In the camps Russian Mennonites participated in a racial-biological study to measure their hereditary characteristics and “racial” composition and “blood purity” in comparison to Danzig-West Prussian, genetic cousins.
In Germany in the last century, anthropological and medical
research was horribly misused for the pseudo-scientific work referred to as
“racial studies” (Rassenkunde). The discipline pre-dated Nazi Germany to
describe apparent human differences and ultimately “to justify political,
social and cultural inequality” (note 2). But by 1935 a program of “racial
hygiene” and eugenics was implemented with an “understanding that purity of the
German Blood is the essential condition for the continued existence of the
German people” (note 3).
In this context Mennonites were an interesting group to
study because they had preserved their Germanic culture and identity as a
minority group for generations abroad, with little marriage outside their
circle. Mennonite ministers and leaders from both groups were keen to
cooperate. The study was published a year after Hitler took power; Mennonite
genealogist Dr. Kurt Kauenhowen claimed it “is indisputably the most important
biological contribution to the history of German Mennonites to date” (note 4).
Medical technicians from Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics and the University of Kiel carried out the anthropological examinations and surveys January 1930 with 1,271 of the Mennonites housed at the Hammerstein, Mölln and Prenzlau refugee/transit camps (note 5).
Not just weight, height and build were measured and
recorded, but also skull shape, eye colour (men=40% light blue; pic), hair
colour, forehead, eye-brow line, nose base, width, tip and prominence, ear
length and width, and chin shape. The next year (May and June 1931), some 386
Mennonites from the Prussian Mennonite congregations of Danzig, Rosenort,
Orlofferfelde, Ladekopp, Elbing, Markushof-Thiensdorf, and Heubuden were
similarly examined with enthusiastic support of church leadership (note 6).
Mennonites were considered an unusually “pure” Germanic subgroup—and now they
had proof.
The main researcher identified a series of minor physical variances between these two Mennonite populations but considered these to be environmentally conditioned only. The racial-biological differences were only “about as great as those between identical twins” (note 7).
Kauenhowen thought the one improvement the author could have
made would be to add a quote from American Mennonite historian C. Henry Smith,
who had written: “The term Mennonite might almost as well be applied to a special
race as to a body of religious belief” (Note 8).
While the specifics of this very detail rich study may be
interesting for those with this same family background—much the way collected
DNA results could be—its ideological context and purposes were consistent with
those being promoted by National Socialism (note 9).
The research is referenced to or expanded in at least two race-based journals during the Nazi era. The popular journal “Volk und Rasse (Race)” published materials on racial theory and typically lauded German people groups in comparison to others.
“For religious reasons they fundamentally rejected mixed
marriages with fellow Germans of other faiths. ... For this reason alone the
Mennonites have a special Volk-biological significance, and therefore deserve
closer attention as well … Amongst Germans in the Vistula, region Mennonites
form a community that is separated spiritually and intellectually, the
characteristics of which are also evident in the groups that settled in
southern Russia, as Keiter has already proven in his investigations some years
ago.” (Note 10)
In an academic journal for racial and social biology, an
article on Russian Mennonite family structure and fertility rates precedes
another essay with the following opening paragraph:
“Researching questions of genetic-hygiene is one of the most
vital tasks which our leader Adolf Hitler gives to scientists and his German
people to solve, because the future of a people depends on its quantitative and
qualitative reproduction.” (Note 11)
The research on 473 Russian Mennonites couples who had reached the end of their fertility showed that Mennonites of the “parent generation” had on average 8.22 children with 5.13 living past childhood. The infant mortality rate for Mennonites of this generation was 12.1%, and a fully 36% died before reaching adulthood. The high birth rates were due, according to researchers, to the absence of abortion or contraception, and the relatively young age for women to marry. Mennonite men were on average older when they married, compared to the Lutherans and Catholics from Russia in the study group. The Mennonite “grandparent generation” had an average of 9.5 children per married woman, with an average of 2.7 childhood deaths. 5.4 children per couple entered into a marriage. The families of the grandparent generation grew up in peaceful times, whereas their children established families in the context of the war, revolution, famine and post-war chaos in the Soviet Union (note 12).
Those theories of race, Volk, and blood were already of strong quasi academic interest by 1929-30 and were further developed and shaped by Nazi-government policy and support by the mid-1930. Mennonite refugees in 1930 brought this experience and its assumptions of “racial science” to their new settlement lands of Paraguay, Brazil and Canada—which would infect their worldview and debates for the decade to come (note 13). Mennonites in Ukraine who were resettled and naturalized by Nazi Germany 1943-44 were most directly impacted by the politics of this so-called racial science (note 14).
