Eugenics and Euthanasia: Russian Mennonites and the Third Reich

Little surprises me when I write about Russian Mennonites caught “between the devil and the deep blue sea.” A 1944 letter I found recently from Mennonite Prof. Benjamin H. Unruh however offers a new and disturbing snapshot of this leader and the Russian Mennonite community under the umbrella of the Third Reich (note 1).

It is not too much to say that this larger-than-life leader stands at the centre of almost every significant Russian Mennonite story between 1915 and 1945, including community decisions during the revolution, the formation of MCC, the emigration of 20,000 Russländer, the miracle release of thousands gathered at the gates of Moscow, 1929-30, the creation of the Paraguayan Fernheim Colony, famine relief in the 1930s, the Canadian debates about identity and worldview in Der Bote and the Rundschau papers, and almost everything that happened with Mennonites in Ukraine from 1941 to 1945. His importance for the Mennonite story cannot be understated. Even for many contemporary Mennonites his post-war publication with complete, exhaustive lists with every Mennonite family that immigrated to Russia from 1789 until the mid-1800s is the backbone for each and any of those genealogies (note 2).

The Unruh letter has to do with active euthanasia.

Nazi Germany developed a policy of eugenics which sought to eliminate those Germans whom they considered to be “unworthy of life” and to be a genetic and financial “burden” on the German race, society and state. It started with forced sterilization in 1933 and by 1939 included specially designated pediatric clinics for children with disabilities, where these children were murdered by medical staff. Soon this program widened to include those up to 17 years of age (note 3).

During the war in the German-occupied East, persons with certain genetic disabilities were typically killed in mass shootings or in gas vans. In the predominantly Mennonite settlement of Molotschna (“Halbstadt”), Dr. Ivan (Johann) Klassen played a role in the elimination of up to 200 handicapped adults and children (including the “deaf and dumb”) in two larger care homes in the villages of Ohrloff and Tiege in November 1941. Klassen was required by the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) to examine and identify “for a planned resettlement” those he deemed to be “unfit for work.” About a month later the SD shot about 100 of these patients (note 4).

Anecdotally, Abram J. Thiessen witnessed German soldiers in his village of Gnadenheim “get upset at a young mentally handicapped man who created a little bit of commotion around a campfire when he was hit with an ember. The soldiers took him away and shot him” (note 5).

Young German Red Cross nurses and midwives flowed into the occupied territories as “missionary-style relief workers [and] … ‘Germanizers’”; Molotschna received eighty-four (note 6). Racial hygiene was a top priority, which included the sterilization of those determined to have heritable diseases, including those with congenital feeble-mindedness (most common), schizophrenia, manic-depression, madness, epilepsy, Huntington’s disease, heritable blindness or deafness, serious physical deformities or alcoholism. Social services for Volksdeutsche (ethnic Geman) supported the broader ideological objectives of racial hygiene and the genetic improvement of the Volk. Individuals with some of these conditions are noted, e.g., in the 1942 village reports (Commando Dr. Stumpp) for easy identification and remedial action (note 7).

Whereas Mennonites in Russia had been committed to the highest standards of care and teaching to the deaf for decades (note 8), for example, in Nazi Germany those born deaf were categorized as “defective” and “biologically inferior” human material and typically sterilized. Schools for the Deaf were considered a product of Christian sentimentality in which “the greater the degree of idiocy, feeblemindedness, blindness, deafness or other physical handicap was, the greater the public expenditure for these biologically inferior people” (note 9). The policy’s singular goal was “to give back and maintain the health, resilience, and performance capacity of the German Volk”—and “no clear and rationally thinking fellow German national has ever doubted the legitimacy of racial legislation,” according to a rationale published for the Volksdeutsche in Ukraine (note 10).

Mennonite young adults who were being prepared to teach in ethnic German schools were no longer trained to teach religion—once the hallmark of the Mennonite curriculum—but now trained in the pseudo-sciences of “race anthropology” (Rassenkunde) and Nazi hereditary studies (Vererbungslehre) to support the "biological fitness of the people" (note 11).

When German armies evacuated ethnic Germans from the Black Sea region to annexed Poland (Warthegau) in 1943, crippled and mentally weak or ill persons were taken away to the provincial (Gau) sanitorium “Tiegenhof bei Gnesen”; the sanitorium was well-known for euthanizing their patients (note 12). My aunt (by marriage) Adina Neufeld Bräul worried that her mother could be “eliminated” if hospitalized because of her epilepsy. Albert Dahl of Marienthal remembered that some of their Mennonites simply “disappeared” upon arrival in Warthegau, i.e., the handicapped and mentally weak (note 13). This was consistent with the Racial Policy of the Reich, which assumed that the “rise and fall of a people’s culture depends above all on the maintenance, care, and purity of its valuable racial inheritance” (note 14).

At least one Chortitza District Mennonite family resettled in Upper Silesia with two mentally handicapped children was a victim of Nazi racial health policy. “They took the children from them and the parents were told later that the children had died” (note 15). 

