfurt “stepped on a mine” and perished on October 2, 1915. Helmuth Friedrich Michael Walter Kererbeck of Hamburg “succumbed to typhoid fever while in the military” on June 28, 1915. The entry for Friedrich Dahl of Karlsrhue reveals that he was “shot through the stomach and died on the battlefield. He was a true and devoted member of the Church, and while serving in the army he used every opportunity he had to preach the Gospel to his comrades.”13 In subsequent years, and especially in reaction to the rise of National Socialism, Mormons stressed the loyalty their German members displayed to the Kaiser by their service and sacrifice on the battlefield during the Great War. The ability to remain loyal to the state and to the church simultaneously, along with the skill of the leaders who brought this message to the government, became the hallmark defense of this American-based religion that aroused so much suspicion in Germany.
The experience of Wilhelm Kessler, a native German who immigrated to the United States and then returned to service in his native country—first as a Mormon missionary and then as a soldier for the Kaiser—demonstrates that German Mormons could be loyal to both their church and their native country. At the outbreak of the First World War, Kessler faced a stark choice: evacuate Germany, remain in missionary service with his American church in Switzerland, and eventually return to his adopted American home, or answer a call to military service from his native land. He chose the latter, expressing profound feelings of guilt for abandoning his church and newfound country, and subsequently paying for the decision by sacrificing his life on the battlefield.
Kessler, born in Neunkirchen, converted to Mormonism at age twenty in 1907. He moved to Salt Lake City in 1910 and worked as a bookkeeper for a candy company. Two years later, the church called him on a mission. He proselytized in Germany during 1912 and subsequently moved to Basel, where his bilingual skills helped him edit the weekly German-language church periodical, Der Stern.
When war broke out, Mission President Hyrum Valentine was touring Germany accompanied by Hyrum M. Smith, the European mission president. Kessler, at work in Basel, attempted to telegraph Valentine, seeking counsel regarding his decision to enlist in the German army. But communications links had been severed at the outbreak of hostilities, leaving the young German-American missionary solely with the guidance he could receive through prayer.14 When Valentine returned to Basel, he found a letter Kessler penned before departing for the front lines that explained the young man’s anguished deliberation and tortured decision:
[qutoe]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 boundary 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 boundary . . . and could come here and take me as a traitor to my country. I may be cast into prison, I may be executed. It matters not. I must go!15[/quote]
In subsequent correspondence, Kessler asked his mission president:
Please don’t argue with yourself that I did wrong in joining the German Army. Consider my patriotism, my rights that I am fighting for, my religious views on the subject, my belief in heavenly protection and the oath that I have taken with a conscious German heart when called into the army.16
Kessler was wounded in battle on Sept. 19, 1914, for which he received the Iron Cross, second class. After recovery in hospitals at Karlsruhe and Labry, the former missionary again served on the front lines. Kessler then attended officer candidate school, from which he graduated and subsequently received a promotion to first lieutenant on June 16, 1916.
One month later, Valentine reluctantly penned the following dispatch to Salt Lake City: “Wilhelm Kessler, a local elder of the Church, was killed in battle on the west front, near Mamerz and Montauban, in France.”17 It was July 1, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, in which the Germans eventually lost half a million soldiers, the British four hundred thousand, and the French two hundred thousand. Kessler’s death made such an impression on Valentine that he made it a subject of his address to the LDS Church’s General Conference in Salt Lake City on April 8, 1917, after the mission president returned from his duties.18 Valentine’s speech took place the day after the United States declared war on Germany, but that did not prevent the former mission president from extolling the loyalty of German-Americans to their native country. Such declarations from the pulpit at the Salt Lake Tabernacle would occur regularly in the years that followed, especially during the pre-war Nazi years (1933-39), when church leaders emphasized the loyalty of German Mormons to their country.
The Mormons were well aware that much of their nineteenth century history in Germany reflected confrontations with local authorities and defiance of government directives; in the twentieth century, the emphasis shifted to compliance and coexistence. Records of the Swiss and German Mission indicate that Wilhelm Kessler was one of seven ordained German missionaries who quit church service in favor of military enlistment at the beginning of the war; others undoubtedly followed in subsequent years. The same mission records indicate that eleven Mormon priesthood holders died on the battlefield for the Fatherland in 1914, twenty in 1915, fourteen in 1916, thirteen in 1917, and seventeen in 1918. These casualties do not include the number of wounded LDS soldiers who survived.19 The willingness of faithful Mormons to serve in the German military and to spill their blood on the field of battle became a strong arguing point for the survival of LDS congregations in the subsequent Weimar and National Socialist eras.
