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“German Days” on the Prairie, 1930s

Recently an acquaintance shared a photo from a Saskatchewan picnic, likely from the late 1930s. Twenty-seven individuals, children, parents and grandparents, are dressed in festive but comfortable clothing. The group includes her grandparents—both children of Mennonites who came to the US from Russia in the 1870s—and other relatives and friends. In the middle of the photograph, spread out like a picnic blanket, is a large swastika flag with the iron cross—the symbol of the German veterans’ association (Deutscher Reichskriegerbund; note 1); a young boy holds one corner of the flag. There are good reasons to think that this photo was taken at “German Day” (Deutscher Tag) celebrations, which were held annually in the 1930s in each prairie province.

Saskatchewan German Day rallies rotated annually between Regina and Saskatoon, between seeding and harvest time. Its first gathering was in 1930 which drew some 4,000 attendees (note 2). In 1932, six months before Hitler’s seizure of power, the German Day included a large choir with participants from First Mennonite Church in Saskatoon (see below).

Picnic participation ranged from 1,500 to 4,000 annually, depending on the health of crops. A stadium or large hall was rented, and the days were marked with ceremonial, pro-Germany speakers at each gathering, including an address from the German Consul for Western Canada. Music and mass choirs played an important role, as well as German essay contests. In Manitoba the Mennonite students typically dominated the prizes (note 3). German Days included an ecumenical German worship service, a banquet, folk dancing, and often a march and car rally (note 4).

Organizer Bernhard Bott—later apprehended and interned in Canada throughout the duration of the war—gave his invitation to the German Days in the Mennonite press:

“A cordial invitation to all Volk comrades ...” — “German Day comes only once a year in every province ... Thousands will flock together, all inspired by the same love for our mother tongue and the ways of our fathers, and for the high and noble cultural assets of our people. Reaffirmed in our faith in our German peoplehood (Volkstum), everyone will return to their daily work after German Day in order to uphold the honour of our people in their new homeland through diligent work, faithful fulfillment of their duties and tenacious adherence to Germanness.” (Note 5)

Bernhard Bott was a German war veteran from WW1 and editor and managing director of the Deutsche Zeitung für Kanada, a pro-Nazi newspaper for Canada. He played an increasingly important role in the Deutscher Bund Kanada which was formed on January 1, 1934 as a society that “aimed to bring existing German-Canadian clubs and organizations in line with the Nazi Party movement in Germany” (note 6).

The weekend typically produced a resolution to the provincial government to reintroduce German language instruction in school districts where German-Canadians were a majority (note 7).

An important goal of the gatherings was “to counter the communist propaganda of lies directed against the German Fatherland and at the same time against Germanness in Canada itself, through education and protest ... to clarify foreign policy issues and to call for a decent and understanding attitude towards the German Reich” (note 8). In the 1930s German-Canadians apparently felt considerable prejudice and witnessed anti-German agitation (note 9).

In 1933 the delegates to the fourth Saskatchewan Deutscher Tag sent official greetings to the new German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler and his government. They welcomed

“… the national awakening in the old homeland and commit themselves to the greater German community of people and destiny … and express the confident hope that the national arising will at the same time contribute to a strengthening of Germanness abroad and especially in Canada. … We send fraternal greetings to all Germans with whom we are bound by unbreakable ties of blood and language. And like Germans in Europe, it fills us with the deepest sorrow that our brothers and sisters in ill-fated Russia are suffering so terribly and are facing death by starvation in the thousands.” (Note 10)

The last sentence of the greeting indicates that Mennonites participated in the text’s formulation, linking their hopes for the new German leader to the relief of their people languishing in Ukraine (note 11).

The 1933 German Day speaker in Regina, Colin Roß, wrote a glowing report for Nazi papers throughout Germany (see below)—clearly mentioning Mennonite participation. At the rally he “delivered an impassioned and radical völkisch oration,” emphasizing that “a later generation of historians will view our present age as he most meaningful and most important epoch in the history of mankind and they will see Adolf Hitler as among the greatest men of history” (note 12).