Similarly, the mentally disabled brother of a young Molotschna woman was taken from their resettler camp in Kutno, Warthegau, to a nearby institution in Zicheln (Zychlin).

“All the undesirables were slowly put aside … I baked something and went to get my brother. When I arrived … there were many hungry people and (brother) was very pale skinny. … I went to the office to get permission to take (my brother) home. … The people there all looked starved, and outside was a small house (morgue) where they put the dead bodies. Four or five times a day a horse and wagon with a coffin drove by, continually coming back for more bodies.” (Note 16)

Chortitza-area Mennonites placed in the resettler camp Konradstein in Konitz (Danzig-West Prussia) in October 1943 were aware that their building had been a psychiatric care facility not so long ago and that its patients had been eliminated in line with the Führer's perspectives (note 17).   

Apparantly even Prof. Benjamin Unruh—the advocate and liaison for Russian Mennonites to the Nazi regime—came to terms with the policy. In a July 1944 letter to regime leaders, including the Mennonite-friendly SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Wolfrum, Unruh wrote:

“That there are cases where genetic (erbbiologische=hereditary-biological) concerns present themselves, justifying / requiring (rechtfertigen  erheischen) a special treatment (Sonderbehandlung) is viewed by many resettlers as justified. However, they have repeatedly asked the undersigned [=Unruh] to request that these cases also be treated and regulated as painlessly as possible, which I will do in a special submission to the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationality, the Reichsführer-SS [Himmler], via the head of the Ethnic German Liaison Office.” (Note 18)

None of the above is new—except for this letter. It is important because it is from Unruh who had stature in all Mennonite circles with a network of influence in Nazi Germany. It is important as well for his additional comment, namely, that “many of our resettlers” also see it as justified. If the resettlers really did “understand” and accept this as somehow tragically necessary, it was because the propaganda had worked.

I am not willing to grant Unruh the same latitude; rather it was the capstone of stunning failure in leadership. Unruh was never an “anti-Nazi” theologian or church leader. He said that his method in contrast to some others had always been to trust in God, trust Christ, but also to work with influential authorities earnestly and without fear, and to trust them too (note 19). This is connected with his concern to hold strictly to the "separation of church and state" (note 20) which the Nazi state desired as well. 

Unruh had options. He was a highly educated faith leader—not repressed—who for years discussed and debated the priorities of Nazi Germany with Mennonites in North and South America. He observed and supported those developments at each successive stage, especially the underlying assumptions of race and the positive implications for Mennonite inclusion. The “demonic” dimension is located, as Carsten Klingemann summarizes well,

“… precisely in the creation of a perfect German ‘Volk’ community, a hereditary-biologically and racially ideal ‘ethnic body’ (Volkskörper), in which defective individuals are prevented from reproducing by measures such as marriage bans, forced abortions, institutionalization, sterilization and murder. Thus, one can certainly speak of a ‘biomedical vision’ with regard to the measures by which the social question was to be solved completely and forever.” (Note 21)

Unruh’s small note on the exclusion of the weak, accepting Nazi Germany’s euthanizing policy even as it impacts the Mennonite people he loves, was the inevitable conclusion of a fatally flawed method, dislodging him fully from the tradition.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Benjamin H. Unruh to Gauamt für Volkstumsfragen /Posen, Hauptabt. für Plannung und Bauten /Posen, Einwandererzentralstelle /Litzmannstadt, Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle /Berlin (SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Wolfrum), July 25, 1944, p. 2 [80]. Berichte der Kommandos der Einsatzgruppe D über das Schwarzmeerdeutschtums vertrauensmänner der Russlanddeutschen Umsiedler in einzelnen Kreises des Warthegaues. Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (National Digital Archives Poland), 39/205/0/-/10, https://www.szukajwarchiwach.gov.pl/de/jednostka/-/jednostka/10973074.

Note 2: See Benjamin H. Unruh, Die niederländisch-niederdeutschen Hintergründe der mennonitischen Ostwanderungen im 16., 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Karlsruhe: Self-published, 1955). Part II English: https://www.mharchives.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/BH-Unruh-Part-2-Electronic-release-2023.pdf. See also my Unruh essay, “Benjamin Unruh, MCC [Mennonite Central Committee] and National Socialism,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 96, no. 2 (April 2022), 157–205, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/handle/20.500.12730/1571.

Note 3: The Holocaust Encyclopedia of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has two concise and helpful online articles on the Nazi practice of euthanasia and the pseudo-science of eugenics, its background and development: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program; https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/eugenics?series=18.

Note 4: Dmytro Myeshkov, “Mennonites in Ukraine before, during, and immediately after the Second World War,” European Mennonites and the Holocaust, edited by Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 217f.

Note 5: Richard D. Thiessen, electronic text to author, March 24, 2020, regarding his father Abram J. Thiessen’s eye-witness experience.

Note 6: Horst Gerlach, “Mennonites, the Molotschna, and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle in the Second World War,” translated by John D. Thiesen, Mennonite Life 41, no. 3 (1986), 5, https://mla.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/pre2000/1986sep.pdf; Wendy Lower, “Hitler’s ‘Garden of Eden’ in Ukraine: Nazi Colonialism, Volksdeutsche, and the Holocaust, 1941–1944,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, edited by Jonathan Petropoulos and John Roth (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 196.

