I’ve seen that the Church sometimes gets a bad reputation for how it navigated Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. One thing that tends to get overlooked, however, was the amount of pressure the Church felt from the Nazi regime. In a recent interview at the Latter-day Saint history blog, Stephen O. Smoot discussed some new research based on a 500-page dossier from the Nazi Party’s intelligence agency, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), preserved in the Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Berlin, on how Nazis spied on Latter-day Saints. What follows here is a copost to the full interview.

Did Nazis Spy on the Church?

In explaining the extent of the surveillance, Stephen O. Smoot wrote,

The Nazis monitored the Church nationwide through informants, interrogations of missionaries, and observation of meetings. Local leaders and members were scrutinized, and senior Nazi officials received regular reports on Church activities and publications. The surveillance was systematic and coordinated throughout the Reich, not limited to isolated incidents. …

Nazi officials explicitly warned Church leaders to prevent any “anti-state” political activity or “propaganda” by members or missionaries, threatening that “the strictest state police measures would be carried out against the sect” if ignored.

Roy A. Welker, president of the German-Austrian Mission, heeded these warnings, instructing missionaries to avoid political discussion entirely in their labors.

This created a tense atmosphere for Latter-day Saints to navigate.

The Nazis were suspicious of the Church for several reasons:

Suspicion stemmed largely from the Church’s foreign base in the United States. Its missionary efforts, teachings on political neutrality and pacifism, and financial ties to America also raised concerns. Nazi officials additionally objected to perceived “Jewish influences” in Church practices, such as Sabbath observance and tithing, and resented funds flowing from Germany to Church headquarters in the United States.

Latter-day Saint doctrines were deemed bizarre or deviant, and there were also (of course!) suspicions of secret polygamy still being practiced in the Church. …

James E. Talmage’s Articles of Faith was banned by government officials because its content was deemed unsuitable to Nazi ideology. Other materials were also censored or confiscated, such as the tract “Divine Authority.” The SD dossier contains several confiscated tracts that were taken from missionaries or local members.

It was a conflict of ideology and concerns about foreign influences that led the Nazis to spy on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany.

This context helps explain why the Church was not stridently anti-Nazi in public:

Church leaders instructed missionaries and members to obey the law, avoid political involvement, and focus on religious activity. The Church adopted political neutrality and an accommodationist stance toward the regime. The evidence strongly indicates this was done as a pragmatic strategy to ensure survival, not as an endorsement of Nazism.

In fact, both privately and publicly, Church leaders denounced Nazism as incompatible with the gospel—a position even noted in an important 1938 report within the SD dossier, which stated, “the teachings of the Mormons are incompatible with the National Socialist worldview,” and that “the American sect leadership is still shamelessly agitating against National Socialist Germany today. Thus, there can be no talk of a pro-German attitude” among Church leaders.

Rather than being openly accepting of the Nazi regime, Church leaders opposed it. They did, however, take a pragmatic approach to keeping the institution alive in Germany during a difficult time.

While the dossier in question doesn’t cover events in the 1940s, it does give context to the most famous story of the Church in WWII Germany:

Helmuth Hübener was a 17-year-old Latter-day Saint from Hamburg who, with friends (including fellow branch members), listened to banned BBC broadcasts and distributed anti-Nazi leaflets.

Arrested in 1942, he was executed by beheading in the infamous Plötzensee prison, becoming the youngest person sentenced to death by the Nazi People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof). …

The dossier ends in 1939 and so does not directly address Helmuth Hübener. However, it provides crucial context by illustrating, for instance, the intense pressure local Church leaders faced, which partly helps explain their response when Hübener’s case arose later.

For example, his posthumous excommunication, according to district president Otto Berndt, was carried out partly to appease Nazi officials by showing them that the boy acted alone and without Church involvement.

(Berndt, for his part, objected to the excommunication, which was instigated by Hübener’s pro-Nazi branch president but overturned by the First Presidency in 1948 when contact was reestablished after the war.)

While a pro-Nazi bishop was part of the picture, there were more pressing concerns about the potential repression of the Church in Germany that influenced the efforts of church leaders in excommunicating Helmuth Hübener.

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For more about Nazi surveillance of Latter-day Saints, head on over to read the full interview with Stephen O. Smoot.