The Mormons’ postwar relief effort served as a trial run for a larger relief effort undertaken on behalf of German members after World War II. Although most of the Great War’s battles occurred away from German soil, continuing Allied naval blockades, enacted to pressure the German government to accept the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, caused widespread hunger and deprivation for more than a year after the armistice. Although the first postwar American missionaries would not arrive to proselytize in Germany until 1921, the new mission president, Angus J. Cannon, busied himself not only with the reestablishment of ecclesiastical supervision over the German branches and districts, but also the provision of relief supplies obtained from Switzerland and the Americas.
On September 2, 1919, Cannon cabled the church hierarchy in Salt Lake City: “Eight thousand Saints of this mission are in immediate need of flour, corn-meal, condensed milk, fats, dried fruit, beans, peas. Can the Saints at home send such supplies immediately?” Cannon followed it with a postal dispatch:
I am certain that [yesterday’s] telegram might cause some surprise because the home papers spread the idea that the people in Germany are well fed and cared for. According to reports we have received from the Saints, we fear their fate is doubtful. They almost beg that their brethren in Zion may help them. One sister, the president of the Relief Society in Chemnitz, writes: ‘A few cans of condensed milk would make us dance like children and our gratitude would reach to the high heavens.’
Cannon’s dispatch emphasized the self-reliance attempted by local Mormons, and how French-speaking Mormons from western Switzerland had been the first to respond by sending local relief items to their fellow German congregants. 20
Church leaders responded by utilizing a resource not available during the rebellious period of the nineteenth century, when their defiance of American antipolygamy laws won them few friends among American politicians and diplomatic personnel. The Mormons turned to political leaders who had emerged with the advent of Utah statehood in 1896. Reed Smoot, seated as a United States senator upon the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt after a three-year Senate investigation in 1907, concluded in concert with church officials that the most efficient way to obtain relief supplies would not be to seek donations in America and to deal with the futility of purchasing passage on already burdened postwar shipping. Instead, Smoot used his political connections to help the church purchase provisions from the American Expeditionary Forces that had joined the war in late 1917.
Said Smoot in a cable to the First Presidency in 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.21
The relief effort provided one vehicle by which the American mission president reestablished ecclesiastical control over German Latter-day Saints who had acted independently of centralized authority for nearly five years. Cannon appointed Elder Johannes Borkhardt to take charge of distributing relief supplies. No figures document the total amount of relief supplies provided from Swiss members and American Army sources, but one invoice from the American military garrison in Koblenz provides an approximation of the magnitude of a typical local effort: Church funds purchased fifty thousand pounds of flour, fifteen thousand pounds of rice, five thousand pounds of oleo margarine, twenty thousand pounds of prunes, and twenty thousand cans of condensed milk.22
German Latter-day Saints during the war not only served their country well, but also attended conscientiously to the business of the church. Baptisms remained relatively stable and tithing collections increased, despite the fact that the American missionaries had departed for home and young German priesthood holders had left for the battlefield. Local missionaries conducted proselytizing activity and many Mormon soldiers preached the gospel to fellow military personnel. During a seven-year period from the outbreak of the war until the first arrival of foreign missionaries in 1921, German Mormons averaged 430 baptisms per year, quite a remarkable accomplishment for a nation in the throes of war and postwar recovery. By contrast, during the prosperous prewar years of 1912 and 1913, with the aid of foreign missionaries, baptisms averaged 564. In 1915, Germany’s first full calendar year of war, tithing collections increased over the immediate pre-war period.23 In 1920, in the midst of the American church’s relief effort but absent supervision from American ecclesiastical leaders, baptisms almost doubled to 1165.24
Thus, to the observer not acquainted with the culture of Mormonism, it may be surprising that the American mission president, upon the reestablishment of centralized church authority over the formerly isolated wartime congregations, would reorder the local ecclesiastical leadership. Mission President Cannon’s successor, Serge Ballif, embarked in 1921 upon a program of wholesale leadership changes at the branch and district level, replacing Germans with Americans. Jeffery L. Anderson, in his master’s thesis at Brigham Young University, speculated that the desire to replace these native German leaders may have stemmed from congregational discord observed by the returning missionaries, driven by the American cultural belief that Germans tend to be dogmatic and inflexible.25
Another factor may have been the spike in patriotic German meetinghouse pronouncements that made the American leadership uncomfortable after the United States joined the war in 1917. An article in the German-language church periodical, Der Stern, which published continually from Switzerland throughout the war, mentions a commendation from the Kaiser bestowed upon a German Mormon for authoring poetry with a patriotic tone.26 Another article cited the tendency of congregants to pray for a German victory.27 Although the Mormon leadership always stressed the loyalty of converts to their secular government, such pronouncements occurred as part of a strategy coordinated by the hierarchy. When Germans expressed patriotic fervor for their native land during a war with the United States, those declarations may have been disquieting for the American leadership—even if they were read, after the fact, in written records of wartime church services.