Note 7: Maria Fiebrandt, Auslese für die Siedlergesellschaft. Die Einbeziehung Volksdeutscher in die NS-Erbgesundheitspolitik im Kontext der Umsiedlungen 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014), 51. The “Neu-Chortitza Dorfbericht,” 261, May 1942, in “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp,” R6/623, file 184, https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_623+Rayon%3A+Sofijevka%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Pjatichatki%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk+Dorf%3A+Neu-Chortitza%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Nowo-Chortitza+&p=R_6_623%5C%D1%823_510-593%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=1) singles out a Braun family for “marriage among relatives” and where “all three children are intellectually disabled (Idioten).” Nothing is noted about their fate. Similarly a son of Peter Martens in “Gnadental (Rayon Sofiewka) Dorfbericht,” May 1942,” Familienverzeichnis, 480, “Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp,” BArch R6/623, Mappe 182, https://tsdea.archives.gov.ua/deutsch/gallery.php?tt=R_6_623+Gebiet%3A+Zwischen%0D%0ARayon%3A+Sofievka%0D%0A%5BKreisgebiet%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk%0D%0AKreisgebiet%3A+Pjatichatki%5D%0D%0AGenerelbezirk%3A+Dnjepropetrowsk+Dorf%3A+Gnadental%0D%0Arussisch+%E2%80%93+Wodjanaja&p=R_6_623%5C%D1%824_945-1037%0D%0A#lg=1&slide=1.

Note 8: See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/01/should-holy-baptism-be-offered-to-deaf.html.

Note 9: Cf. Karl Lietz, “The Place of the School for the Deaf in the New Reich,” in Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe, edited by Donna F. Ryan and John S. Schuchman (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 117.

Note 10: “Schutz gegen Volkszerfall,” Ukraine Post, no. 8 (February 27, 1943), 4, https://libraria.ua/en/all-titles/group/878/. The policy “has resulted not only in an increased birth rate and a considerable decline in unsuitable elements, but has also impacted, among other things, the crime statistics,” according to the unnamed author.

Note 11: Gerhard Winter, ed., Die volksdeutsche Lehrerbildungsanstalt (LBA) zur Zeit der deutschen Besatzung in Rußland (Wolfsburg: Self-published, 1988), 143f. Racial theory had been a required course for all schools in Prussia since September 1933; cf. Renate Fricke-Finkelnburg, ed., Nationalsozialismus und Schule. Amtliche Erlasse und Richtlinien, 1933–1945 (Opladen: Leske Budrich, 1989), ch. 7 (“Rassenkunde”). As sample literature, see Martin Staemmler, Rassenpflege im völkischen Staat (Munich: Lehmanns, 1933), https://wellcomecollection.org/works/jq2kjhda/items. 

Note 12: Document from: Unterbringung der Schwarzmeerdeutsche, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (National Digital Archives Poland), 53/299/0, series 2.2, file 1978. Cf. https://szukajwarchiwach.pl/.

Note 13: Albert Dahl, interview with author, July 26, 2017, St. Catharines, ON.

Note 14: In Anson Rabinbach and Sander Gilman, eds., The Third Reich Sourcebook (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 171.

Note 15: Abram Janzen, Osterwick, for Gerhard Fast, Das Ende von Chortitza (Winnipeg, MB: Self-published, 1973).

Note 16: “Elsie” (interview), by Cynthia A. Jones, “Grounding Diaspora in Experience: Niagara Mennonite Identity” (PhD dissertation, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2010), 173, https://scholars.wlu.ca/etd/1099/.

Note 17: Waldemar Janzen, Growing up in Turbulent Times (Winnipeg, MB: CMU Press, 2007), 62.

Note 18: Unruh to Gauamt für Volkstumsfragen /Posen, et al., July 25, 1944, p. 2 [80].

Note 19: Benjamin H. Unruh to Abram Braun, letter, February 5, 1944. Vereinigung Collection, Folder 1944, Mennonitische Forschungsstelle Weierhof.

Note 20: Cf. Benjamin H. Unruh, “Vollbericht,” to Executive of the “Vereinigung der deutschen Mennonitengemeinden,” January 7, 1944, 2. Benjamin H. Unruh Collection, Abraham Braun Correspondence, 1930, 1940, 1944-45, Mennonitische Forschungsstelle Weierhof.

Note 21: Carsten Klingemann, Soziologie und Politik: Sozialwissenschaftliches Expertenwissen im Dritten Reich und in der frühen westdeutschen Nachkriegszeit (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009), 210, https://books.google.ca/books?id=hfjqnzsA4aoC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PA13&dq=Soziologie%20und%20Politik%3A%20Sozialwissenschaftliches%20Expertenwissen%20im%20Dritten%20Reich&pg=PA210#v=onepage&q&f=false.

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To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "Eugenics and Euthanasia: Russian Mennonites and the Third Reich," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), October 9, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/10/eugenics-and-euthanasia-russian.html.