---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast
---Notes---
Pics: From Friedrich Keiter (n.5 below); also photographs of the
1929-30 refugee crisis published in the Mennonitische Blätter, the
denominational paper of the north German and Prussia Mennonites (Vereinigung),
February 1930 to March 1931, https://dlibra.bibliotekaelblaska.pl/dlibra/publication/25820#structure.
Note 1: See previous posts, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/01/christmas-with-refugees-1929.html;
AND https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/03/death-of-refugee-children-as-political.html.
Note 2: See especially the work of the Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum in Dresden. It was founded in 1912, and after 1933 used to
propagate Nazi race ideology: “Rassismus: Die Erfindung von Menschenrassen,” https://www.dhmd.de/ausstellungen/rueckblick/rassismus.
Note 3: “Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood
and German Honor, September 15, 1935,” Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance
Center, https://www.yadvashem.org/docs/nuremberg-law-for-protection-of-german-blood-1935.html.
Note 4: Kurt Kauenhowen, Mitteilungen des Sippenverbandes
der Danziger Mennoniten Familien Epp-Kauenhowen-Zimmermann 2, no. 1 (February
1936), 29f., https://www.mharchives.ca/download/1403/.
Note 5: Friedrich Keiter, Rußlanddeutsche Bauern und ihre
Stammesgenossen in Deutschland. Untersuchungen zur spezielen und allgemeinen
Rassenkunde (Jena: Fischer, 1934), 33, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Pis/RusBauer.pdf.
More generally see idem, “Wir Deutsche: Was wir im Vergleich zu den anderen
Völkern sind und nicht sind,” Volk und Rasse 16, no. 4 (April 1941), 61-65, https://archive.org/details/nsdap-volk-und-rasse-1941-04/page/n2/mode/1up.
Note 6: Keiter, Rußlanddeutsche Bauern und ihre
Stammesgenossen, 2; eye colour chart, p. 36.
Note 7: Keiter, Rußlanddeutsche Bauern und ihre
Stammesgenossen¸ 84.
Note 8: C. Henry Smith, The Coming of the Russian Mennonites
(Berne, IN: Mennonite Book Concern, 1927), 209, https://archive.org/details/comingofrussianm00unse/page/208/mode/2up;
Kauenhowen, Mitteilungen des Sippenverbandes, 30 (my emphasis).
Note 9: For ethical reflection on this era and Mennonite
participation, cf. Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany
in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 121-123; 140f.;
idem, “Terms of Racial Endearment: Nazi Categorization of Mennonites in
Ideology and Practice, 1929–1945,” German Studies Review 44, no. 1 (2021), 27-46; 30, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goossen/files/goossen_terms_of_racial_endearment_german_studies_review_2021.pdf;
idem, “Hitler’s Mennonite Voters,” Anabaptist Historians, online, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/2021/10/07/hitlers-mennonite-voters/.
Note 10: Erich Keyser, “Die Mennoniten im Weichselland,” Volk
und Rasse 17, no. 4 (1942), 71f.; 73, https://dlibra.bibliotekaelblaska.pl/dlibra/publication/65799/edition/60776/content.
Note 11: Heinz Boeters, “Familienaufbau und
Fruchtbarkeitsziffern bei rußlanddeutschen Bauern,” 36–42; and Wilhelm Lohoff,
“Erbhygenische Untersuchungen an Hilfsschulkindern in Oberhausen und Mühlheim
an der Ruhr,” in Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie 30 (1936), 36–42;
42, https://books.google.ca/books?id=GcUjAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA36#v=onepage&q&f=false.
The study is also referenced in Helmut Hackbarth, Rassentypische
Verhaltungsweisen der Mennoniten im Weichsel-Nogat-Delta (Munich: J. F.
Lehmanns, 1939), https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1939,%20Hackbarth,%20Rassentypische%20Verhaltungsweisen%20der%20Mennoniten%20im%20Weichsel%20Nogat%20Delta/1939,%20Hackbarth,%20Rassentypische%20Verhaltungsweisen.pdf.
Note 12: Boeters, “Familienaufbau und
Fruchtbarkeitsziffern.”
Note 13: See esp. Frank H. Epp, “An Analysis of Germanism
and National Socialism in the Immigrant Newspaper of a Canadian Minority Group,
the Mennonites, in the 1930s.” PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1965.
See previous posts: https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2022/09/canadian-mennonites-on-prairie-and.html;
AND https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2022/09/in-january-2020-i-received-information.html.
Note 14: See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/08/mennonites-highly-attractive-and.html.
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