The most alarming reason for the reversion to American congregational leadership, however, may have been the tendency of the German wartime priesthood— often converts who had limited Mormon Church experience prior to the departure of the American missionaries—to modify ironclad liturgical practice in accordance with their previous Christian experiences in the Catholic or Lutheran churches. In Hamburg, for example, the local branch president began withholding the Sacrament of bread and water from members of the congregation who did not pay a ten percent tithing.28 The same leader began pronouncing “prophesies” regarding the fate of Germany’s enemies in the post-war period.29 Mormons believe in the authenticity of personal prophecy for oneself and one’s own immediate family, but such wide-ranging, global predictions of the future are usually reserved for the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator—the church president. In Bremen, the simple Sacrament ceremony found itself upgraded to a Catholic or Evangelical Church-style presentation with candles on a sacrament table adorned with a gilded tablecloth, water consumed from a crystal chalice, and a musical accompaniment.30 The Mormon Sacrament is served in silence.
The First World War served as a dress rehearsal for Mormon survival after the Nazi seizure of power and the Second World War that followed. In 1914, and again in 1939, missionaries were suddenly and expeditiously withdrawn upon the outbreak of hostilities, leaving local congregants accustomed to close supervision to wield church governance on their own, which they did quite successfully on both occasions. With American missionaries gone, persecution by religious prelates and the police waned. German Mormons enlisted in the armed services and supported their country’s war efforts during both conflicts, demonstrating genuine patriotism and dedication to mutual support by the members. Customary German immigration to the United States practically halted during both conflicts, only to begin again after peace was restored. After both wars, the church moved aggressively to reestablish ecclesiastical supervision of members and institute effective material aid to its German members in a war-ravished country. Following both world wars, improvements in constitutional democracy gave the Mormons more freedom of action to promote their church programs and missionary conversion efforts in both postwar periods.
The First World War proved to be a crucible in which German Latter-day Saints demonstrated they could survive as a foreign-based religious sect without direct guidance of their traditional mentors. However, it took the return of that American leadership, and the political savvy it had developed after the demise of polygamy, to provide the German church with the mettle it would need to survive National Socialism in both peacetime and war.
Mormons in the Weimar RepublicCritics of the Weimar Republic, that fourteen-year experiment in German democracy born of devastating defeat in war and ultimately crushed in the catastrophe of National Socialism, often refer to it as a “republic without republicans.”31 The degree to which German society was ready to embrace constitutional democracy lies beyond the scope of this study, but the freedom afforded by the new republic appeared fortuitously timed to benefit a struggling American religious sect hampered by its inconvenient past and a history of being persecuted. Mormon society, a theocracy governed by rigid, centralized authority, did not require all of the constitutional freedoms ostensibly guaranteed by the new German republic; it needed only some breathing room. This is what the German LDS Church received when Friedrich Ebert, the state president, affixed his signature to the Weimar Constitution on August 11, 1919. Henceforth, although Mormons would still encounter resistance from offended Protestant and Catholic ministers and priests, and the occasional policeman would still take an elder into custody, there would be no question of a law-abiding American’s right to preach his version of the gospel on German soil.
Mormons had been their own worst enemy during the nineteenth century; their doctrine of polygamy was a self-inflicted wound. Latter-day Saints, branded as outlaws in their own country, could hardly have expected to receive recognition of legitimacy in Imperial Germany. Although the First Manifesto prohibited new plural marriages in 1890 and the Second Manifesto in 1904 cleaned up hierarchical resistance to the new doctrine of monogamy, skepticism in Germany remained. The conduct of Mormon missionaries did little to convince officials otherwise. For example, during the first decade of the twentieth century, young Americans from Utah were registering themselves as “English teachers” rather than missionaries in order to circumvent a banning order in Prussia.32
Hugo Preuss, a respected left-wing politician, Secretary of State of the Weimar Republic, and a Jew, drafted a constitution that challenged the Mormons and their German antagonists to adhere to a higher standard of conduct. The freedom to proselyte in Germany carried with it a responsibility to respect the sensitivities of Germans toward emigration of young, single, female citizens to distant lands. The policeman who investigated an incensed Lutheran minister’s hysterical and unsubstantiated complaint against a young Mormon missionary could also become a resource that helped the same emissaries of the gospel locate and rent a schoolhouse for Sunday meetings.33 When a town mayor did not respect the lawful right of a young missionary to conduct his religious teachings, the Mormon leadership bore the responsibility to hire an attorney or seek help from the American consulate, rather than sneak the young man out of town and clandestinely replace him with a surrogate. The responsibility fell upon the church leadership to effect a strict code of conduct for missionary work and to employ skilled and sensitive mission presidents who would enforce it. For the most part, the Mormon hierarchy met this challenge successfully by employing more stringent selection, training, and supervision of missionaries.
