"Motherhood of the People": Halbstadt Midwife Helene Berg and the SS

Recently Benjamin Goossen posted an important piece on the “well-known” Halbstadt midwife Helene Berg. Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler had taken a special interest in “old Mrs. Berg” and had publicly recognized her for helping birth some 8,000 Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) babies (note 1).

Goossen and I have shared archival materials in the past years. Below I would like to continue the exploration of Taunte Bojsche (or "Aunt Berg") and the surprisingly broad interest in her by Nazi officials as icon.

I begin with a family story as a window onto the times.

Some 35,000 Mennonites were evacuated out of German-occupied Ukraine in Fall 1943. After a grueling trek west the survivors landed in German-annexed Wartheland (previously Poland) where they were naturalized as German citizens.

My grandmother Helene Bräul had eight children, and Helene Berg may very well have been her midwife for one or more of them. Like many Mennonite mothers in Wartheland, my grandmother was “honoured” at a local event for the number of sons she had serving in the army (including two in the Waffen-SS) and was presented with a large portrait of Hitler.

My grandmother embodied the pragmatic Nazi view of a Volksdeutsche woman: a sturdy peasant who bore many strong children, had kept the race “pure” and also worked the land. Helene Bräul and her generation were not easily excitable, but she was afraid of the consequences of not hanging up the picture. She told daughters Käthe (my mother) and Sara, “I do not want that picture; I just want our boys back.”

Such events designed to celebrate and revive motherhood were usually held on the birthday of Hitler’s mother and were carefully executed because of the importance placed by the regime on rearing a new generation of soldiers.

At these events a speaker would normally recite Hitler’s comments on the mother’s role in the German Reich for the “up-building of the Volk” and for the recovery of the nation:

“What the man gives in heroic-courage on the battlefield, the woman gives in eternally patient devotion, in eternally patient suffering and endurance. Every child that she brings into the world is a battle which she wages for the being or non-being of her Volk. And both must therefore mutually value and respect each other when they recognize that each performs the task that Nature and Providence have ordained.” (Note 2)

That was a notable contrast to the “Day of Women” which they had celebrated annually in the Soviet Union on March 8; on that day Stalin was officially praised for the liberation and freedom he brought women (note 3). Now under a new totalitarian regime, the goal of these women was simply to stay alive and to keep their children alive.

This context may help in part to understand official interest in the Midwife Berg.

Mrs. Berg was known not only by thousands in the Molotschna settlement area; the German Mennonite (Vereinigung) denominational chair and pastor in Elbing, Emil Händiges, had been well acquainted with Mrs. Berg for decades. She had been in Basel, Switzerland when Händiges and Benjamin Unruh were students there, ca. 1906 to 1907.

“The concern about midwife Helene Berg… also moves me deeply. I know this brave and well-deserving woman personally from Basel [Switzerland], where she accompanied the two ethnic German Mennonites, sisters Katarina and Helene Willms, who studied there about 35 years ago, and with whom we had a Mennonite literary circle with about 10 to 12 participants … [In the past year] I have kept in touch with Mrs. Berg and sent her old issues of the Mennonitische Blätter.” (Note 4)

Her travels, training and friendship with these leaders—and their respect for her—point to her intellectual capacities and broad range of interests.

Goossen refers to a letter from May 1942 from Hans Spittler to Händiges about Mrs. Berg. Spittler was Händiges' nephew, the son of city a missionary, and by training an engineer in the German military (Organization Todt) assigned to the Dnieper River dam project near Einlage, Chortitiza.

From occupied Ukraine Spittler wrote a letter to his uncle Emil with greetings from the 84-year-old Halbstadt midwife. “Despite her advanced years she was physically and intellectual fit … and curious about everything, even political matters. She had studied the Führer’s [Mein] Kampf with the appropriate interest,” the young man reported (note 5).

Spittler wrote his uncle that “the German essence and nature (Art) in this Volk are healthy and strong enough to withstand the blows and tests which they had to endure.” It was during this period that the second most powerful man in Nazi-Germany--Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler--visited Halbstadt and awarded Old Mother Berg for her role in the motherhood of a people.

