On February 17, 1943, Hitler made a flying visit to Zaporozhje where he addressed the troops and declared:
 “The outcome of a battle of decisive importance depends on you!  Germany’s fate, present and future, will be decided a thousand kilometres from the borders of the Reich.
 The entire German homeland has therefore been mobilized. Everyone, to the last man, and the last woman, is being called into service to support your battle...
 If everyone of you helps me, we will—as before—succeed with the help of the almighty.”

from:  Kurowski, Franz.  Trans by David Johnson.  Panzer Aces; German Tank Commanders in World War II.  Stackpole, 2004, p. 46.    Web access June 11, 2008 at  http:://books.google.ca
 

Adolf Hitler and Mennonites
by Robert Martens

 The Mennonites who escaped the Soviet Union with the retreating German army during the latter years of World War II were faced with one of the untenable choices that life so often imposes upon us: Joseph Stalin or Adolf Hitler? In this case the only possible decision was survival. Mennonites fled the atrocities of the USSR, arguably greater than those of the Third Reich, under the wing of the fascist German troops. If a few, in these nightmarish conditions, fell under the sway of Hitler, it is understandable.
 The choices faced by Russian Mennonites before World War I were not as extreme but harsh nonetheless. The imperial government, riding a wave of xenophobic panslavism, intermittently threatened to expropriate the lands of "German" colonists and deport their owners to Siberia. Mennonites responded, for the most part, that they were of Dutch origin, and should not be subject to anti-Germanic law. This was partly an argument of pragmatism. Over the years the Mennonite colonies had become increasingly Germanic in culture, and the Dutch tongue had long been forgotten. Nevertheless their roots indeed were generally in the northern lowlands of Europe; their connections with Germany had never been strong; in fact many Mennonites had fled to Catherine the Great's Russia when their Polish lands were absorbed by the warlike Prussian state.

 Russian Mennonites were becoming increasingly educated but their knowledge of their own and especially of Russian history was still sketchy. A debate was carried on concerning their roots among their most articulate leaders, such as PM Friesen, the brothers Peter and Heinrich Braun, and Benjamin Unruh. In the prevailing hostile political climate, the German argument was seldom made. Sympathies lay with the Boers, historically of Dutch extraction, during the war in South Africa. Individuals such as Unruh and Heinrich Braun, however, who had studied in German schools, were already deeply permeated with an admiration for Germanic culture. Schiller and Goethe were being taught in Mennonite schools in Russia.

 The catastrophes of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath produced an overnight change. German troops helped train young Mennonite men to defend militarily the assaults on their colonies. Unruh's stance on Mennonite cultural roots altered gradually from the Dutch argument to the German: "Now as Christians," he wrote in a letter to BB Janz, "we believe that it was God's way with our fathers that they gained access to the German spirit" (Friesen 291). Heinrich Braun wrote that "we both desire and intend to cherish and assert our Deutschtum ... after the difficult experiences of the last years..." (Friesen 276). A Studienkommission (study commission) was formed, with Unruh among its members, to investigate possible emigration to Germany.

 With the defeat of the German army this option was no longer viable, and the Studienkommission veered clumsily back to the Dutch origins theory. About 20,000 Mennonites managed to escape to North America. Benjamin Unruh, however, never returned to the Soviet Union, and settled in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1920, where he taught Russian language and literature at the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule. The Braun brothers followed him to Germany. Here these three Mennonite men, among others, were to fall under the spell of Adolf Hitler.

 Jewish participation in the Bolshevik Revolution helped fuel anti-Semitism among them. A desperate hope lingered that Hitler might help restore the Mennonite homeland in Ukraine. Additionally, the principle of nonresistance, often regarded in Russia as a mere political prerogative, had been lost among a significant number of Mennonites. Meanwhile other events were pushing uprooted Mennonites into the German camp. Initially, Siberian Mennonites, having little contact with the state of Germany, considered themselves a Völklein (little people) having little to do with the powers of the "world." In 1929, however, about sixty to seventy Siberian Mennonite families managed somehow to flee to Moscow and acquire passports out of the country. A flood of desperate Mennonites followed them to Moscow upon hearing of their success. They were forced, when other alternatives failed, to turn to Otto Auhagen of the German embassy. He publicized their plight, the German media took up their cause – "Brothers in Need!" was the cry – and some 5700 Mennonites were rescued by Hindenburg and the German authorities. They eventually settled in Paraguay and Brazil. BH Unruh helped negotiate the effort. Over the years he argued that the German government regarded the refugees as part of the Volk (the ethnic German nation) and that they no longer constituted a separate Völklein. "That the Nazi ideology was strongest among these refugees is no accident" (Friesen 313).

 Peter Braun, who died at a young age in 1933 of tuberculosis, wrote of a "Jewish-Slavic" clique (Friesen 319) that dominated the Bolshevik leadership and threatened the Mennonite Volkstum (peoplehood). Heinrich Schroeder, another Russian Mennonite teaching in Germany, published a book that began with a quote from Hitler and featured a photo of himself in Nazi uniform. In 1934 a pro-fascist article by Schroeder printed in the Mennonitische Rundschau argued for the notion of a global German culture. To his credit, BB Janz of Coaldale, Alberta responded vigorously in opposition. Meanwhile, Benjamin Unruh's support for Hitler, who he hoped was God's instrument to smash Soviet Communism, seemed to grow over the next years. By 1943 he was rewriting the history of Mennonites, minimizing their historically-established antipathy to Prussian rule in the eighteenth century, and emphasizing the "purity of the blood of these volksdeutsche (German people) settlers" (Friesen 325). His manuscript is now resident in the Hoover Archive of Stanford University.
 Hitler's shadow extended to North America. Russian Mennonite immigrants, Russländer, welcomed democracy but were suspicious of its secularist and increasingly morally relativist nature. In 1923 the Zentrale Mennonitische Immigrantenkomitee (ZMIK: Central Mennonite Immigrants Committee) was formed to defend immigrants' rights and to advance Mennonite culture by supporting German booksellers, youth groups, and the teaching of Mennonite history. It was headed by Dietrich Epp, long-time editor of Die Bote. ZMIK was continuously short of funds and was finally absorbed by the Canadian Board of Colonization, but over Epp's protests, who argued that assimilation was the greatest danger threatening Mennonites in the west.

 The Deutschtum (Germanness) movement, arguing on behalf of a common global German culture, powerfully influenced some Mennonites during the 1930s. JJ Hildebrand, a member of Mennonite Immigration Aid, went so far as to propose a separate state for Mennonites: "The government of this colony should be and stay in Mennonite hands ... with Low and High German serving as official languages and guaranteed unrestricted access to the German cultural spirit" (Urry 197). The concept was clearly unrealistic and went nowhere. Hildebrand was, however, part of a Nazi-influenced movement that emphasized such issues as German literature, aid to German refugees, and the importance of family. Poet Gerhard Friesen, in support of Deutschtum, actually moved to Germany in 1938. Meanwhile Mennonite newspapers were openly publishing Nazi propaganda, with Hermann Neufeldt, editor of the Rundschau, printing Hitler's speech to the Reichstag in 1939. In 1934 and 1939 he was brought before the court for publishing anti-Semitic material. BB Janz, on the other hand, was again leading the fight against the militaristic ideology of Nazism.

 Mennonites were increasingly supporting strong right wing government as a perceived necessary response to communism. In the light of their experience and the ongoing holocaust in the Soviet Union, this was almost inevitable. The election of Jacob Penner as a communist alderman in Winnipeg was perhaps the exception that proved the rule. With the start of World War II and the revelations about Hitler's atrocities, however, support among Mennonites for National Socialism either fell silent or vanished. It was a dark and shameful episode in Mennonite history.

 On the other hand, was it perhaps not understandable for them to take a stance against the "progressive" forces of individualism and relativism, which today are being profoundly questioned? And while BH Unruh's support for Hitler was utterly and eternally inexcusable, does the suffering of his own people go some way to explaining his stance? Somewhere along the journey, however, the Mennonite ideal of a separate and peaceful church had been partially lost to the allure of power. The "recovery of the Anabaptist vision" by Harold Bender after World War II began a sustained debate over the purportedly weakened ideals of witness and peace, and the result has been a healthy self-examination of the Mennonite past. The issue extends beyond history, however, and should begin with the awareness of power's shadow in our own hearts.

References:
Friesen, Abraham. In Defense of Privilege: Russian Mennonites and the State Before and During World
  War I. Winnipeg & Hillsboro: Kindred Productions, 2006.
Urry, James. Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2006.
Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.