By 1934 the German Days were firmly under the control of Canadian pro-Nazi apologists, and “the flying of the swastika and the singing of the Horst Wessel song were standard procedure” (note 13). At the 1934 gathering, delegates from the various German groups voted to form a “German Central Committee of Saskatchewan”—which included the “Mennonite Provincial Committee” (Mennonitisches Provinzialkomitee; note 14).

In 1936 Bott, who worked closely with the Mennonites, spoke at the Saskatchewan German Day of “changes that had come about in Germany and what they implied for German people abroad. ... Wherever they lived, they were now people of one blood and of a common bond. This carried with it a duty.” 900 attended the music festival—lower than expected because of rapidly changing crop conditions and financial stress. The Mennonite choir from Rosthern “won appreciative applause” (Rosthern’s Mennonite school, the “German-English Academy,” changed its name in 1946 to Rosthern Junior College; note 15).

The 1936 weekend included a mass children’s choir of 180 voices singing two German folk songs and a hymn. At the concluding ceremony all joined in for “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” but only few knew the accompanying Nazi Party anthem, the “Horst-Wessel-Lied.” Those who did “sang it lustily, with hands raised in the Nazi salute, but roughly 1,500 other delegates showed little interest. The meeting ended with God save the King” (note 16).

Both Mennonite papers—Der Bote and (even more emphatically) the Mennonitische Rundschau—promoted the German Days, and on occasions reprinted full speeches—e.g., on the occasion of Hitler’s fifth anniversary of power, January 1938 (note 17).

Moreover, the papers “defended German völkisch and National Socialist teachings frequently and with vigour;“ Frank Epp has analyzed this in detail (note 18). In 1933, for example, the Rundschau printed an article by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Enlightenment and Propaganda, on Jews, Marxists and Hitler: “If he [Hitler] fights against the Jews, it is not because he pays homage to a dull and mindless anti-Semitism, but because he has recognized in the Jew the symbol of German decay” (note 19).

The German Consul for Western Canada—a regular keynote at every German Day event—was given space in 1933 in the Rundschau to explain Germany’s approach to Jews, including the boycott of Jewish shops, doctors and lawyers on April 1, 1933 (note 20). “A boycott against all Jews as a countermeasure against the anti-German propaganda spread abroad by the Jews and false reports of Jewish pogroms” (note 21).

Mennonites across the prairies kept a warm relationship with the German Consul for Western Canada who donated money and books to its school or town libraries. The highest donation to the Mennonite Collegiate Institute in Gretna, Manitoba in the third quarter of 1938—after the Bergthal Mennonite Church—was the German Consul, Wilhelm Rodde (note 22).

Predominantly Mennonite communities also received new German language books and reading materials from the Reich’s “Association for Germans Abroad” (VDA: Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland), dedicated to the promotion of Greater German nationalism with the help of German minorities abroad.

The Coaldale (Alberta) public library, for example, received 165 new German books in the 1936-37 school year.

“The VDA has contributed many good books to our Coaldale [Alberta] library, and wishes further to extend its energetic support to our German schools. It also offers to assist our largest settlements in the province with stationary libraries and school materials.” (Note 23)

Notably Russian Mennonite leader in Germany Benjamin H. Unruh was a board member of the VDA and was networked with powerful offices in the regime. Unruh was also a regular contributor of pro-German articles in the Canadian Mennonite papers (note 24).

In these ways the Mennonite community, its choirs, schools and especially its press were used as propagandistic and apologetic instruments in Canada for the Nazi regime. Mennonites on the prairie—especially those who arrived in the 1920s—were also, by and large, willing participants.

This of course ended with the start of war in 1939—as did the German Day picnics on the prairie. Photos were tucked away.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: I thank Jane Andres for sharing the picnic photo of her grandparents, John P. Friesen and his wife Emma Gossen Friesen, and for permission to post the photo here.