Members of the church leadership in Salt Lake City had discussed problems pertaining to the quality of missionaries since the turn of the twentieth century. Only after the First World War did concrete reforms find their way into the process. The reliance on volunteers without sufficient spiritual, moral, or health screening resulted in embarrassing incidents that occurred in the foreign mission field prior to World War I. Some missionaries in Switzerland and Germany, just prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, surreptitiously violated the church’s health code, the Word of Wisdom, by drinking tea and coffee, smoking cigarettes, and enjoying an occasional beer. Earlier that same year, the mission president in Japan reported that five of his missionaries “had visited houses of prostitution and that one had contracted a venereal disease.”34 Other well-meaning missionaries had reported for duty in questionable health and found themselves unable to keep up with fourteen-hour days of going door-to-door, preaching on street-corners, and walking across town to attend meetings. Only after 1922 did the church require that prospective missionaries submit a statement of fitness from a medical doctor, and by 1926 authorities added the requirement for vaccination against smallpox and typhoid fever.35
Prior to World War I, new missionaries arrived in the field with only the preparation they had received in church, Sunday school, or at family devotionals. A turn-of-the-century effort to offer missionary training at church-operated colleges and normal schools collapsed because of the students’ financial burden, failure to complete the course, or decision not to pursue a call to missionary service after graduation. The only recourse was the anonymously written Elder’s Reference or Notes for Missionaries by Apostle Francis M. Lyman. In 1925, missionaries and mission presidents called from the Mormon Culture Region began attending a one-week course of instruction at Mission Home in Salt Lake City.36 By January 1927, newly arrived missionaries in the recently established Swiss-German Mission, responsible for the western half of Germany but headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, began attending a four-to-six-week instructional program in Cologne.37 The curriculum stressed missionary responsibilities, teaching strategies, and rudiments of the German language.38
Disciplined, Knowledgeable Mission Presidents Lead the WayWhen Oliver Budge hurriedly closed his oral surgery practice in Utah’s Cache Valley late in the summer of 1930, having agreed on only two months’ notice to become an emergency replacement for the Mormons’ Dresden-based mission president, he hardly expected that his first duty would involve quelling a congregational revolt.39 Having spoken little German since returning from a youthful mission just prior to the turn of the twentieth century, Budge found his linguistic, diplomatic, and managerial skills abruptly challenged when a thirty-three-member faction in the Breslau Central Branch petitioned the mission office demanding that it be allowed to split off from the main body of local worshipers and elect its own local leadership.40 That constituted a surprising degree of rebellion almost unheard of in a Mormon congregation, especially one located in the foreign mission field, where the local faithful obediently submitted to close supervision from the American mission president.41
The fifty-eight-year-old bespectacled dentist, the first in Logan, Utah, to own his own x-ray machine and one of the first in the state to administer local anesthetic to patients before a tooth extraction, handled the schismatic congregants with a degree of interpersonal skill befitting an experienced practitioner of the healing arts.42 Yet, as a ten-year veteran stake president, the equivalent of a Catholic bishop who oversees a diocese, he also displayed the authoritarian manner characteristic of a Mormon ecclesiastical leader.43 His first order of business was to reestablish respect for the church’s chain of command; only then did he address the underlying cause of the discontent.
Three days after disembarking from the ocean liner S. S. America in Hamburg, Budge repacked his suitcase for the trip to Breslau in Lower Silesia. There, on the train platform, Budge met with one of his stalwart missionaries, Donald C. Corbett, the mission secretary who assumed command after illness struck the wife of Budge’s predecessor, forcing the previous mission president to leave for America ten weeks earlier. The youthful Corbett had been trying unsuccessfully to quell the schism. He identified the two instigators of the hostilities as local members, both long-time residents of the German city that later became Wroclaw, Poland. 44
The members’ complaints seemed understandable. The insurgent leaders, who were older, married German priesthood holders and their wives, objected to their branch being led by younger, single American missionaries.45 Undertones of matrimonial jealousy permeated the obvious friction between older German members, many of whom had recently converted to the LDS faith, and the younger American missionaries who had been born into the church regimen of the Mormon Culture Region. The petitioners proposed that the breakaway church members be allowed to elect their own local leadership, which would subject itself to the counsel of the American mission president and use tithing money to rent a separate meetinghouse. An unauthorized search had already resulted in the selection of one property.46
On the first day of his journey to quash the rebellion, Dr. Budge prescribed vinegar for the miscreants and on the second, honey for the congregants. He instructed Corbett to assemble the petition leaders, Paul Köhler and Karl Hübner, and then called in each individually. Budge’s memoirs describe the confrontation, recounting how he patiently listened to each member and then forcefully but tactfully warned of the absolute necessity to obey church authority—and the implied threat of the consequences to their church status for failing to conform. Budge recalls his approach to the first man.
