Russian and Prussian Mennonite Participants in “Racial-Science,” 1930

In December 1929, some 3,885 Soviet Mennonites plus 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists and seven Adventists were assisted by Germany to flee the Soviet Union. They entered German transit camps before resettlement in Canada, Brazil and Paraguay (note 1)

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.

---

To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Russian and Prussian Mennonite Participants in 'Racial Science', 1930," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), Septemer 25, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/09/russian-and-prussian-mennonite.html.

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History of the Russian Mennonites

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