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.

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History of the Russian Mennonites

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