After he had finished his story, I commenced to talk, ‘Brother,’ I said, ‘your attitude in this matter is not what it should be. If you value your Priesthood and the Gospel, you should be willing to take the advice of your Mission President.’ After talking to him for some time, he softened.47
Budge’s admonition is familiar to anyone reasonably fluent in Mormon parlance. By questioning how the errant member cherished his religious values, Budge warned him that rebellion not only endangered his church membership but also his eternal salvation.48 Faced with that ultimatum, the believing member relented. Budge took a similar tack with the second instigator:
I used the same procedure that was so successful with the first man. He became so excited at times that he jumped off his chair and danced around like a centipede on a hot stove. Several times I had to ask him to sit down. . . . After I had explained to him what it meant to be a Latter-day Saint, to hold the Priesthood, and to enjoy the blessings which follow a consistent Priesthood holder, he became calm and apparently repentant.49
The next evening, after giving the malefactors an opportunity to think about the consequences of rebellion and allowing the news of his corrective action to circulate among the congregants, Budge summoned the entire branch membership. Once everyone assembled, his approach changed. Undoubtedly, Corbett had told Budge that many had not supported the disgruntled members. Exploiting the congregational division, the American leader downplayed admonition and instead urged the flock to avoid factionalism. He assured everyone that recent disagreements had been settled to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. Then he asked for and received the congregation’s sustaining vote.50 According to official reports of the German-Austrian Mission, “A few left the meeting in a bad spirit, but . . . no more trouble was experienced.”51 The congregants of the Breslau Central Branch eventually received their desired all-German ecclesiastical leadership, but that did not occur until four years later in 1934, after the American leadership had emphasized the training and development of German members for leadership positions in their own congregations.52
Budge had arrived in Germany in 1930, in the midst of the Mormons’ gradual but steady rebuilding of its church network after the American leaders and their missionaries had fled the country at the outbreak of the First World War. Like those who preceded and followed him as mission presidents, he governed both his missionaries and German church members lovingly but firmly. He traveled the expanse of the mission’s territory, visiting congregations and extolling the virtues of faithfulness and obedience. He disciplined errant missionaries. He presided over church courts that excommunicated or dishonorably released missionaries from their callings. He never hesitated to send a young man home on the next transatlantic steamship if his behavior violated mission standards or threatened to embarrass the church. He managed the German church’s meager resources during the country’s decline into the Great Depression, which struck industrialized Germany with rapidity unmatched in more agrarian European countries. Despite their financial hardship, Budge never relented in his appeal to the German Latter-day Saints to continue their tithing and other church offerings. He continued an ongoing process of integrating newly converted German Mormons into the governing structure of their local congregations, a process impeded by the steady stream of emigration by many faithful Germans. He interacted with government officials when his missionaries faced legal challenges to their right to proselytize. He cultivated contacts among American consular officials, employed German lawyers, and used the local court system to defend the church’s interests when necessary.
Budge’s skill in dealing with the government proved valuable upon Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor on January 30, 1933. This sudden change of regime focused new suspicion on foreign religious groups operating in Germany. His tact in dealing with Nazi officials, which will be discussed in the following chapter, bespeaks the kind of leader the Mormons dispatched to the foreign mission in the twentieth century. That Budge possessed this critical ability, as did his immediate predecessor and successor mission presidents, explains to a large degree why the Mormons were able to succeed in their dealings with the National Socialist state. Their experience contrasts with that of other foreign-based small religions, which suffered persecution or suspension of their rights to worship.
Missionary and Member DisciplineWhen twenty-four-year-old American missionary Reed Galli, a native of Midway, Utah, appeared for his church court—an ecclesiastical disciplinary tribunal in Dresden on February 19, 1927—fanciful tales still circulated widely in Germany about lecherous Mormon elders preying on meek and defenseless young German women and shipping them off to the wilds of Utah for sexual service in polygamous harems.53 Priests and ministers still condemned the better-documented lasciviousness and misjudgment of church founder Joseph Smith, whom various modern scholars have credited with marrying from thirty-four to eighty-four times.54 Distinguished former Brigham Young University historian D. Michael Quinn documented Smith’s:
violation of laws and cultural norms regarding marriage and sexual behavior—the performance [or authorization] of civil marriage ceremonies by legally unauthorized officiators, monogamous marriage ceremonies in which one or both partners [had not yet been divorced] from legal spouses, polygamous marriage of a man with more than one living wife, his marriage proposals to females as young as twelve, polygamous wives as young as fourteen, polyandry of women with more than one husband, marriage and sexual cohabitation with foster daughters, and [sanctioning of] Mormon marriages of first cousins, brother-sister, and uncle-niece.55
Hyrum Valentine, on his second tour as a Mormon mission president in Germany, officiated that winter morning in Saxony over a jury of ten young Mormon elders, who would hear testimony and render judgment on Galli, a peer who stood:
charged before this tribunal with serious violations of missionary rules and regulations, to wit: sexual sin, committed three times in the city of Dresden, according to his own admission of guilt. All done at the time that he has been commissioned as an emissary of the Meek and Lowly Master, contrary to each and every suggestion given the missionaries, and in violation of our mutual sacred covenants and obligations.
