Easter and Molotschna's First Ethnic German Cavalry Regiment of the Waffen-SS, 1942

For the two years of German occupation, 1941-43, the Molotschna Settlement area—renamed “Halbstadt” after its largest village—was under S.S. (Schutzstaffel) control. During this time, new National Socialist ceremonies and liturgies were introduced to the Mennonites in Ukraine, including Easter.

Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler named Halbstadt with its surrounding 144 villages a district commando. SS-Storm Unit Leader (Sturmbannführer) Hermann Roßner was appointed the Special Command R[ussia] leader for Halbstadt.

Halbstadt had Waffen-SS doctors, a Waffen-SS pharmacist team and pharmacy, hospital equipment from the medical offices of the Waffen-SS and soon a Waffen-SS cavalry self-defense regiment of some 500-plus Mennonite young men (note 1).Two of my uncles became members of the cavalry unit; a later, long-time lay minister in my home congregation was in the regiment as well.

SS-celebrations for “Easter” were deliberately non-religious and anti-Christian, though careful not to tread heavily on the sensibilities of ethnic Germans. While the SS-rituals were not really substitute religious or mystical practices, they developed and performed powerful liturgical practices steeped in (apparent) ancient Germanic feasts and German Volk practice.

Notably the psychological-spiritual care of Waffen-SS soldiers as well as their ceremonies were without field chaplains; this did not go unnoticed. “There were no pastors [chaplains] in the S.S. formations as there were in the regular army units,” as one former member noted (note 2).

Arguably all of these young men were broken. Mennonite congregational life in Ukraine—including worship, mutual aid, and faith instruction—had been systematically dismantled by 1933. Almost all cavalry members were born in the post-revolutionary Bolshevik era. Church elders, ministers, deacons and—by 1938—the majority of middle-aged Mennonite men had been exiled or executed. Most Mennonites who joined the cavalry had lost their fathers, had seen their mothers terrorized, overworked and largely removed from the home, and had been encouraged by teachers to distrust their “German” Mennonite neighbours and elders with pre-revolutionary memories or perspectives.

As young teens they survived the famine and lived in extreme material poverty (note 3). Cavalry members carried a distant memory of Mennonite church piety; as young children almost all would have learned simple prayers and children’s hymns, and many would have memorized some Bible stories (note 4). But none of the cavalry members would have had the ability, tools, leisure, memory or guidance needed to reflect biblically or theologically as Mennonites on war, Nazism and its ideology.

Commanders of SS-cavalry units filled the vacuum.

They were coached and even ordered by the Brigadeführer to become father, teacher, commander and chaplain to their soldiers. Surviving 1943 correspondence from two Brigadeführer commanders of the 8th SS-Cavalry Division “Florian Geyer”—to which the Mennonite squadron members would later belong—offers clear instructions for commanders working with ethnic German SS-Cavalry men.

SS-Brigadeführer Fritz Freitag was a meticulous coach to his commanders. In one of his special reminders in April 1943, Freitag wrote each of his unit commanders that Reichführer-SS Himmler “attaches the greatest importance” to “constant ideological instruction” and that unit commanders and staff “must always work for the welfare of the mind and soul of their men” (note 5).

“The unit leaders must be a constant influence on our men is crucial if the troops are to be fully reliable” (note 6). A good commander will be concerned to strengthen the self-confidence of the ethnic German, and “to bring them to the point where one can appeal more and more to their honour.”

Freitag required his unit leaders, for example, to plan for lectures, readings and lessons on the same weekly timetable as other aspects of soldiering was taught (note 7). Freitag required a unified curriculum that would hold the SS together.

Here are his recommendations for Easter with ethnic German cavalry men (note 8).

“Organization of celebrations. The special feast days and holidays of the German people are not intended to give the men days off duty merely as a change from their daily routine, but to celebrate them in a German-cultural-popular (volkstümliche) manner. This is true, first of all, of Easter and May Day, which are fast approaching ... To the extent that the customs and traditions that our ancestors used to observe on [this] feast in earlier centuries have already been forgotten, they should be revived. It should be pointed out that in the ethnic German settlement areas the old customs and traditions at Easter and May were still particularly well preserved and cultivated. Our men, and first and foremost again the ethnic Germans, expect to be spoken to about the meaning and significance of these festivals. The unit leaders therefore have to deal with these problems.

Easter. The time of spring, with all the hope and joy of a new beginning, holds many old customs, some misunderstood, some deliberately falsified, from the world of our Germanic ancestors. Easter, the feast of the resurrection of life, falls on the first Sunday after the spring full moon ... that Easter was a Germanic feast and was appropriated only by the Christian church for reasons of expediency. ...

The Easter egg, ancient symbol of life renewal, as the shell of young, new life, is an integral part of Easter.

The church was not able to eradicate the old Germanic customs. Instead, another meaning was attributed to them. Easter was made into the Jewish "Passover" festival. The awakening of nature became the resurrection of the crucified founder of the church.

