Learning how to Worship again as Germans: Molotschna 1941

In June 2023 St. Catharines Mennonites held their last German worship service. It is a congregation that has been shaped by German language and culture for decades. St. Catharines United Mennonite would eventually include many post-war immigrants, and by 1971 its Saturday morning German School enrolled 118 students--including me. German was the language in which I too first experienced worship (note 1).

But for the post-war immigrants born under Stalin or earlier, the journey to faith through the Nazi era was much more complex. Young adults came with a blank slate, and the older ones had to learn how to worship again--but as Germans. Much of their worship and simple theology (without leaders) had to be unlearnt after the war. Below I try to piece together a part of that faith and cultural journey.

With German occupation of Ukraine in Fall 1941, the public celebration of Christmas returned to the Molotschna for the first time in about a decade. Practices for a children’s program “such as we used to have” began early, with the Christmas story, poems and carols, according to Susanna Toews (note 2).

A family friend from Großweide remembered it as a “first Christmas without fear”. There were no pine, fir or spruce trees in the Molotschna, so her family cut a cherry tree branch in the form of a Christmas tree and filled it out with green cedar branches. Tree decorations were creatively crafted from straw and the foil papers from German cigarette packages. Candles too were created. The primary school was prepared for a community Christmas service and was also used for worship. There were almost no gifts that could be purchased, nor did people have money that was of any value (note 3).

One older Pastwa woman who had been wealthy before the revolution still had some colourful fabric pieces that she now gave to the children for neckties (boys) and bags (girls). In most homes cookies were baked and candy cooked from syrup and potato flour; after the service all children received a small bag of cookies: “Words can hardly express what we felt that Christmas” (note 4).

My mother was four years old at the time, and recalls being awakened by her two older sisters and told to peak out through the door. But instead of seeing Santa Claus—the Weihnachtsmann—she only saw her mother and Aunt Tina placing Christmas goodies on the children’s plates! My mother’s cousin Marga Bräul—who had been in teachers college in Odessa—was able to acquire a porcelain doll in Odessa for my mother’s sister Lenchen (some 25,000 Jews were murdered in Odessa in October 1941; it is hard not to assume that the doll came from one of those families).

The German soldiers in the village had three or four free days and were grateful to be amongst other Germans for Christmas (note 5).

Local women formed a special choir to practice Christmas carols; at the practices, German S.S. officers insisted that the choir learn the anthem of the Third Reich (“Siehst du im Osten das Morgenrot”), and that certain formulations in the carol “Silent Night” be left out and replaced with another text (note 6).

Already at their Thanksgiving service there was a sense that things were different.

“The hymns that were sung were foreign to us; even the manner of speaking we found somewhat strange. But it was very nice, we thought, for we hadn’t been in a worship service for more than ten years.” (Note 7)

In the village of Paulsheim my mother’s cousin Nellie remembered worship in homes led by women and a choir for teenage girls; she had never been in a choir—it was all so new (note 8). Most remaining church buildings were in serious disrepair. Gnadenfeld’s old church building however could be cleaned and reopened. Because there were only two older ministers in the Molotschna, women or other lay people began to take turns reading scripture and a devotional on Sunday from a published collection (note 9).

The S.S. commander who addressed the Christmas worshipers in Gnadenfeld assured them that their trials and sufferings had now come to an end. “We have delivered you. For this you can be grateful to our great leader, Adolf Hitler. He alone deserves your thanks," as Susanna Toews recalled his words. However she adds some years later: "We knew quite well, that the praise was due to our great God. In fact, we were surprised that the speaker made no mention of God” (note 10).

In another memoir the author writes: “We noticed that the chaplain spoke only of God and never mentioned Jesus. Nevertheless, we hoped for the best” (note 11).

They would be disappointed, however.

