Did the Nazis persecute Mormons?

Factual Questions
1

As a young Mormon kid I was told by several people over the years that the Nazis not only put Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Russians, etc. in the concentration camps, but that they automatically stuck members of what they considered “cults” in the camps as well, including Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-Day Adventists. Essentially, I was told, being a Mormon in Nazi-era Germany meant you were going off to the camps to be enslaved and killed.

So today, while browsing Wikipedia for something entirely unrelated, I fell victim to the infamous problem with Wikipedia, and somehow ended up reading about the Holocaust. Well, early on, I found a link to this article about Nazi persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I was surprised to see that, apparently:

[list=a]
[li]There was persecution of religions “sects,” but[/li][li]The main reason Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent to camps was because they refused to serve in the military or take an oath of allegiance to “the Fatherland,” and[/li][li]They could sign a form renouncing their faith, promising never to practice or believe it again, promising to inform on their believing friends and turn any literature they received in the mail to the police, etc., and if they signed the form and renounced their faith, they would be immediately released from the concentration camp.[/li][/list]

So it seems that the reason Jehovah’s Witnesses were targeted by the Nazis was not specifically (or at least not solely) because they belonged to a “cult,” but because their religion had an uncomfortable (for the Nazis) connection to America and because they refused to take an oath of allegience, serve in the military, and so forth. And this Jehovah’s Witness “pacifist / no-oaths” behavior is certainly not a requirement for Mormons.

I searched the SDMB archives and couldn’t find any discussion of this, so I tried Google but just got a lot of overheated rhetoric from pro-Mormon sites comparing the 1838 Mormon War in Missouri to Nazi Germany and from anti-Mormon sites comparing various Mormon leaders to Nazis, plus a lot of humorous commentary talking about a Salt Lake Tribune columnist’s classification of Mormons as “New Age Mormons, Orthodox Mormons, and Nazi Mormons.” Oh, and of course lots of talk about the big controversy about LDS folk doing baptisms for Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But nothing about actual Nazi persecution of Mormons.

So was I misinformed all those years ago? Did the Nazis not really round up all the Mormons and haul them off to be enslaved and killed?

Although I’m no longer a believing Mormon, I still feel cultural connections to my Mormon heritage, so I’m very interested in the answer. Thanks for any responses!

2

I’ll bet that there was no blanket statement you could make about this – i suspect that the German LDS population wasn’t big enough for them to have a set policy about them. My understanding is that Mormonism was big in the British Isles and in Scandinavian countries. I never heard of large LDS populations in France, Germany, or elsewhere on the continent outside Scandinavia.

Here’s an interesting page on the Mormons in Germany. I have no idea how accurate it is:

http://www.historyofmormonism.com/Mormonism_in_Germany.html

3

I thought that is was well understood that JWs were sent to camps for being pacifists. They did then and do now not participate in the military in any country.

Were there even any Mormons to speak of in Nazi Germany?. I thought that the explosive growth in Mormonism outside of the U.S. was fairly recent.

4

Certainly you could be LDS & a good German and good soldier and there were plenty (relative to the rest of the World) of German LDS :

*Along with its focus on Latter-day Saints, the archive is unusual because it documents veterans from several nationalities on both sides of the conflict. When the war erupted in Europe in 1939, Church membership in Germany was third only to the United States and Canada. More than 500 German Latter-day Saints lost their lives in World War II.

Hans Max Boettcher, a veteran of the German Army, recalls his experience with other Latter-day Saints while at an Allied prisoner-of-war camp in the Italian mountains. Boettcher had served a full-time mission and had married a young LDS woman before being drafted. The only LDS prisoner in his camp, Boettcher learned that an old LDS friend was in a nearby camp. He was able to make contact with his friend, who in turn put him in touch with an American LDS chaplain, Royden C. Braithwaite, '37. From their first meeting, records Boettcher, “[He] came every Sunday and picked me up for sacrament meeting in town.”
*
This site says that there were 12,000 German Mormons at about the outbreak

So, unless someone comes up with something I would call B.S. on German LDS dying in camps en masse for being LDS.

Having said that, I would never state flatly with what I see that no “Mormon” died in the Holocaust. I think that does a disservice to those that probably from their view did die for being Mormon. I would assume that the LDS died in Camps & would likely be French, Polish etc I am talking about people who were by and large killed not really because the Nazi’s targeted them as Mormon’s per se, but for the same reasons non-Jewish Polish Intellectuals were killed – they were community leaders and were seen as a threat to the new Nazi order. I think that would be SOP with the Nazi’s but I will say that I can’t find evidence that it happened.

5

Much thanks CalMeacham and jimmmy for the information and for finding that article. So it sounds like I was misinformed, and that Mormons were not rounded up the way Jehovah’s Witnesses were.

Is the “incident in Munich that caused a great stir” the paragraph that follows it, about Helmuth Hübener, the youngest person executed by the Nazis for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets? Or is the Munich incident something else? I don’t see anything about Munich in the Wikipedia article about Helmuth Hübener; in fact, it says Hamburg. But I can’t see what else the “Mormonism in Germany” article could be referring to.

