Canadian Mennonites on the Prairie and the Führer, 1939

Another deep dive into the dark side of Mennonite history—this time in Winnipeg.

The latest issue of MCC’s journal Intersections on MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism through the 1930s should not be entirely shocking to Canadian Mennonites (note 1).
Mennonite support for Hitler and his vision for Germany was very real and public on the Canadian prairies until the start of WWII.

The most read newspaper in Manitoba, the Winnipeg Free Press, reported on a large Winnipeg pro-Hitler rally (January 30, 1939, page 3) with the byline: “Hitler Salute: Local Germans hail re-birth of fatherland under Fuehrer."

The pictures show the Mennonite Young People's Choir performing at the event (see also last paragraph of the Free Press article). The choir was led by John Konrad, a Russländer (1920s Mennonite immigrant). Konrad founded an ensemble in 1935 that evolved into the Mennonite Symphony Orchestra; he actively directed choirs with the Manitoba Mennonite Youth Organization, and was choirmaster at First Mennonite Church in Winnipeg. The pictures also show the youth and others giving the Hit!er salute with arm raised.

On the prairies upstanding Russländer Mennonites were praising the Führer two years before German armies would enter Ukraine and convince Mennonites there to do the same. Reference in the article to the "ill will" of a "certain press" is a thinly veiled reference to one of Hitler’s anti-Semitic tropes of the “Jewish press.” Russian Mennonite émigré and leader Benjamin Unruh in Germany, and German Mennonite pastors like Gustav Kraemer, for example, did the same.

Unruh was only one—but the most powerful—of a handful of Russian Mennonites in Germany who regularly, but especially in 1938 and 1939, fanned the flames of pro-Nazi sentiments in the Canadian (Russländer) Mennonite paper, Der Bote. Their voices were complemented by a few of their “followers” primarily “in and around Winnipeg,” as David G. Rempel recalled (a contemporary to Unruh; historian; note 2).

Unruh was adamant that Mennonites had a role to help purify and sanctify Germanism and support Hitler’s effort to bring wholeness and fulfillment to the German people. “Being true to God implies being true to one’s Volk, which in turn requires faithfulness to the nation,” as Frank H. Epp summarized Unruh’s Bote arguments (note 3).

Because Unruh’s articles always had an “extremely polemical tone,” as Rempel recalled, “few dared to openly differ with Unruh’s interpretation of historical events.” A powerful member of First Mennonite Church (Schönwiese) in Winnipeg, hymnologist J. P. Claszen, openly acknowledged with “bitter articles” that he would be “denouncing certain Mennonite ministers—and very prominent ones—to a certain agency in Nazi Germany,” for the “alleged decadence of Mennonite faith and social and cultural life.” Claszen branded those who disagreed “as people ‘who were gravely ensnared in outlived forms, traditions, customs and externals’, but who sooner or later would be pulled out of their position of indifference by a ‘sacred storm’ from abroad,” as Rempel summarized (note 4).

Walter (Jakob) Quiring—also in Germany, but later to move to Winnipeg and become editor of the Der Bote—similarly indicted much of the Mennonite ministry “for its shallowness and tepidity toward the new spirit in Nazi Germany, and that they and others guilty of the same weaknesses should not be surprised when, after the liberation of the Ukraine by Germany they would be confronted with a bill of particulars. There were numerous other threats of dire reprisals to anyone who did not agree with their version of the past and predictions of the future” (note 4).

Already in 1935, one of Rempel’s professional colleagues in the US wrote to him about the Canadian Mennonite periodical and its Rosthern, Saskatchewan editor, as well as about the other Mennonite paper, the Rundschau:

“The Bote? For heaven’s sake I am glad that I don’t have to read that Käseblatt [literally, “cheese paper,” or “rag”]. I had quite a row with the editor, D. Epp. ... When I began to notice the pitfall to Nazi propaganda, I told him bluntly the danger he was letting himself in for but he resented this. … Pitiful and disgusting. And as to Herman Neufeld’s Mennonitische Rundschau that is even more deplorable … he was condemned for printing a pamphlet with the bloodiest Nazi theories propagating the most horrible lies with regard to the famous ‘Zionist Protocols’.” (Note 5)

It is not surprising that MCC in North America remained entangled with Unruh and National Socialism through the 1930s—years before Mennonites in Ukraine (living under a news embargo) would get to know Hit!er as a liberator.

Immigration leader B. B. Janz (Coaldale, Alberta) finally put an end to this in 1940; he had the clout to stand up against J. P. Claszen and the rest (they owed him their lives, in a way). See Janz's now "famous" article reprinted in multiple places in English and German: “Am I a National Socialist?” In “Canadian Mennonites Loyal to New Fatherland, Leader of Coaldale Colony Declares,” Lethbridge Herald (June 1, 1940), 14.