The new German Bible paraphrase, The Message of God (Die Botschaft Gottes), was a de-Judaized version of the New Testament released in 1940 without the Old Testament by the "Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life." The translation removed passages such as Jesus’ statement that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22), for example (note 12). The German Reich hymnal had also been released that year, and it too was purged of “Judaisms,” including Hebrew words such as “Hallelujah,” “Amen,” “Messiah,” and “Hosanna,” and all references to Jerusalem and Zion (note 13).

It is unclear how many copies of the Bible and hymnal were distributed to the ethnic German villages in occupied Ukraine or how soon—but they were likely used by chaplains (note 14). Both documents were ideologically compliant with Nazi doctrine. The pro-Nazi "German Christians" movement sought to challenge Jesus' Jewishness, and resurrect a very old anti-Semitic argument—that Jesus is not Jewish but "Aryan."

Curiously Mennonites in Germany had also found this "thesis" interesting to consider (note 15). In 1937, the young adult periodical Mennonitische Jugendwarte published a longer essay by non-Mennonite Eduard Putz, in which Putz outlined and seriously considered the argument that Jesus was not Jewish, but “Aryan … and related to us by blood”; that “it was his Nordic blood that rose up in him against all that is Jewish. That’s why he grabbed for the whip to chase the Jews out of the temple,” and why he called them “children of the devil.” His was a "racial battle, of an Aryan soul and a Jewish racial soul,” and his death an “Aryan tragedy,” his battle an “anti-Semitic battle” (note 16).

The strongest Mennonite theologian of the era in Germany was Benjamin H. Unruh, who considered the argument as well. Unruh was a Russian Mennonite barred from USSR since 1921, and highly influential not only in all German Mennonite circles, but especially too with Russian Mennonites in South America and in Canada whom he had shepherded out of the USSR.

But rather than shut down the argument in the Jugendwarte, Unruh played with the idea and agreed that "of course Indo-Germanic blood" made its way to Galilee, and at another level too, of course Jesus did not only have Jewish blood in his veins as a descendant of Ruth, and yes, the Bible takes blood and race very, very seriously, etc., etc. (note 17).

Two-and-a-half years later, the SS director of the teacher training institute at Halbstadt/Prischib and acquaintance of Unruh, Karl Götz, advised his SS superiors that Mennonite faith and worship was evolving as hoped.

“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. … They are groping for religious models again. Understandably, they also come upon dogmatic-confessional matters on occasion. But 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 18)

Nazi leadership assumed that any residual Mennonite adherence to religious doctrine was a “temporary phase” that in time will be replaced by Germanic völkisch ethnic values.

But the Mennonites in Ukraine knew nothing of this agenda.

However after the Christmas service in Gnadenfeld in 1941 members of the S.S. invited the youth to the school to dance into the night. Despite years of no church, the young Mennonite women knew their tradition well enough though to tell the German men: “We do not like it” (note 19)!

Eduard Reimer, a Mennonite member of the First Ethnic German Cavalry Squadron in 1942 recalled: “[O]n weekends we could frequently ride home to our villages and attend worship services. Our enthusiasm for everything German was so great that at the end of the service we uniformed men (I had no civilian clothing) with raised right arm (German greeting) sang the German national anthem (Deutschlandlied and Horst Wessel Lied). The congregation sang with us” (note 20).

What was the impact of that larger, twisted story of learning, unlearning and relearning the heart and purpose of worship? I am too close to those experiences to see clearly. But I know that learning, unlearning and relearning the patterns and themes of worship takes time. There are many important "cautions" from that “German experience” for other eras and generations. But at the same time, it is sad for me to hear that the German services have ended in St. Catharines; inevitably there will be much cultural richness in worship and heritage that will be lost as well.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: See Maria H. Klassen, “Last German Service Held in St. Catharines United Mennonite,” Canadian Mennonite 27, no. 14D (July 10, 2023), https://canadianmennonite.org/stories/last-german-service-held-st-catharines-united-mennonite. On German School statistics, cf. Isbrand Friesen, “The Saturday German School,” in St. Catharines United Mennonite Church: 50th Anniversary, 1945–1995, 142–144 (St. Catharines, ON. Self-published, 1995), 143.I have reflected on my experience in this congregation in a previous post (forthcoming).

