“Prof. Unruh, Shut up!": MCC’s "Dutch Strategy," 1946

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) had hoped to get their refugees into The Netherlands for months. With the support of the Dutch Mennonites in 1946, 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 (ethnic naturalized Germans), but of Dutch origin.

MCC's C.F. Klassen argued, not without stretching the facts, that these Mennonites only became German citizens during the war under duress, and that “naturalization had been conducted in a coercive environment” (note 1).

MCC’s “Dutch strategy” was shorthand for a complex story. As one refugee remembered: “We were [naturalized] German citizens, but … MCC claimed that we were refugees and that German citizenship papers had been forced on us, and on that basis they considered us ‘Staatenlos’, without a country. We all came in under that” (note 2).

This was the narrative that was used later in Canada as well: “And we usually say our ancestors came from the Netherlands—I mean to people who don’t know about Mennonites … Oh, that was used to get us into Canada, of course, so it was very practical, but before that nobody really talked about Dutch ancestry” (note 3).

These memories are anecdotal. But MCC’s applications reflected “the emotional and spiritual state of the refugees” (note 4). And it was the case that the Yalta Agreement made all certificates of naturalization issued by the National Socialist regime null and void. The Soviet Union agreed: they were not “German” citizens, but Soviet.

The influential Amsterdam Mennonite pastor Tjeerd Hylkema paved the political way into Holland and welcomed the Russian Mennonites as “our people,” “‘pure’ members of ‘Dutch stock,’ and a ‘true example of old Dutch virtue and resilience’” (note 5).

For German Mennonite leader Prof. Benjamin H. Unruh, however, it was a faulty conclusion and called into question his life work. According to Unruh the “germanization” of Dutch-German Mennonites was complete as early as 1750, some four decades before migration to Russia (note 6). Mennonites were not unlike the Protestant French Huguenots (using the racial categories of the 1930s) who had been absorbed into Prussian society two hundred years earlier: a “person of a similar (stammesgleicher) racial origin, who himself or his ancestors have been absorbed into the German peoplehood,” and as such belonging to the Volk, but with a unique ancestry (note 7).

MCC needed to distance itself from Unruh (formerly on MCC’s payroll), whose very close relationships with the Nazis before and throughout the war years had raised serious concerns. He was now seen as a liability in MCC’s negotiations with British and American occupation forces (note 8). In a 1945 Memorandum MCC director Peter Dyck wrote:

"[Many] of our people have had to accept the Volksdeutsche Ansiedler Pass in 1943. … [Our] friend Prof. Unruh insists all our people to be ‘gute Deutsche’ (good Germans) … [I]f the military authorities happen to come to this same conclusion, which they have not, then we may as well pack our suitcases and go home because there will be no emigration for quite some time." (Note 9)

Ted D. Regehr’s research shows that IRO officials did not really believe the claims advanced by senior MCC officials that the Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union were really persons of Dutch ancestry. Nonetheless, they initially continued to process the refugees for relief and immigration assistance under pressure from American officials and in order to expedite the refugee problem in postwar Europe.

Regehr suggests that while the competing claims of MCC and the IRO were both true in some respects, those cherished values of truth and honesty “may appear differently to people in complex, difficult and morally ambiguous situations” (note 10).

Peter Letkemann (Winnipeg) also sides with Unruh, and bluntly calls MCC’s claims to a remote and obscure ancestry a Notlüge, a lie of necessity, required by the emergency situation (note 11).

Only 437 "Menno Passes" were actually issued before the Soviet Union exerted enough pressure on the Dutch government to completely close the door on Mennonite immigrants from the Soviet Union.

A year later when refugees in Germany applied to leave for Paraguay and had to face a political commission that included Soviet members, “we answered all the questions in a manner that was necessary to obtain permission to emigrate. Everyone knew that these were lies, and yet things went without a hitch …," according to P. Derksen, later Oberschulze in Neuland, Paraguay (note 12).

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

----Notes----

Note 1: 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), 199.

Note 2: “Focus group: Fluechtlinge,” in Cynthia A. Jones, “Grounding Diaspora in Experience: Niagara Mennonite Identity” (PhD dissertation, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2010), 325, https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/1099/.

Note 3: Ibid., 324f.

Note 4: Ted Regehr, “Anatomy of a Mennonite Miracle: The Berlin Rescue of 30–31 January 1947,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 9 (1991), 11–33; 18, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/326/326.

Note 5: T. Hylkema, Fredeshiem, cited in G. Homan, “‘We have come to love them’: Russian Mennonite Refugees in the Netherlands, 1945–1947,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 25 (2007), 39–59; 43, https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/1223/1215.

Note 6: Cf. 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; and Benjamin Unruh, “Praktische Fragen,” Der Bote (January 20, 1937), 1f. In the first part of Unruh’s mammoth self-published post-war research (Niederländisch-niederdeutschen Hintergründe), he argues with passion and length for the predominantly east Frisian—i.e., German—origins of Prussian / Russian Mennonites. Nazi promoter Heinrich Hajo Schröder argued in 1937—with reference to his one-time teacher and collaborator Benjamin Unruh—that the term “Holländer” was simply short-hand for Frisian farmers who lived under Dutch nobility—making the designation “Dutch” misleading and wholly “unscientific” (Rußlanddeutsche Friesen [Döllstädt-Langensalza: Self-published, 1936], 3f., https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1936,%20Schroeder,%20Russlanddetusche%20Friesen/).

Note 7: “Gemeinschaft des Blutes,” Ukraine Post, no. 5 (February 6, 1943), 4. No author given. 06.02.1943, Issues «Ukraine Post» - LIBRARIA - Ukrainian periodicals archive online.

Note 8: Cf. Albert Keim, Harold S. Bender, 1887–1962 (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1998), 394, https://archive.org/details/haroldsbender1890000keim; MCC agreed to share in a modest monthly allowance and pension plan for B. H. Unruh in 1948, “primarily for living but also for research purposes” (John Unruh, In the Name of Christ: A History of the Mennonite Central Committee and its Service 1920–1951 [Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1952], 355 n.1). At the time of the Nuremberg Trials, Unruh purportedly destroyed a large number of potentially incriminating documents (Letter, David G. Rempel to Lawrence Klippenstein December 2, 1988, 2 in David G. Rempel Papers, Box 6, File 6 (Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Toronto, ON); and Letter, David G. Rempel to John D. Thiesen, July 30, 1990, 3.

Note 9: “Memorandum on Mennonite Refugees in Germany, July 25, 1945,” cited by Krista Taves, “Reunification of Russian Mennonites,” Ontario Mennonite History XIII, no. 1 (March 1995), 1–7; 5, http://www.mhso.org/sites/default/files/publications/Ontmennohistory13-1.pdf.

Note 10: Regehr, “Anatomy of a Mennonite Miracle," 19. “The hard facts of the case were that IRO researchers and officials were closer to the truth as revealed in the surviving German documents than the disclaimers in the various MCC documents.”

Note 11: Peter Letkemann, “Nachwort,” in Fügungen und Führungen: Benjamin Heinrich Unruh, 1881–1959, by H. B. Unruh, 361–447 (Detmold, 2009), 427.

Note 12: P. Derksen, cited in Peter P. Klassen, Mennonites in Paraguay, vol. 1: Kingdom of God and Kingdom of this World, trans. G. H. Schmitt (Hillsboro, KS: Self-published, 2004), 114f.

---

To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “‘Prof. Unruh, Shut up!’: MCC’s ‘Dutch Strategy,’ 1946,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 11, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/prof-unruh-shut-up-mccs-dutch-strategy.html.

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History of the Russian Mennonites

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