In this context it must be said that the church among the ethnic Germans is to be addressed as a Volks- (peoples’) church, which has earned great merit for the preservation of German peoplehood (Volkstum). This also explains in part why our ethnic Germans are still very attached to their church.

But this is no reason not to speak openly about these questions with the ethnic Germans; rather, it is an obligation of the unit leader to deal with these questions thoroughly and until the men are convinced of the correctness of our position.”This rethinking of Easter and other Christian celebrations was also happening with the young women and men training to become teachers in the Mennonite/ethnic German village schools. Helene Dueck was in the SS-run pedagogical school led by a longtime "friend of Mennonites," S.S. Storm Unit Leader Karl Götz. Dueck recalled: “I hardly knew what Easter was” (note 9).

In January 1944 Götz advised S.S. superiors in a confidential report that, in his opinion, Mennonite leaders in Germany would be able to guide the Russian Mennonites over time toward an appropriate and “thoroughly German religiosity.”

“For the Russian Mennonites … the Lord God (Herrgott) or the divine as such remained as most essential to their religious feeling. For the most part, all Christian-dogmatic aspects have faded. … With astute guidance regarding worldview, the Mennonites in particular—but also the rest of the German Russians—will be led away from dogmatic-confessional matters to a clear and thoroughly German religiosity (Gottgläubigkeit). Their desire is for the divine, for awe before the Almighty, the inconceivable, the sublime. Mennonite leaders are now working to lead the world of Mennonitism (Mennonitentum) toward this German god-believing, religious attitude.” (Note 10)

Decades later in Canada I sometimes shared a joint German/English service—something that happened at Easter, for example—with the lay minister noted above. He was in the same regiment as my uncles who did not survive. He was a student of Karl Götz, as was a great aunt and the parents of multiple friends. He was quite the disciplinarian in our Saturday morning German School; he also baptized my father. He has long passed, but his son and I remain good friends. He is one member of the “lost generation” (note 11) who was “found”.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Hermann Roßner to Wolfgang Vopersal, November 2, 1983, letter, Bundesarchiv (Freiburg) MA, N/756, 151/a. See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/retrieving-lost-generation-heinrich.html.

Note 2: Eduard Allert [pseud., Abram Reimer], “The Lost Generation,” in The Lost Generation and other Stories, edited by Gerhard Lohrenz, 9–128 (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1982), 71f.

Note 3: See my essay, “A new Examination of the ‘Great Terror’ in Molotschna, 1937–38,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (October 2021), 415–458, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/handle/20.500.12730/1031.

Note 4: Cf. e.g., Harry Loewen, ed., Road to Freedom: Mennonites Escape the Land of Suffering (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2000), 99f.

Note 5: S.S. Brigadeführer Fritz Freitag, “Special Instructions for the Working Area of Abt VI No.1,” to SS-Kav. Division VI, April 22, 1943, Bundesarchiv (Freiburg) MA RS/3/8, 73/b.

Note 6: Freitag, to SS Cav. Division, Ia/VI, April 5, 1943 (Special Instructions for weltanschauliche Erziehung), Bundesarchiv (Freiburg) MA, RS/3/8, 80.

Note 7: Freitag, SS-Kav. Division IIa, Divisions-Tagesbefehl Nr. 10/43, March 22, 1943, Bundesarchiv (Freiburg) MA, RS/3/8, 72.

Note 8: Freitag, "Special Instructions … to SS-Kav. Division VI, April 22, 1943.”

Note 9: Helene Dueck, Durch Trübsal und Not (Winnipeg, MB: Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 1995), 148, https://archive.org/details/durch-truebsal-und-not/page/148/mode/2up?q=ostern.

Note 10: Karl Götz, Das Schwarzmeerdeutschtum: Die Mennoniten (Posen: NS-Druck Wartheland, 1944), 11f., Bundesarchiv 187/267a, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1944, or https://chortitza.org/pdf/0v772.pdf. On Götz and the booklet (in translation), see Benjamin Goossen, “‘A Small World Power’: How the Nazi Regime Viewed Mennonites,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92, no. 2 (2018), 173–206, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goossen/files/goossen_a_small_world_power_2018.pdf.

Note 11: Cf. Allert [pseud., Abram Reimer], “The Lost Generation.”

Photos: SS Brigadeführer Fritz Freitag, Bundesarchiv https://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/dba/de/search/?topicid=dcx-thes_bestand_774u70q3f7q68r0nd48&sort=DateCreated+DESC&page=8; Time Magazine, April 13, 1942, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,766503,00.html; Mennonite soldiers, Bundesarchiv (Freiburg), BA MA, N/756, 151/a (Vopersal file). 

To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Easter and Molotschna's First Ethnic German Cavalry Regiment of the Waffen-SS, 1942,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 10, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/easter-and-molotschnas-first-ethnic.html.