Faced with Galli’s guilty plea to all three specifications and unambiguous instructions by the First Presidency concerning convictions for adultery and fornication, the disciplinary tribunal pronounced its only allowable sentence: excommunication.56
Excommunication from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in that epoch not only severed one’s church connections in the temporal existence and chances for spiritual exaltation in the afterlife, but it also pinned a badge of shame on a young missionary who returned to his community. Elder Galli or his parents faced the immediate burden of paying for the errant young man’s transatlantic passage back to the United States, as the church immediately disavowed any connection with or responsibility for him.
Once he returned to his small community in Utah’s Heber Valley, he would have been welcome to attend services at this church ward, but everyone would know about his shameful excommunication and eventually the reason would become common knowledge. Many would avoid eye contact and verbal greetings would be embarrassingly perfunctory. More than likely, concerned elders would have advised the disgraced young man to seek a new life away from community.
Apparently, the resiliency of youth allowed Galli to overcome some of the worst consequences of excommunication, but a short, bittersweet life followed. By June 1928, some sixteen months after being dismissed from his mission, the young man apparently had regained his church membership, a remarkably short period of spiritual renewal in twentieth-century Mormonism, when rehabilitation from excommunication usually required a much longer period of repentance. Galli used that privilege to marry a young Salt Lake City native of Danish descent in the Salt Lake Temple, a religious venue where Mormon marriages could be solemnized for eternal duration.57 Nevertheless, the young couple had no children and the best employment the young man could attain, given the dual consequences of the Great Depression and a dishonorable mission release, was the position of custodian at a newspaper office. Records of the Salt Lake City municipal cemetery authority reveal that Reed Galli died prematurely at the age of thirty-two in the year 1935.58 His death certificate indicates he suffered from chronic leukemia and Vincent’s infection (trench mouth).59 Victims of trench mouth usually manifest several accompanying symptoms: emotional stress, poor oral hygiene, and poor nutrition. Probably, Galli never recovered from the emotional consequences of his indiscretion and resulting banishment from missionary work.60
Mission presidents were no more tolerant of other young missionaries who stepped out of line during a period when the church was trying to stress its conformity with the law and social customs. One month after Galli’s excommunication, the same German-Austrian mission records describe the release of another missionary who fared slightly better at the disciplinary tribunal. Twenty-one-year-old Elder Rulon W. Jenkins faced charges of:
despoiling a wife, dishonoring a mother, and destroying a home. You have made a mockery of things divine, by baptizing a woman as a penitent sinner, which placed you in the position of her spiritual adviser, and thus you have despoiled her. You have greatly aggravated the situation already strained by again meeting with her clandestinely after having somewhat of an understanding with her offended husband.
The record of the church court then got specific and graphic regarding Elder Jenkins’ transgression:
According to a statement by Willie Zacheile, Ludwigstrasse 26, Chemnitz, which he read to the tribunal, Rulon Jenkins was charged with several clandestine meetings with Sister Zacheile, and of handling her sexual organs, and hugging and kissing her, taking her out several times late at night at which times she returned home in a drunken condition, and even after having been taken to task by the husband of this woman, of meeting her later and indulging in these liberties with her.
This tribunal handed down a different sentence than the one that had convicted Elder Galli one month previously. Jenkins was dishonorably released from his mission, asked to surrender his missionary credentials, and required to return home at his own expense. But he was not excommunicated and thus remained a full-fledged member of the church who would eventually be able to marry in the temple and regain the full fellowship of his congregants, on earth and in the life to come.
Why was this church court more lenient? The record indicates that Jenkins:
acknowledged all of the pertinent points of these charges, taking exception to one or two . . . but admitted them generally. The accused was then questioned as to whether he had committed adultery, to which he solemnly replied he had not. He was then questioned, ‘Has your sexual organ been placed next to hers?’ to which he replied, ‘No.’
Although Elder Galli had admitted to three sexual liaisons, nothing in the record of his disciplinary tribunal indicates he had done so with married women. There is no record of a pregnancy. Galli was an ordinary missionary. By contrast, Jenkins was a branch president, had baptized the woman with whom he had a relationship, and had become her spiritual adviser. The woman’s aggrieved husband testified at Jenkins’ hearing. Nevertheless, because of the distinction drawn between tactile and coital sex, Jenkins’ membership was left intact.
The social consequences once Jenkins returned home were also different. He would not be allowed to speak triumphantly from the podium in his home ward, as befitting honorably released missionaries upon their successful return. He would have to answer to his parents and local ecclesiastical leaders for his dishonorable release. Astute congregants would have noticed that he returned home earlier than scheduled. But his ability to partake of the sacrament, speak and pray aloud in church, and eventually obtain his bishop’s endorsement to attend the temple would have facilitated his acceptance back into his local social and religious circles. Unlike Reed Galli, who died five years after his excommunication, Rulon Jenkins lived to the age of eighty-six.61
One did not have to partake in illicit sexual relations in order to run afoul of the new orthodoxy being enforced by Mormon mission presidents in the Weimar period. Merely becoming engaged to a local German girl and marrying her at the conclusion of one’s obligated missionary service was sufficient to deny a missionary an honorable release and a church-funded steamship ticket home.
The case of Elder Edgar C. Schwab illustrates how far the mission leadership was willing to pursue this policy. Schwab, a native of Smoot, Wyoming, arrived in Dresden in February 1926 and immediately fell into disfavor because he smoked cigarettes. The mission president assigned him to be supervised by “one of the best men in the mission” as a companion, but he was soon discovered smoking in a railway station restaurant while seated with an empty glass of beer in front of him. The mission president then transferred Schwab to Berlin, where he would work under another missionary with an excellent reputation. At this point he repented somewhat and continued his missionary work for the better part of two years before falling sick early in 1928 and being granted an honorable release based on ill health.
When Mission President Valentine learned, two days after Schwab had sailed from the port of Bremen, that the former missionary had been married between his last contact with mission authorities in Dresden and his departure for America, he took the extraordinary step of writing the First Presidency in Salt Lake City. Ostensibly, that correspondence would be forwarded to Schwab’s ecclesiastical leadership in Wyoming. On official German-Austrian Mission letterhead, Valentine sought the return of the young man’s certificate of honorable release and forwarded a demand for reimbursement of funds expended by the church to send him home. Valentine was particularly incensed that Schwab had left his new wife in the care of relatives while she resolved difficulties with her visa. Instead, Schwab traveled home in the company of his wife’s sixteen-year-old sister, who faced no difficulties with immigration procedures. Schwab’s father, who had relatives in Germany, had joined his son and new wife in Bremen for the wedding and transatlantic passage home. Said Valentine in that correspondence:
The taking of this 16-year-old girl, a sister of his wife, as far as New York is an unpardonable indiscretion and wholly uncalled for, even though it was done with the consent of her parents, who are faithful members of the church in long standing.62
Elder Schwab’s last contact with mission authorities had occurred on February 11, 1928, when he received his certificate of honorable release. He married on March 8 with full knowledge of both sets of parents, who were presumably at the ceremony.
Valentine’s rant was motivated by two factors. First, he knew that the Mormon Church in Germany had been criticized severely for its recruitment of young single women, who then emigrated. Elders taking German brides home, even if their courtship had adhered to all standards of Christian premarital chastity, did not seem consistent with the church’s stated twentieth-century goal of merely spreading the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Valentine’s second desire was to maintain control. As he stated in the letter he sent after Schwab’s departure:
Missionaries generally should be made to feel that their mission begins, and terminates if at all, in the ward from which they are accredited. The technicality of ‘release’ does not permit them to do that the next second, which they are not permitted to do as missionaries.63
Apparently, Mormon mission presidents applied the same rules to native German missionaries serving on their home soil. In January 1928, Albert Zenger received a dishonorable release for “marrying a local member.”64 Another German missionary, Bruno Böhm, released dishonorably for unspecified purposes one month later, reacted with an unusual degree of defiance. He took the mission president to court, suing him for having made “insulting remarks.” In April, the local judge dismissed the litigation.65
From time to time, groups of proselytizing elders misbehaved, which required the mission president to travel to the scene to investigate and reorganize the ecclesiastical units that he purged of the malefactors. In November 1930, German-Austrian Mission President Oliver Budge summoned by telegram the missionaries serving in the West Pomeranian hamlets of Prenslau and Stargard to meet him in Stettin, where he held an inquiry pertaining to facts not disclosed by the mission records. He sent the district president home on the next transatlantic sailing without a certificate of honorable release and then demoted and reassigned the rest of the offending missionaries.66
Discipline of errant German members occurred even more frequently, and often without the same degree of due process from the mission president and his top-level assistants. Although the mission president would eventually have to approve the excommunication, the disciplinary courts would almost always be held at the district level, where young, single American missionaries in their twenties would sit in judgment of older, married German members. The three most frequently cited reasons for depriving congregants of their membership—their ticket to paradise in the afterlife— were adultery or fornication, disrespect or disobedience to proper ecclesiastical authority, or acquiescence to a member’s request that his name, or those of his entire family, be removed from the membership rolls.