Note 2: 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), 19.

Note 3: Katharina Esau, “So bleibt es nicht. Erinnerungen aus meiner Kindheit [bis 1945],” 2002. In my possession--ANF.

Note 4: Katie Friesen, Into the Unknown (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1986), 46.

Note 5: Esau, “So bleibt es nicht. Erinnerungen.”

Note 6: G. Lohrenz, Lose Blätter III (Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1976), 131.

Note 7: Lohrenz, Lose Blätter III, 130.

Note 8: Nellie Bräul Epp, interview with the author, 2017; Victor Janzen of Osterwick, Chortitza also recalls first worship services in their home and then later in the schools (From the Dniepr to the Paraguay River [Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1995], 34, 37).

Note 9: In the first year two older ministers, Abram Boldt and Heinrich Penner, served the Gnadenfeld and Konteniusfeld congregations and baptized only 24 people, according to Harry Loewen, ed., Road to Freedom: Mennonites Escape the Land of Suffering (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2000) 77. Cf. also S. Toews, Trek to Freedom, 19.

Note 10: S. Toews, Trek to Freedom, 19.

Note 11: Lohrenz, Lose Blätter III, 130. Cf. Doris Bergen, “Between God and Hitler: German Military Chaplains and the Crimes of the Third Reich,” in In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, edited by Omer Barkov and Phyllis Mack, 123–138 (New York: Berghahn, 2001), 129.

Note 12: Die Botschaft Gottes, Institut zur Erforschung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben (Weimar: Deutsche Christen, 1940), https://archive.org/details/die-botschaft-gottes/mode/2up. Cf. also the related /helpful Wikipedia entry: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Botschaft_Gottes.

Note 13: Großer Gott wir loben dich (Weimar: Verlag für deutschchristliches Schriftum, 1941), https://digisam.ub.uni-giessen.de/urn/urn:nbn:de:hebis:26-digisam-123404. See the 1942 critical English-language review by Millar Patrick, “The New Nazi Hymn Book,” Bulletin of the Hymn Society of Great Britain, no. 20 (July 1942), 20, https://hymnsocietygbi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/T05-The-New-Nazi-Hymn-Book.pdf. Cf. also Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 119-122, https://archive.org/details/aryanjesuschrist0000hesc/page/118/mode/2up (some errors in hymn titles, section names and page numbers).

Note 14: Cf. Bergen, “Between God and Hitler,” 129; also Susannah Heschel, “Nazifying Christian Theology: Walter Grundmann and the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” Church History 63, no. 4 (December 1994), 587–605; 595.

Note 15: Cf. James Irwin Lichti, Houses on the Sand? Pacifist Denominations in Nazi Germany (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), ch. 5.

Note 16: Eduard Putz, “Der Kampf Jesu wider die Juden,” Mennonitische Jugendwarte 17, no. 2 (April 1937), 18-34. https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Mennonitische%20Jugendwarte/DSCF9318.JPG.

Note 17: Benjamin H. Unruh, "Blut und Rasse im A.T. [Alten Testament]," Gemeindeblatt der Mennoniten 69, no. 20 (October 1, 1938) 90-91. https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Gemeindeblatt%20der%20Mennoniten/1933-1941/DSCF7785.JPG. On Unruh see my published essay, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/bitstream/handle/20.500.12730/1571/Neufeldt-Fast_Arnold_2022a.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. 

Note 18: 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 19: S. Toews, Trek to Freedom, 19.

Note 20: Eduard Reimer, Memoir (n.d.), 68, from Gerhard Lohrenz Fonds, 60, no. 63, vol. 3333, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB. Compare Eduard Allert [pseud.], “The Lost Generation,” in The Lost Generation and other Stories, edited by Gerhard Lohrenz, 9–128 (Steinbach, MB: Self-published, 1982), 55.

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To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Learning to Worship again as Germans: Molotschna 1941,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), July 14, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/07/learning-how-to-worship-again-as.html.