"In the Case of Extreme Danger" - Menno Pass and Refugee crisis, 1945-46

"In the Case of Extreme Danger

1. We are Russian-Mennonite refugees who are returning to Holland, the place of origin. The language is Low German.

2. The Dutch Mennonites there, Doopsgezinde, will take in all fellow-believing Mennonites from Russia who are in danger of compulsory repatriation.

3. The first stage of the journey is to Gronau in Westphalia.

4. As a precaution, purchase a ticket to an intermediate stop first. The last connecting station is Rheine.

5. Opposite Gronau is the Dutch city of Enschede, where you will cross the border.

6. On the border ask for Peter Dyck (Piter Daik), Mennonite Central Committee, Amsterdam, Singel 452. Peter Dyck (or his people) will distribute the relevant papers—“Menno Passes”--and provide further information.

7. Any other border points may also be crossed, with the necessary explanations (who, where to, Mennonites from Russia, Peter Dyck, M.C.C., etc.). The Dutch border Patrol is informed.

8. Here the whole matter must be handled with the utmost secrecy. It must not be made public because this can harm everyone, including those who are already there. -02/16/1946." (Note 1)

Context (Hooge and Kornelsen memoir, note 1): “While we were in Müden, after the war had ended, Russia tried to persuade us to return. But we Mennonites did not want to return. This document was secretly given to us—I don’t know by whom. … Back in October, 1945 one evening Peter Becker had come to us and said that Jasch and my husband were supposed to get ready quickly to go along to a meeting where a man from Canada, C.F. Klassen, wanted to talk to the men. He told them then that if we ever were in great danger of being sent back to Russia we should go to Holland. On February 14, 1946 a Russian Commissar came to Müden and asked the Bürgermeister (mayor) to call together all the refugees from Russia … ”

Background

Immediately after the war the North American Mennonite relief agency, Mennonite Central Committee, was actively looking for “its people” in Germany—as was the Soviet Union. In cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the Red Cross, MCC special commissioner C.F. Klassen, German Mennonite professor Benjamin H. Unruh, MCC Europe Director Peter J. Dyck, and Dutch Mennonite leader T.O.H. Hylkema began the work of locating and registering Mennonite refugees. Klassen was named an “officer” of the British Red Cross, which enabled him to travel freely by car through Germany and make first contact with the scattered Soviet Mennonites, some of whom he found “living in stables, chicken barns, and even pig sties” (note 2). Klassen’s fall 1945 reports to the Mennonite papers in Canada enabled MCC to raise a large sum of money to help with the immediate humanitarian crisis.

Klassen made contact with about 3,000 Russian Mennonite refugees, including the larger “Gnadenfeld group” in the Hermannsburg and larger Celle Region, and made contacts with the assistance of Jacob Neufeld, the Gnadenfeld group trek leader. On October 14, 1945, Klassen gathered specifically adult-male refugees and shared the short-term objective: “If I can get you to Holland, we could help you” (note 3). On August 1, 1945 some thirty-three Soviet Mennonites mostly from the village of Nieder-Chortitza had already been allowed to cross the Dutch border as “refugees of Dutch ancestry” (note 4).

On January 7, 1946, municipal leaders in and around Celle received orders to make lists of all refugees who had been Soviet citizens prior to 1939. “We were very upset about this and had reason to feel great concern. In a few days’ time the Russian commissar became very active” (note 5). Information had reached the refugees that British forces could no longer protect the Soviet Germans from repatriation.

"On February 1st, a pastor in Celle, who was our negotiator with the English, came to see us. He said he could no longer help us and we must now look out for ourselves. A Canadian soldier came to see his relatives at night and told them they must try to get to Holland as quickly as possible, but to travel in small groups." (Note 6)

The Canadian solder—“Tjart,” also a Russian Mennonite—had told them to travel to Gronau and gave them the address of the MCC office in Amsterdam (note 7). Within the Molotschna refugee network in Celle word spread rapidly that this family had left overnight. By February 3rd, almost all of the Mennonite refugees housed in the suburbs of Wester-Celle and in Alten-Celle had left.