The war began to turn in 1943 and the Volksdeutsche were ordered to cross to the west bank of the Dnieper in September and eventually retreat out of Ukraine altogether. Berg wrote Unruh on November 20 that she hadn’t slept in a real bed in seven weeks, and now in Kamenetz-Podol’sk winter was upon them. She wrote that she was “willing to endure anything so long as our Germany retains the victory against evil Bolshevism and saves us from the hands of our enemies” (note 6).

In the same month Unruh made a request to Heubuden Elder Bruno Ewert (Nazi Party member) and Gustav Reimer, church historian and deacon in Heubuden, to find a small house for Mrs. Berg with her elderly sister and niece/caregiver Agnes Wiens, because the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle ("VoMi"; Coordination Center for Ethnic Germans) ultimately under Himmler explicitly desired that Mrs. Berg be cared for into her sunset years (note 7). The VoMi also wanted a cow for Mrs Berg—like she and her sister had in Halbstadt, and also on the west side of the Dnieper at Alexanderstadt after the first stretch of the Trek west. (Many left Molotschna with a cow, and niece Agnes was “an exceptional milker”).

But the Heubuden church had nothing available. The best they could offer was perhaps a room at the Heubuden seniors residence—which the VoMi did not want. But even the former idea was a problem: it already had 12 elderly women and one elderly man and no extra space. Unruh pushed hard in the correspondence, saying that SS Obersturmführer Dr. Wolfrum “emphatically” wished for this to work out, not least because he had received hospitality in her home a year earlier; Wolfrum was the representative of SS Oberführer Hoffmeyer (note 8). Unruh emphasized that Himmler wanted “to honour us [emphasis in original] through her” (note 9).

Reimer and Unruh had a long working relationship, but the correspondence shows it was under increasing stress during this time of resettlement. The “midwife Berg issue” brought these tensions to a boiling point in their correspondence.

As soon as Unruh had word of Berg’s arrival in German-annexed Poland, he wrote her a letter: “But we know that Taunte Bojsche can do more than the others. How often did I admire you during the [Russian] Revolution, how you jumped up in the middle of the night and, where the greatest dangers threatened, helped some working-class woman to give birth to her baby” (note 10).

The letter gives evidence that she was more than a sweet old lady from his beloved Halbstadt. Unruh had just completed two longer historical-theological treatises (one on baptism) to serve as a framework for unifying the Mennonite and Mennonite Brethren groups coming out of Ukraine; in the letter he specifically asked for her feedback on the drafts. “As our much-experienced sister and mother, your judgement is of great value.”

Sidenote to Himmler:

In his correspondence with the Vereinigung denominational executive, Unruh always showed great pride in his various government and Nazi Party connections—but always of course on behalf of his Mennonite people. But nothing seemed more significant for Unruh than his meeting with Heinrich Himmler, January 1 to 3, 1943. Over these three days they had talks over lunch and supper, and then an exhaustive, one-hour business meeting together with Hoffmeyer and Lorenz as well. Unruh wrote his German pastor friend Abraham Braun (also born in Russia) that he “anticipates significant consequences for our entire Mennonitica from this consultation” with Reichsführer Himmler.

“I was received and treated with exceptional warmth, and I was told the most complimentary things about Mennonites, especially the Volk German Mennonites. … The Reichsführer will eliminate any existing “dualisms,” and Reichs-German and Volks-German Mennonites will be treated in the exact same manner.” (Note 11)

In this meeting Himmler brought greetings to Unruh from Mrs. Berg.

At the end of his piece Goossen asks: “And what about Berg herself? The archival documents by and about her suggest intriguing new directions for research about Mennonites, reproduction, and the elderly under fascism—topics still waiting to be explored.”

While it is somewhat unclear how much and how fast Soviet Mennonites under German occupation embraced the vision for reproduction propagated by Nazi Germany, Mennonite clergy from the Reich shared the worldview of their state and could speak of childbirth for the nation as a woman’s “highest and holiest determination” (note 12) topped with the concern for “healthy breeding” and against Volk-destructive “racial contamination” (note 13).