Note 2: Heinz Lehmann, Das Deutschtum in Westkanada (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1939), 302, https://digitalcollections.ucalgary.ca/Share/jgym75t141yxu1ddb77ml1oc128q262g.

Note 3: Mennonitische Rundschau (hereafter MR) 61, no. 5 (February 18, 1938), https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1938-02-02_61_5/page/6/mode/.

Note 4: Lehmann, Das Deutschtum in Westkanada, 301f.

Note 5: MR 61, no. 26 (June 29, 1938), 11, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1938-06-29_61_26/page/n10/.

Note 6: Michelle McBride, “From Indifference to Internment: An Examination of RCMP Responses to Nazism and Fascism in Canada from 1934 to 1941,” M.A. thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland (1997), 33; 37; 281, https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp04/mq23157.pdf.

Note 7: Lehmann, Das Deutschtum in Westkanada, 302; 305.

Note 8: Lehmann, Das Deutschtum in Westkanada, 302.

Note 9: Jonathan F. Wagner, Brothers Beyond the Sea: National Socialism in Canada (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University, 1981), 147.

Note 10: Lehmann, Das Deutschtum in Westkanada, 304f.

Note 11: On the Mennonite in Canada struggling with these matters, cf. Frank H. Epp, Mennonites in Canada, 1920–1940: A People’s Struggle for Survival (Toronto: MacMillan, 1982), esp. ch. 12, https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/sites/ca.grebel/files/uploads/files/mic_iir_0.pdf. For related post on Niagara Mennonites, see previous post (forthcoming); and on Manitoba Mennonites and Nazism, see https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2022/09/canadian-mennonites-on-prairie-and.html. 

Note 12: Lehmann, Das Deutschtum in Westkanada, 96f.

Note 13: Wagner, Brothers Beyond the Sea, 96. See Roß’s article: “Deutscher Tag in der Prärie,” Der Führer (Karlsruhe) 8, no. 226/137 (May 20, 1934), 11, https://digital.blb-karlsruhe.de/blbz/periodical/zoom/3441528.

Note 14: Wagner, Brothers Beyond the Sea, 85.

Note 15: Rosthern's long-time board chair and Canadian Mennonite immigration leader, Aeltester David Toews, visited Germany in 1936; on his mixed impressions of the Nazi state, cf. John D. Thiesen, “The American Mennonite Encounter with National Socialism,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 27 (1992), 131f., https://scholar.archive.org/work/q5fyxg4dabbvxajake67lxzaxq/access/wayback/https://journals.ku.edu/ygas/article/download/19231/17216.

Note 16: Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (July 20, 1936), 5, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=SCE0ypLQHGcC&dat=19360720&printsec=frontpage&hl=en.

Note 17: See MR 61, no. 5 (February 2, 1938), 3; 10, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1938-02-02_61_5/page/3/; also Wagner, Brothers Beyond the Sea, 105.

Note 18: Wagner, Brothers Beyond the Sea, 105. See especially 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.

Note 19: MR 56, no. 12 (March 22, 1933), 12, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1933-03-22_56_12/page/12/.

Note 20: MR 56, no. 15 (April 12, 1933), 11, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1933-04-12_56_15/page/n9/; see also MR 56, no. 18 (April 3, 1933), 11, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1933-05-03_56_18/page/10/.

Note 21: MR 56, no. 14 (April 5, 1933), 15, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1933-04-05_56_14/page/14/.

Note 22: MR 62, no. 2 (January 11, 1939), https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1939-01-11_62_2/page/n8/.

Note 23: Quoted in Wagner, Brothers Beyond the Sea, 53.

Note 24: See my 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.

---

To cite this page: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "'German Days' on the Prairie, 1930s," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), November 15, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/11/german-days-on-prairie-1930s.html.

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