Within the next two weeks news reached the Hermannsburg group that more Soviet Mennonites were leaving for Gronau. Because they had no passport or visa but only the following information on an unsigned page—likely via Tjart, directly from MCC—which had been passed from family to family, they felt extremely vulnerable.

Those who had left two weeks earlier recommended that others pack only the most basic belongings in one hand-bag each, travel discreetly and not in groups, and speak only high German—and not their Low-German dialect—when buying their train tickets. Hosts who knew the destination of their Mennonite guests expected the families would return because they had no passports or visas which would allow them to enter The Netherlands, but only their Volksdeutsche naturalization papers and ration cards for identification.

The Mennonites who gathered at the Hermannsburg train station made an odd sight; the families agreed not to travel alone, but also to act as if they did not know each other. My uncle Walter Bräul remembered how strange it was to meet his mother Helene and sisters at the train station and to act as if they were complete strangers! Because everyone was purchasing tickets in the direction of Gronau, their primary concern was not to arouse the suspicions of police or the ticket agents. One of the Mennonite men who at first tried to enlist the others for repatriation meetings noticed that some of “his people” were quietly packing and beginning to leave for some unannounced destination. Everyone knew that this man should be told nothing. Walter shared that at the train station this man and his wife began to panic, thinking that they would be left completely alone. They began to weep bitterly and they pleaded for forgiveness. They were eventually told of the flight to The Netherlands and were graciously invited to join—which they did.

The route to Gronau included transfers at Hanover, Bielefeld, and Osnabrück; the train cars were overcrowded with refugees from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Hermannsburg group held together discreetly and arrived in Gronau on February 18, 1946.

MCC had hoped to get their refugees into The Netherlands for months before this crisis. With the support of the Dutch Mennonites, MCC officials worked to convince the new post-war Dutch government and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) that these refugees were not technically Soviet Germans or Volksdeutsche, but of Dutch origin. After years of racial propaganda exclaiming them to be biologically pure carriers of “German blood,” the Mennonite refugees were instructed to adopt another traditional descriptor: “[W]e were refugees from Russia. Our ancestors had come from Holland, and we would like to stay here until our relatives could help us over into Canada” (note 8).

MCC had to deal with questions of detail and argued, not without stretching the facts, that these Mennonites only became German citizens during the war under duress, and show that “naturalization had been conducted in a coercive environment.” Moreover, “since the Soviets did not recognize Russian Mennonites as German citizens and were eager to repatriate them as their own,” MCC Refugee Commissioner C.F. Klassen “saw no reason for the IRO to think otherwise” (note 9).

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1 / Pic 1: In Selma Kornelsen Hooge and Anna Goossen Kornelsen, Life Before Canada (Abbotsford, BC: Self-published, 2018), 79. My translation--ANF

Note 2: Frank H. Epp, Mennonite Exodus (Altona, MB: Friesen, 1962), 366.

Note 3: Susanna Toews, Trek to Freedom: The Escape of Two Sisters from South Russia during World War II, translated by Helen Megli (Winkler, MB: Heritage Valley, 1976), 37; cf. Hooge and Kornelsen, Life Before Canada, 78.

Note 4: Gerlof D. Homan, “‘We Have Come to Love Them’: Russian Mennonite Refugees in the Netherlands, 1945–1947,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 25 (2007), 39–59; 42; 40f., https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/1223/1215.

Note 5: Toews, Trek to Freedom, 38.

Note 6: Toews, Trek to Freedom, 38.

Note 7: Toews, Trek to Freedom, 39; also Katie Friesen, Into the Unknown (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1986), 101f.

Note 8: Toews, Trek to Freedom, 40; cf. esp. Ted D. Regehr, “Of Dutch or German Ancestry? Mennonite Refugees, MCC and the International Refugee Organization,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 13 (1995), 7–25, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/441/441.

Note 9: Gerhard Rempel, “Cornelius Franz Klassen: Rescuer of the Mennonite Remnant, 1894–1954,” in Shepherds, Servants and Prophets: Leadership Among the Russian Mennonites (ca. 1880–1960), edited by Harry Loewen, 193–228 (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2003), 200.

To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “‘In the Case of Extreme Danger:’ Menno Pass and Refugee Crisis, 1945-46,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 10, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/in-case-of-extreme-danger-menno-pass.html.

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