Mennonite Nazis — Chester Weaver — Ep. 098

Lesson Transcript

First of all, I would like to say thank you for allowing me to pay my debt to you. As an older person, I owe you some information, and the things that I share with you this morning are things that nobody wants to talk about. But you're here to listen, and I have more to say than I'll get said, than I have time to say, so I'll do my best to try to stay on topic and not go into rabbit trails. So, without wasting any time, let's get started. What I'm going to do is present overheads. I'm going to read these overheads.

I want you to see it and hear it at the same time. Most of what I have is documented. It comes from various kinds of books, and you'll be able to see the source as we go. So, first of all, memory is a conscious work of interpretation marked as much by deletion as by selection. How a community remembers its past is the single most important element in determining its future. I'm a teacher. I would just love to park and explain some of this kind of stuff.

And I'm going to throw so much stuff at you that you're not going to be able to handle everything, and I apologize for that part of it. But trust me, that's an important statement. Let's get a geographical context for all this. Is there anybody here in this audience who has a Dutch, Prussian, Russian background? Let me see your hands. Several of you. Okay. Those are the people who have their origins here.

Under persecution in Anabaptist times, these people moved east first to Danzig and Prussia, and from there to Kortytsia and Mlachna over here in Ukraine. Most of us in this room this morning had our origins here in Switzerland. Under persecution, we moved north, and from there we moved to the United States in the 1700s. We went west. Those people went east. Okay. Now get this.

The story I'm going to tell you this morning is about the people who did not move, the people who stayed both here and here, and here, especially here. So if we have the three words, American, Mennonite, and Christian, how would you put them in order? Are you a Mennonite Christian American? Are you a Christian American Mennonite or an American Mennonite Christian? Okay. It would be fun to just park here and talk for a while, but I can't for the sake of time.

I hope you learn in grammar class that the noun is the strongest word, and adjectives in English are located before the noun. So the only proper thing to do is to be a Christian first. And it really doesn't matter if you're an American Mennonite Christian or a Mennonite American Christian. The story I'm going to tell you today is about a group of people called Mennonites who decided that they're going to be German first, even before Christian.

This is a quote from the book, Seven Men Who Ruled the World from Their Graves. "Anyone who contemplates history cannot help but notice how the gift of blessed forgetfulness is given to virtually every generation in the unrolling years of history. This gift makes it possible for a given age, in the midst of its blithe optimism, to repeat the fatal mistakes of a previous generation with hardly a pang of remorse or fear." And again, it would be interesting to park there and explain why and how that is important.

The ultimate test of any civilization is what it does with its children. And your parents demanded that they care enough about you to send you to a school like this. The Christian school is tasked with instilling the worldview that all of life is sacred. When students wonder, grasp truth, love all people, and find personal security, all by sitting at the feet of the Master Teacher and his human agents, they find life to be meaningful and full of purpose. And so this morning, ideas have consequences.

In terms of science, we say a given cause with time produces a certain effect. In biblical terminology, sowing given time produces some kind of reaping. One of the things I want you to carry away from this topic, which is entitled The Skeleton in the Closet: Ideas Have Consequences. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by hopelessly while everyone else repeats it. I have a book with me. I won't take time to show it.

It's entitled Mennonite German Soldier. It chronicles how the German Mennonites spent a hundred years losing their non-resistance a little bit at a time so that by 1900, they were ready to participate in World War I. By the mid-1700s, the Mennonites in Germany were losing their Anabaptist worldview. They spent a hundred years losing their non-resistance one step at a time. By 1900, they're ready to take up arms. And World War I cost them 400 German Mennonite soldier deaths.

But they had come to love the martial spirit of their times. And again, it would be fun to park right here and explain what is meant by that. If you have ever listened to a military band play, if you've ever watched a military parade, you know it's emotional. And Mennonites loved that emotion and bought into it. The Prussian German Mennonites were mostly assimilated in Prussia by the late 1800s and desired to partake of all the positive elements of being German and wanted to participate fully in German society.

