“Who is our neighbour?” A German Mennonite Reflection on Blood, Race and the Limits of Love, 1934

Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan is prefaced by a discussion eternal life and the question, "Who is my neighbour?" (cf. Luke 10:25–29).

In the 1920s and 30s, the Mennonite denominational papers in Germany always, always highlighted the plight and need of their Russian Mennonite co-religionists languishing under Stalin. These were “their” neighbours, “their” refugees or “their” hungry and imprisoned. And that is good.

But our life stories are always complex—aspects later generations will praise, aspects they will reject, and some things they will abhor deeply. So it is with this story—of the Mennonites in Germany who embraced Russian Mennonites.

In 1934 Dirk Cattepoel (b. 1912; note 1) was a young German Mennonite doctoral student and soon-to-be pastor of the Krefeld Mennonite Church in Germany. He answered that biblical question in the Mennonitische Blätter with a longer article that denominational leaders would point to and cite favourably over the next years.

For Germans—including German Mennonites—the neighbour “is the one who shares his being, whose own blood flows through him, whose soul is his soul. … Because he must love and help his neighbor, he will have to destroy the one who threatens the development of that life. … Love necessarily implies guilt, which is the tragedy of human life. … We are members of the German Volk [ethnic peoplehood]. But because we are Christians who affirm this earthly life, it seems to us to be our highest duty before God, to love our Volk and our Volk colleagues, to help them with all of our strength … . The German is our neighbor, to whom we are committed with our love and strength. Our neighbour cannot be a Negro, Japanese, or Jew. … Our limited strengths are claimed by the neighbor and cannot take the others into consideration.”

Cattepoel cites Hitler’s book Mein Kampf affirmatively: "What we have to fight for is the necessary security for the existence and increase of our race and Volk, the subsistence of its members and keeping pure its blood, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland; so that our Volk may be enabled to fulfil the mission assigned to it by the Creator of the universe.”

To this Cattepoel adds that “as Christians we stand—fully conscious of our Christian duty—behind the government, which with a Christian sense of responsibility represents the interests of the whole Volk to the world.” (Note 2)

For Cattepoel—like Prussian Mennonite doctoral student and pastor Horst Quiring (son-in-law to Benjamin Unruh) and others (note 3)—Christian ethical bearings should be oriented by the “created orders” (e.g., race). Whereas Mennonites have sometimes pointed to the “image of God” or the Sermon on the Mount as starting points for ethics, Cattepoel and Quiring elevated blood, Volk and race as the decisive categories for Mennonite faith and moral obligation.

In the months prior to the publication of this article in the Mennonite press, new laws had already excluded Jews from the civil service. The Nazi Party and its affiliated organizations had also organized nationwide boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany, and in October 1933 a new German law forbid all non-“Aryans” from working in journalism.

A decade later Russian Mennonites “resettlers” were embraced by this loving, caring and deeply racist Mennonite fold in Warthegau—German annexed Poland. Mennonites in Prussia had done all the archival genealogical work needed to ensure all Russian Mennonites would have Aryan identity cards that would be given the same privileges in Nazi Germany as they had and official recognition, with a particular pure line and high percentage of Nordic, Frisian blood. They ensured that Mennonite resettlers could practice their faith. For example, Prussian Mennonites helped set up the legal articles of incorporation for the new “Conference of Mennonite Congregations of German Nationality in the Province of Wartheland” (Mennonitische Gemeindekirche Deutscher Nationalität im Reichsgau Wartheland). Accordingly, their statutes limited membership to those of “German nationality,” strictly defined in Nazi Germany by blood and Volk.

After the war in 1948, Pastor Dirk Cattepoel was one of two official German representatives at the Fourth Mennonite World Conference sessions held at Goshen, IN, and North Newton, KS.

Here Cattepoel asked Dutch and French Mennonites for forgiveness (see note 4).

He also told the global gathering that German Mennonites were in effect naïve or blind to the evils National Socialism and certainly not complicit. National Socialism approached them “with the motto, ‘Freedom and Bread!’ with a program for political and economical reconstruction, with social measures for the working classes, with a splendid welfare organization, and with a youth work doing justice to all the idealism of youth. Everything else—the black and the terrible—was kept in the background … I myself learned the names of the concentration camps … for the first time from an American soldier’s magazine in an American prisoner of war camp.” (Note 4)

Cattepoel had forgotten that the opening of Dachau Concentration camp in 1933, for example, was well publicized (see pic); he had forgotten his own acclaimed public recommendations to fellow Mennonites to exclude Blacks, Jews and Asians from the obligations of neighbourly love—precisely as Jews and others were being systematically excluded from public life and from protection and equality under the law. In 1940, his published “War Sermon” boldly proclaimed that Hitler’s triumph over France—the “enemy”—was nothing less than God at work (note 5).

Who is my neighbour? My people—the Russian Mennonites under Stalin--were always the “neighbour” for the German Mennonites, and we benefitted from their real generosity and brotherly love. But faith and blood were horribly intertwined. By 1948 Cattepoel had rediscovered the bonds of responsibility and love to French, Dutch and American Mennonites, but remained silent on the "Negro, Japanese or Jew."

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Pic: Vincent Van Gogh, Good Samaritan, 1890, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, NL (US public domain, https://nsjonline.com/article/2020/10/the-word-love-thy-neighbor/).

Note 1: For a short biography, cf. Hans Adolf Hertzler, “Cattepoel, Dirk,” MennLex V, http://www.mennlex.de/doku.php?id=art:cattepoel_dirk. See also my essay, “German Mennonite Theology in the Era of National Socialism,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, edited by Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen, 125–152 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).

Note 2: Dirk Cattepoel, “Mennonit und Wehrwille (Fortsetzung 3),” Mennonitische Blätter 81, no. 5 (1934) 43f. https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Mennonitische%20Blaetter/1933-1941/DSCF0916.JPG; https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Mennonitische%20Blaetter/1933-1941/DSCF0917.JPG; https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Mennonitische%20Blaetter/1933-1941/DSCF0918.JPG.

Note 3: Ibid; see also Horst Quiring, “The Anthropology of Pilgram Marbeck,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 9, no. 4 (October 1935), 155–164.

Note 4: Dirk Cattepoel, “The Mennonites of Germany, 1936-1948, and the Present Outlook,” in Fourth Mennonite World Conference Proceedings, August 3–10, 1948, edited by P. C. Hiebert 14-22 (Akron, PA: Mennonite Central Committee, 1950), https://archive.org/details/FourthMWCProceedings1948/page/n31/mode/2up.

Note 5: Cattepoel, “Gottes Schritt im Weltgeschehen,” Mennonitische Blätter 87, no. 4 (July 1940), 25, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Mennonitische%20Blaetter/1933-1941/DSCF1399.JPG.

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History of the Russian Mennonites

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