Oh, and hajario, I’m sure it’s common knowledge that Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned for pacificism, but somehow I managed to avoid realizing that until today. I hate it when I find out that I’ve been misinformed or uninformed for my entire life … but at least learning new things makes up for it.

6

I don’t know much about Nazi persecution of Mormons. It’s my understanding that they didn’t bother much with Mormons, but had plans to eventually get rid of such suspicious people–they were just too busy with more urgent things like the war and slaughtering the Jews. Mormons were people to keep a suspicious eye on–they tended to be friendly to Jews, were far too connected to America, and belonged to some bizarro cult–but they certainly didn’t get automatically dragged off to the camps or anything. (Nor have I ever been told so, just fyi.)

There are several good books about Helmuth Hübener and his friends these days. His entire congregation figured that they would be objects of extreme suspicion (he had used the church’s typewriter), so they didn’t say anything for years.

7

Also, in the Wikipedia article on Hubener, it says:

However, it doesn’t say what the source for this is. I wonder where it came from…

Well, they did say something … they disavowed knowledge of his actions and excommunicated him, which was undoubtedly the smartest thing to do at the time since they surely would have been imprisoned along with the friends he had helping him if they were thought to really be disloyal. And later he was reinstated.

8

In a documentary about the case, one of Hübener’s friends stated that an official said those words to him: “After the Jews, you Mormons will be next.”

At the time, the church in Germany was independent of the church in US, of course. There was no way to properly conduct an excommunication and Hübener’s membership was reinstated after the war ended.

9

Sorry, I meant that the members wouldn’t talk about Hübener after the war. They didn’t want to talk about the story to sympathizers. They did indeed do a sort of on-paper excommunication at the time, I suppose for appearances’ sake; as Monty notes, it wasn’t real. They couldn’t send it to Salt Lake or anything. Then of course a lot of the members were bombed out or killed anyway, so after the war I’m not sure how many people even knew about that–IIRC they found the records and fixed it up properly. I seem to recall that Hübener’s family members all died, but I’d have to look it up.

10

Where did you grow up? I grew up Mormon in Salt Lake, of pioneer stock, and didn’t hear that one.

11

You happen to be in luck in that The owners of the family owned company I worked at, had a mother from Salt Lake City that was trapped in Germany for WWII. She never mentioned any prosecution of herself during the war period. She married a Ukrainian from a circus and moved back to America. He was not in the circus at the time of the war, he was fighting. I listened to her tell stories when ever I could.

12

There are a few stories of LDS soldiers running into their co-religionists fighting in the Nazi army. Many were used by the US forces as translators as they learned German serving as missionaries in pre-war Germany. A good, slightly fictionalized (but based on real stories of LDS soldiers) version of one of those meetings is the film “Saints and Soldiers”, arguably one of the best of the quickly dying LDS movie market.

13

I’m getting the impression these Nazis just liked to oppress everyone.

14

Huh. I thought the Nazis persecuted the Mormons, too. Now that I think about it, though, I don’t really have a for-sure reason I thought so. There was a lady in my ward when I was a teen who survived a Nazi concentration camp and I thought she was there because she was Mormon, but thinking back, I really can’t say that I can trust the memory.

Thanks all for fighting my ignorance.

15

For those interested, BYUTV will be showing Truth and Conviction: Helmuth Hubener Story at the following times (Mountain Time):

March 17 @ 8:00 PM
March 20 @ 3:00 AM

Go to www.byu.tv to watch the show. You can go to that website any time after the air time and scroll back to watch the full show. (I think the scroll back option is good for one month after the date of the show.)

16

Also, BYUTV is available on Dish Network and DirecTV, as well as many cable providers.

17

Pacifism is one manifestation of JWs belief in strict neutrality as it relates to political affairs. They place their trust in God, and his current and future “government”, and do their best to respect the laws of any government they live under. (as long as they don’t conflict with what they perceive to be God’s laws, as articulated in the bible)

This neutrality extends, however, to any political involvement. JWs would not serve in a non-combat role, for example. They would not sign a political party allegiance card. (and suffered tremendously for refusing in the country of Malawi in the 70’s) They were abused unmercifully in the USA for refusing to recite the pledge of allegiance. (and took the case to the SCOTUS, and won civil and religious rights that most of us take for granted) They do not vote.

It’s worth noting that the JWs were perhaps the only group that could have walked out of Auschwitz and other camps—not by enlisting in the German Army—but by simply signing a declaration renouncing their faith. Very few did.

Rudolph Hoss recorded, “On many occasions Himmler as well as Eicke offered the fanatical faith of Jehovah’s Witnesses as an example. SS men must have the same fanatical and unshakable faith in the National Socialist ideal and in Adolph Hitler as the Witnesses had in Jehovah. Only when all SS men believed as fanatically in their own philosophy would Adolph Hitler’s state be permanently secure.”

18

To this day, adult male JWs in South Korea are jailed for refusing to perform mandatory military service.