---Notes---

Pics (below): Winnipeg Free Press, January 30, 1939, p. 3; Winnipeg Evening Tribune, January 30, 1939, p. 3, https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A1368295/manitoba_metadata; picture with Aeltester (bishop) J. P. Claszen and John Konrad, Winnipeg Evening Tribune, July 20, 1936, p. 2, https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A1814165.

Note 1: “MCC and National Socialism,” MCC Intersections, Fall 2021, https://mcccanada.ca/media/resources/12017.

Note 2: David G. Rempel, Recollections, summer 1939, pp. 65-69. From Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, David Rempel Papers, MS Coll. 329 2B Annex, box 36, file 29.

Note 3: Cf. Frank H. Epp, “An Analysis of Germanism and National Socialism in the Immigrant Newspaper of a Canadian Minority Group, the Mennonites, in the 1930’s” (PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1965), 227, 228, 229

Note 4: David G. Rempel , Recollections, summer 1939, 65-69. ” See Claszen's articles in Der Bote, February 2, 1938, pp. 2f; March 30, 1938, p. 2; December 14, 21, 28, 1938, pp. 2, 2f., 1f. respectively. For Walter Quiring, see especially “Staatstreu und Volkstreu,” Der Bote, January 11, 1939, pp. 2f. On Claszen, cf. Wesley Berg, "Gesangbuch, Ziffern, and Deutschtum: A Study of the Life and Work of J. P.Claszen, Mennonite Hymnologist," Journal of Mennonite Studies 4 (1986): 80-30, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/229/229.

Note 5: Letter to David G. Rempel (English), from D.R. (illegible), Sept 25, 1935. From Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, David Rempel Collection, Box 1 Correspondence, 1932-1991. Box 1, file 1.

Comments

Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp, 1942: List and Links

Each of the "Commando Dr. Stumpp" village reports written during German occupation of Ukraine 1942 contains a mountain of demographic data, names, dates, occupations, numbers of untimely deaths (revolution, famines, abductions), narratives of life in the 1930s, of repression and liberation, maps, and much more. The reports are critical for telling the story of Mennonites in the Soviet Union before 1942, albeit written with the dynamics of Nazi German rule at play. Reports for some 56 (predominantly) Mennonite villages from the historic Mennonite settlement areas of Chortitza, Sagradovka, Baratow, Schlachtin, Milorodovka, and Borosenko have survived. Unfortunately no village reports from the Molotschna area (known under occupation as “Halbstadt”) have been found. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a prolific chronicler of “Germans abroad,” became well-known to German Mennonites (Prof. Benjamin Unruh/ Dr. Walter Quiring) before the war as the director of the Research Center for Russian Germans...

1929 Flight of Mennonites to Moscow and Reception in Germany

At the core of the attached video are some thirty photos of Mennonite refugees arriving from Moscow in 1929 which are new archival finds. While some 13,000 had gathered in outskirts of Moscow, with many more attempting the same journey, the Soviet Union only released 3,885 Mennonite "German farmers," together with 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists, and 7 Adventists. Some of new photographs are from the first group of 323 refugees who left Moscow on October 29, arriving in Kiel on November 3, 1929. A second group of photos are from the so-called “Swinemünde group,” which left Moscow only a day later. This group however could not be accommodated in the first transport and departed from a different station on October 31. They were however held up in Leningrad for one month as intense diplomatic negotiations between the Soviet Union, Germany and also Canada took place. This second group arrived at the Prussian sea port of Swinemünde on December 2. In the next ten ...

Eduard Wüst: A “Second Menno”?

Arguably the most significant outside religious influence on Mennonite s in the 19th century was the revivalist preaching of Eduard Wüst, a university-trained Württemberg Pietist minister installed by the separatist Evangelical Brethren Church in New Russia in 1843 ( note 1 ). With the end-time prophesies of a previous generation of Pietists (and many Mennonites) coming to naught, Wüst introduced Germans in this area of New Russia to the “New Pietism” and its more individualistic, emotional conversion experience and sermons on the free grace of God centred on the cross of Christ ( note 2 ). Wüst’s 1851 Christmas sermon series give a good picture of what was changing ( note 3 ). His core agenda was to dispel gloom (which maybe could describe more traditional Mennonites) and induce Christian joy. This is the root impulse of the Mennonite Brethren beginnings years later in 1860. “Satan is not entitled to present his own as the most joyful.” His people “sing, jump, leap ( hüpfen ) ...

1871: "Mennonite Tough Luck"

In 1868, a delegation of Prussian Mennonite elders met with Prussian Crown Prince Frederick in Berlin. The topic was universal conscription--now also for Mennonites. They were informed that “what has happened here is coming soon to Russia as well” ( note 1 ). In Berlin the secret was already out. Three years later this political cartoon appeared in a satirical Berlin newspaper. It captures the predicament of Russian Mennonites (some enticed in recent decades from Prussia), with the announcement of a new policy of compulsory, universal military service. “‘Out of the frying pan and into the fire—or: Mennonite tough luck.’ The Mennonites, who immigrated to Russia in order to avoid becoming soldiers in Prussia, are now subject to newly introduced compulsory military service.” ( Note 2 ) The man caught in between looks more like a Prussian than Russian Mennonite—but that’s beside the point. With the “Great Reforms” of the 1860s (including emancipation of serfs) the fundamentals were c...

Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor), 1932-1933

In 2008 the Canadian Parliament passed an act declaring the fourth Saturday in November as “Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (‘Holodomor’) Memorial Day” ( note 1 ). Southern Ukraine was arguably the worst affected region of the famine of 1932–33, where 30,000 to 40,000 Mennonites lived ( note 2 ). The number of famine-related deaths in Ukraine during this period are conservatively estimated at 3.5 million ( note 3 ). In the early 1930s Stalin feared growing “Ukrainian nationalism” and the possibility of “losing Ukraine” ( note 4 ). He was also suspicious of ethnic Poles and Germans—like Mennonites—in Ukraine, convinced of the “existence of an organized counter-revolutionary insurgent underground” in support of Ukrainian national independence ( note 5 ). Ukraine was targeted with a “lengthy schooling” designed to ruthlessly break the threat of Ukrainian nationalism and resistance, and this included Ukraine’s Mennonites (viewed simply as “Germans”). Various causes combined to bring on w...

Why Danzig and Poland?

In the late 16th century, Poland became a haven for a variety of non-conformists which included Jews, Anti-Trinitarians from Italy and Bohemia, Quakers and Calvinists from Great Britain, south German Schwenkfelders, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, and Greek Catholic Christians, some Muslim Tatars, as well as other peaceful sectarians like the Dutch and Flemish Anabaptists. Unlike the Low Countries and most of western Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a “state without stakes,” and as such fittingly described as “God’s playground” ( note 1 ). In the view of 17th-century Dutch dramatist Joost van den Vondel, it was “the ‘Promised Land,’ where the refugee could forget all his sorrow and enjoy the richness of the land” ( note 2 ). Over the next two centuries an important strand of Mennonite life and spirituality evolved into a mature tradition in this relatively hospitable context ( note 3 ). Anabaptists from the Low Countries began to arrive in Danzig and region as early as 15...

Becoming German: Ludendorff Festivals in Molotschna, 1918

During the friendly German military occupation of Ukraine at the end of WWI, patriotic “Ludendorff Festivals” were encouraged by German forces to raise funds to support injured German soldiers. A first such festival in the Molotschna was held on June 25, 1918 in Ohrloff, and was attended by “a great many German officers, soldiers and colonists with music, [patriotic] speeches and social interaction” From the perspective of the German army press, the event was “extremely enjoyable;” it was accompanied with music by a 30-piece regiment orchestra, and beer, sausage, sandwiches, ice-cream, raspberries and cherries were sold. It closed with a “small dance,” raising 7,387 rubles or 9,850 German marks in donations ( note 1 ). Later that summer, a Ludendorff Festival in Halbstadt began with Sunday worship, followed by an early concert, games and performances by the Selbstschutz , as well as “entertainment and merriment of every kind,” with short plays and dancing into the morning ( note ...

The Tinkelstein Family of Chortitza-Rosenthal (Ukraine)

Chortitza was the first Mennonite settlement in "New Russia" (later Ukraine), est. 1789. The last Mennonites left in 1943 ( note 1 ). During the Stalin years in Ukraine (after 1928), marriage with Jewish neighbours—especially among better educated Mennonites in cities—had become somewhat more common. When the Germans arrived mid-August 1941, however, it meant certain death for the Jewish partner and usually for the children of those marriages. A family friend, Peter Harder, died in 2022 at age 96. Peter was born in Osterwick to a teacher and grew up in Chortitza. As a 16-year-old in 1942, Peter was compelled by occupying German forces to participate in the war effort. Ukrainians and Russians (prisoners of war?) were used by the Germans to rebuild the massive dam at Einlage near Zaporizhzhia, and Peter was engaged as a translator. In the next year he changed focus and started teachers college, which included significant Nazi indoctrination. In 2017 I interviewed Peter Ha...

Four-Part Singing in Mennonite Schools and Church in Russia

The significance of singing instruction may seem trite, but it became a key vehicle in the Mennonite school curriculum for fostering a basic appreciation of the arts and for faith formation. In Johann Cornies’ circulated guidelines for teachers, singing was recommended as a means “to stimulate and enliven pious feelings” in the children—a guideline he copied directly from a German Catholic pedagogue and circulated freely under his own name ( note 1 ). On January 26, 1846 Cornies distributed a curriculum regulation to all schools that mandated “singing by numbers ( Zahlen ) from the church hymnal” ( note 2 ). Attention to singing instruction in the schools precipitated significant and controversial changes in Mennonite liturgy. An 1854 visiting observer to the Bergthal Colony—a Chortitza daughter colony outside of Cornies’ purview—wrote: “Endlessly long hymns from the Gesangbuch (hymnal) were begun by the Vorsänger (song leader) of the congregation, and sung with so many flo...

What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws. It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog