History of the Russian Mennonites

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 “s

This post begins with an apologies and shame towards Polish readers. Many Canadian and South American Mennonites have a family connection to the “Great Trek” story. 35,000 Mennonites were removed from Ukraine behind the retreating German military in the Fall of 1943 and early 1944. Nazi Germany’s goal: at war’s end Wartheland (annexed Poland) would have a majority racially-German population and remain part of greater Germany. Its Poles were disposed and tens of thousands deported; Jews were destroyed. Reichsführer SS Himmler boasted to one resettler group: Poles know that “if you bother just one hair of a German family, you and all your Polish men in your village will lose your lives” ( note 1 ). Catholic clergy had been largely executed or banished. Polish parish churches were repurposed--in some cases for Nazi Party offices ( note 2 ). The official representative of Soviet Mennonites, Benjamin H. Unruh—who had met Heinrich Himmler for multiple meetings a year earlier—had requested

I have yet to visit the former Mennonite congregations in Poland; it is on my bucket list. And when I do it will done with great humility. Poles suffered greatly because of Nazi Germany. Prussian Mennonites sided firmly and enthusiastically with the racial politics of the Reich and its goals for a reorganized Europe under German leadership. Here is the Sunday program for the 1941 Rosenort Mennonite Heldengedenktag : Day of Commemoration for Heroes , March 1941 (Third Sunday of Lent). In addition, the file has other write-ups and photos of fallen congregational members for the denominational paper (below). The congregation's lead pastor (Elder) Ernst Regehr had been a Nazi Party member since 1931. This was not unusual for Prussian Mennonite congregations, and there was nothing in a decade to temper their enthusiasm. In 1941 the Rosenort cemetery had a large memorial stone for twenty-one fallen congregational soldiers in World War 1 (see pic ); likely that was destroyed in Worl

The Naked Anabaptist : this title recommended by the editors of Stuart Murray’s book certainly helped sales for a text certainly worth reading ( note 1 ). Early Anabaptist beginnings have resonated with many twenty-first century Christians in the global north who seek new post-Christendom expressions of church. Here is Murray’s summary of those sixteenth-century convictions: to follow Christ in life whatever the consequences; to regard the Bible as authoritative not only in debate, but also in living and with ethical issues; to hold to the separation of church and state; to live in mutual accountability with other baptized members of the community, which includes using church discipline to maintain distinctiveness; to share resources; to live non-violently and to tell the truth; and to expect that suffering is normal for faithful disciples and is a mark of the true church ( note 2 ). Indeed, most of those themes can be found clustered together in some early Anabaptist communiti

Biographies, memoirs, interviews, and diaries inevitably include and often exaggerate those parts of the life-story that support the claim of the storyteller, and omit or flatten other parts assumed to be irrelevant or in contradiction to the preferred storyline. In 1848, the Guardianship Committee for Foreign Colonists President Eugen von Hahn tasked each village administration to work with the schoolteacher to produce an exact historical description of its settlement and key events in its history ( note 1 ). Notably most village histories are silent or say very little about their engagements with their Nogai neighbours whom they had displaced. Mennonites were fully aware that their colony on the Molotschna River was on lands of the nomadic Nogai, and that the Nogai had been forcibly displaced for Greater Russia’s colonizing program. This earlier history of the land is noted in a few village reports. “In this location there used to be a large Nogai village. By order of authorities

In 1847 agricultural scientist and Russia expert Baron August von Haxthausen reported that for the conservative Mennonites in Russia tilling the soil is a “religious duty from which no one is exempt except those with special need, for the Bible teaches: ‘By the sweat of your brow you will you cultivate the ground’” ( note 1 ). This same rationale for Mennonite farming is picked up in Friedrich Matthäi’s 1866 volume of German settlements in Russia ( note 2 ). The biblical reference is a composite of Genesis 3:17 and 3:23. God says to Adam: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life” (3:17); and 3:23; God “banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.” That perspective however was rooted neither in Mennonite tradition nor theology. In the sixteenth century Flemish Anabaptists were largely urban; ability to read scripture was an imperative—not farming. While Genesis 3:17 is qu

Johann Cornies expanded his Agricultural Society School library in Ohrloff to become a lending library “for the instruction and better enlightenment of every adult resident.” The library was overseen by the Agricultural Society; in 1845, patrons across the colony paid 1 ruble annually to access its growing collection of 355 volumes (see note 1 ). The great majority of the volumes were in German, but the library included Russian and some French volumes, with a large selection of handbooks and periodicals on agronomy and agriculture—even a medical handbook ( note 2 ). Philosophical texts included a German translation of George Combe’s The Constitution of Man ( note 3 ) and its controversial theory of phrenology, and the political economist Johann H. G. Justi’s Ergetzungen der vernünftigen Seele —which give example of the high level of reading and reflection amongst some colonists. The library’s teaching and reference resources included a history of science and technology with an accomp