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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