Puzzling over Mennonite Nazis

Earlier this month an on-line acquaintance pointed me to “How to Catch a Mennonite Nazi” over at Anabaptist Historians. I found it all grimly fascinating, surprising and of course deeply troubling. 

Then Tablet picked it up and highlighted it in their daily newsletter (re-titled: “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust”). When I opened the email I swallowed hard and glanced at the clock. Sure enough, within a day or two I heard from my Jewish friends. I had some 'splainin’ to do.

I was grateful for the time of deliberation. The longer I mulled it all over, the more curious it seemed to me that antisemitism was very much NOT in the purview of the milieu that raised me. Here I was, a kid isolated in the prairies in a community proficient in the German language. Back when it came time to fight the Nazis, the religiously sanctioned community response was to stay out and stay home. You’d think this would be fertile ground for antisemitism. 

Instead the church library stocked accounts of Christians who had given shelter to Jews during the Holocaust, alongside survivor accounts like Elie Wiesel’s Night. The most widely read of these was The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. In fact, although I was not as a child permitted to set foot in a movie theatre to enjoy Disney’s bland entertainments, a dispensation was made for a Billy Graham funded production of The Hiding Place. (The other exception was Hazel’s People. After that I was permitted to see Star Wars, and then it was game over.)

Not a "first date" movie -- unless you're Mennonite.

I have recollections of childhood conversations with my mates about how we might comport ourselves during a Nazi occupation. My cohort and I tacitly understood that of course we would shelter Jews — that’s just what Christians did. I don’t think it sunk in until I was almost 20 that Christians also sent Jews to the camps. By that point I could banish the cognitive dissonance by putting scare-quotes around “Christian” and reassuring myself that at least these people were not Mennonite.

So much for that.

This Heinrich Hamm presents a second curiosity. Hamm, it seems, had no difficulty buying into the antisemitic tenets of Hitler’s Third Reich — indeed he proselytized on its behalf. Most of the Mennonites who left Russia during and following the war vigorously asserted that antisemitism was not in any way any part of the Mennonite scene, that Mennonites were co-sufferers and frequent co-conspirators with the Jews in their mutual desperation to escape the hell that Russia had become. While that might not be an outright lie, it is clearly not the whole truth, either.

More anon...