Much of the verbiage that appears in the official mission historical records is curt and lacking in detail, and gives the impression that separating these members was a routine act of culling the flock: “Marie Elizabeth Rattei was excommunicated from the church for immorality,” said one entry.67 Both parties in a German couple, who had apparently separated and sought companionship with others without taking the trouble to file for divorce, were “excommunicated for committing adultery,” according to another record.68 Eight members of one family in the Swiss-German Mission were excommunicated together on one day in May 1929, apparently at the behest of the parents.69 Two days later, a single entry in the German-Austrian Mission’s records names nine unrelated German members who were “excommunicated at their own request.”70
Recording the details of a German member’s excommunication became more important, however, when that individual became a public apostate or heretic, or when he stole money from the church. Paul Seifert of Dresden serves as an example of the first category, when in August 1930 a priesthood tribunal found him guilty of “vigorously fighting against the church and excommunicated him.” Having fallen out of favor in his local congregation, but not having bothering to request the termination of his own membership, he voiced his opposition publicly by authoring “many vile articles that appeared against the Church in newspapers around the country.”71
Theft and embezzlement rated an even more extensive accounting of the miscreant’s disciplinary hearing. Immediately after the end of the First World War, the Latter-day Saints had tried unsuccessfully to become certified as a church by the German government, but resistance from bureaucrats and religious leaders forced the Mormons to apply, instead, for recognition as a Verein, or an association or club. The government’s rejection of the application for recognition as a church stated that for a foreign religious organization to receive German accreditation, it must first be recognized as a church in its home country. Since the United States did not certify churches, the Mormons could not receive such recognition in the Republic.72
The LDS Church obtained its status as a legal association in 1923, which allowed the purchase of the Dresden mission headquarters and an attached meeting hall for several of its congregations. However, the laws that governed the recognition and operation of a Verein required that its officers and directors be German citizens. Earlier mission presidents had appointed ostensibly loyal German church members to the “Board of Control,” with the understanding that they would control nothing. Instead, they were expected to defer to the American mission president regarding important decisions. In January 1928, a Dresden resident and prominent church member, Bruno Ernst Richter, received a seat on the board.73
In September 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, German-Austrian Mission President Oliver Budge decided that expenses required for the upkeep of the mission headquarters building on Königsbrückerstrasse in Dresden were placing an undue burden on the church’s finances. More desirable property had been identified in Berlin, and Budge decided to move the mission office to the nation’s capital. However, when the sale of the Dresden property closed on December 19, 1931, church officials learned that Richter had used his authority as a legal owner of the property to mortgage it and abscond with the proceeds.74
Richter’s church court, which tried him in absentia, convened on January 19, 1932, with a prayer followed by the well-known LDS hymn, Do What is Right. Marvin A. Ashton, the designated prosecutor, accused Richter of misappropriating several thousand Rentenmarks by mortgaging the mission headquarters and “spending the money on riotous living.” His estranged wife, with whom Richter apparently did not share the proceeds, testified that her husband “had led an indecent life and had previously been punished by city and other governing officials for dishonesty.” Then, in an effort to increase the severity of Richter’s sentence, Ashton accused him of “being an apostate at heart” and of drinking and smoking. The tribunal returned a guilty verdict and unanimously prescribed excommunication.75 When subsequent articles describing the embezzlement appeared in local newspapers, the church records referred to them as anti-Mormon or propaganda “against the church.”76
For German Mormons, the Weimar period marked a strict reestablishment of control by American missionaries and their mission presidents after four years of ecclesiastical home rule necessitated by the First World War. For many native members, it was a humbling experience to once again be subjected to the authority of younger, unmarried American missionaries. Likewise, it was occasionally difficult to accept the leadership of older American mission presidents who preached an American gospel in distinctly accented German. However, as the next section demonstrates, these same Americans brought with them the spirituality of an idyllic, far-away American Zion— where miracles were presumed to be common occurrences. The same upstart young foreigners who could offend an older German congregant could, on the other hand, serve as an inspiration for those who dreamed of emigrating. For the most part, the young missionaries themselves seemed to prosper in an environment that prescribed strict rules of conduct, but which allowed them to develop their spirituality in outposts far away from the constant supervision of the mission president.