These themes were consistent with those repeated in the press and in official speeches on “German womenhood.” This ostensibly conservative concept of motherhood placed a woman’s highest call in connection to the “motherhood of the people”—and above the immediate parenting and protection of their actual living children.

Mrs. Berg immigrated to Canada on July 28, 1948, and died in Winnipeg on October 1, 1951 (note 14).

             ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast  

---Notes---

Pics: Thanks to Brent Wiebe for identifying archival video footage thought to be Helene Berg at Halbstadt in the summer of 1943: http://www.archiv-akh.de/filme?utf-8=%E2%9C%93&q=halbstadt#1. See Wiebe’s website: https://trailsofthepast.com/helene-berg/.

Note 1: Benjamin Goossen, “Himmler’s Mennonite Midwife,” Anabaptist Historians, posted August 13, 2020, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2020/08/13/himmlers-mennonite-midwife/. Cf. GRanDMA #173286 for Helene Berg.  

Note 2: Adolf Hitler, “Die völkische Sendung der Frau,” in N.S. Frauenbuch, edited by Ellen Semmelroth and Renata von Stieda, 9–14 (Munich: Lehmanns, 1934), 11, https://archive.org/details/SemmelrothEllenUndStiedaRenateVonN.S.Frauenbuch1934287S.ScanFraktur/page/n9/mode/2up.

Note 3: Eduard Allert [pseud. for Eduard Reimer], “The Lost Generation,” in The Lost Generation and other Stories, edited by Gerhard Lohrenz, 9–128 (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1982), 32.

Note 4: Emil Händiges to Benjamin Unruh and Ernst Crous, December 1, 1943, [1943a 36 of 104] Vereinigung Collection 1943, Mennonitische Forschungsstelle, Bolanden-Weierhof, Germany, hereafter MFS.

Note 5: Hans Spittler to Emil Händiges, May 7, 1942; copied in Emil Händiges to Benjamin Unruh and Abraham Fast, May 18, 1942, Vereinigung Collection 1942, MFW.

Note 6: Copied in Benjamin Unruh to Hans Epp [former Chortitza district mayor], December 5, 1943, Vereinigung Collection 1943, MFS.

Note 7: Gustav Reimer to Benjamin Unruh, December 20, 1943, Vereinigung Collection 1943, MFW. 1943a 18.

Note 8: Cf. also Unruh to Epp, December 5, 1943; Benjamin Unruh to Gustav Reimer, December 5, 1943; and Benjamin Unruh to Emil Händiges, November 18, 1943; Vereinigung Collection 1943, MFW.

Note 9: Cf. Unruh to Epp, December 5, 1943.

Note 10: Benjamin Unruh to Helene Berg, February 3, 1944, in Benjamin Unruh – Abraham Braun Correspondence, MFW.

Note 11: Benjamin Unruh to Vereinigung Executive, January 6, 1943, Vereinigung Collection 1943, MFW.

Note 12: Horst Quiring, “Ehe” and “Leib,” in Grundworte des Glaubens: Achtzig wichtige biblische Begriffe für den Menschen der Gegenwart dargestellt (Berlin: Furche, 1938), 58; 147, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1938,%20Quiring,%20Grundworte%20des%20Glaubens/DSCF9361.JPG; https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1938,%20Quiring,%20Grundworte%20des%20Glaubens/DSCF9405.JPG.

Note 13: Cf. Krefeld Pastor Gustav Kraemer, Wir und unsere Volksgemeinschaft 1938. Lecture delivered in Heubuden, West Prussia, January 25, 1938 (Krefeld: Consistorium der Mennonitengemeinde Krefeld, 1938) 8, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1938,%20Kraemer%20Wir%20und%20unsere%20Volksgemeinschaft/Worse%20Copy/DSCF7381.JPG.

Note 14: Cf. her autobiographical account of the closing year of the war and the immediate post-war period: Helene Berg, Unsere Flucht: Erinnerungen von Helene Berg, frueher Halbstadt, Sued Russland (Thomashof/Baden, 1947).