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.
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.
For more about Nazi surveillance of Latter-day Saints, head on over to read the full interview with Stephen O. Smoot.
Comments
9 responses to “Nazis and Latter-day Saints”
When I think of matters like this, I wonder what else we’re they supposed to do?
It’s interesting that the Nazi’s didn’t like the churches efforts to remain politically neutral. It’s a very “If you’re not with me, you’re against me” approach. I think it would be good to teach everyone that no one who takes that attitude is in the right.
I’m currently reading a biography of David O. McKay, and the leaders of the church just prior to World War II were more concerned about communism than fascism. I see echoes of that today…
Great write up and some interesting finds in the write up I hadn’t heard of that era in Germany -The member who wouldn’t salute. My great grandparents left Germany in 1927 after converting but many other extended family remained. The horror of the Nazi era will never not be gut wrenching. One of the joys of my life was living in Germany and reading lots of history, visiting important sites, and thinking about its past. I really appreciate the approach Germany has taken to its history with its openness and ownership.
Nowadays it seems a lot of public online discourse in the US is explicitly or implicitly trying to show how your opponents ideas and actions are linked to Naziisms terrible fruit. Unfortunately at the same time it seems the US is dabbling in lighter versions of fascism and nationalism.
As a broad supporter of the institutional LDS Church, I’m not sure they always get it right but this era in Germany was especially difficult. Wed like to think we’d be the hero in the safety of our current understanding if we were in that era. The Church’s neutrality and antiwar stance seems slightly different from a general neutrality stance now.
In future generations, the stickiness of the Church policies to help the members and church permanency in countries with bad governments like China or Russian remind us that we continue to live in complex times.
I wonder what teachings on pacifism Stephen S. was referring to in his response to the interview question about Nazi suspicions. (Or maybe it was just Nazi perceptions of the Church’s teachings.) In any case, bringing new documents like this to light is genuinely helpful, as there’s still a real need for solid scholarship.
Tim,
My understanding of America in the 1930s is that most people, not just church leaders, were more worried about Communism than they were with fascism/Nazism. That all flipped when war broke out.
Just to reiterate what I think most people already know: in the 20s and 39s, fascism was seen as legitimate in some quarters as an answer to what was considered intolerably messy communism. Fascism was going to make sure that Russia’s seemingly haphazard revolt, which seemed to cause as many problems as it solved and put undesirables in power, didn’t happen in the likes of Spain and Germany, for example.
In the end, both systems ended up mostly indistinguishable from each other in practice: state run commerce, high levels of personal control, few personal freedoms.
Fascinating stuff…
“Nazi officials…resented funds flowing from Germany to Church headquarters in the United States.”
I’ll bet they did. Hard currency to buy needed imports was the biggest constraint on the German military buildup in the 1930s, and they went to great lengths to control currency flows.
“the leaders of the church just prior to World War II were more concerned about communism than fascism.”
With good reason. Stalin already had the blood of millions on his hands when Hitler was just taking power. That Hitler would be a monster on the same scale was not obvious until well after the war started.
“We’d like to think we’d be the hero in the safety of our current understanding if we were in that era.”
And the numbers strongly suggest we would not. The horrifying thing about Nazi Germany is the way ordinary people were drawn into evil, and I doubt many of us would have done better. I can’t say I’ve done as much to fight against autocracy as Helmut Hubener, despite facing almost no risk for doing so. This is definitely an area where the commandment to “judge not” applies.
Douglas Tobler did some excellent work on the Church’s interactions with the German government and individual members on the ground who could be counted as Righteous Gentiles. I was able to use him as a resource in a graduate class on the Holocaust and It’s Meaning. Basically, there were very heroic members who acted on their own while the church struggled to balance the 12th Article of Faith with the actual happenings in Nazi Germany.