Now, you'll notice that on a number of these slides here that I have sources for these statements. The story I have to tell you today is so awful that nobody wants to even write a book because it won't sell. This is an unpublished, or this quote is from an unpublished dissertation. "On the other hand, the Mennonites wanted to maintain the cultural and religious traditions that gave them a strong sense of group identity and a strong sense of connection with their cherished history." So what are you going to do?

You can't do both. You want to go with the Prussian spirit of the times, and you have your own history. They don't match. They're forced to a choice. The Prussian Mennonites were familiar with the Martyr's Mirror, which is basically the Dutch-Russian story. Our story is only about 60 pages at the very end. We value that book. They do not. They were familiar with the Martyr's Mirror, but they chose to believe that the past did not apply to the present.

The martyr stories were good for that day, but not applicable for the present day. Does that sound familiar in any way? The German Mennonites outgrew their Anabaptist forefathers such as Menno Simons. Instead, they adopted the ideas of Julius Wellhausen and another man by the name of Friedrich Schleiermacher, German rationalist scholars. Okay. These men taught a higher criticism, which claimed that the Bible was a sublime collection of human documents.

Human reason was to be trusted, not the supernatural claims of the Bible. So it's man versus God, who is the ultimate source of authority. Now, a culture cannot lose its philosophic center without the most serious of consequences, not just to the philosophy on which it was based, but to the whole superstructure of culture and even each person's notion of who he or she is. Everything changes. So you cannot shift from one to the other without having very serious consequences.

And so these Anabaptist people decided that if they want to go with the Prussian spirit of their times, they have to forget about their separation of church-state concepts. And by the way, do you know that your Anabaptist forefathers are the ones who actually pioneered that gift to Western history? Your forefathers bought the concept of religious freedom with their blood, and now everybody values it. And I don't know why many of our people do not know that. Your people are the ones who pioneered religious freedom.

It was understood in Europe. In fact, being an Anabaptist was a criminal offense at first because they understood that human society needed to have state and church like wolf and wolf and cloth. If you pull the state apart from the church, it's just like fabric. It will fall apart. And so to be an Anabaptist, to insist that they're separate, you're an anarchist, and you need to be killed because society will crumble. Okay.

So if you lose that concept and you send your children to institutions of higher learning, where are you going to send them? Well, there were Lutheran and Baptist seminaries and training schools in Germany and Prussia.

It says, "With leadership from Lutheran and Baptist-trained pastors who encouraged church-state cooperation, the Mennonites, one of the few Christian denominations founded on a theology of radical non-conformity and non-resistance, were left without a substantial theological foundation for resisting Nazism." Okay. So once this separation disappeared, they became prime prey for Nazism. So here's the dilemma. In Anabaptist history, Anabaptists teach God and I, but it doesn't stop there.

Protestants teach God and I, individual relationship to God. Anabaptism has something in addition to that. It's God and we. No man is in Christ apart from his brother. Our Protestant friends do not believe that. Okay. So how do you put those two together? And once again, you can't. And so these people were willing to yield on this one. And so it's back to God and I. So what happens if you have liberal, individualized theology plus conservative political views?

Well, you get Mennonite German Nazis minus the two kingdom concept, which turned into impotence against Satan and recognized by the Nazis. And you'll understand more why this is important to the Nazis as we proceed. And so Hitler said in 1923, "The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human. They cannot be human in the sense of being an image of God." Now get the date, 1923. In 1924, Adolf Hitler wrote, "By their fruits you shall know them. Puritans, Anabaptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, those are the juiciest ones.

In each of them sits the Jewish maggot." And again, it would be interesting to park here and talk about what that means. Adolf Hitler says in 1928, "We tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian." Date, 1928.

I'm not going to read all this to you for the sake of time, but basically this page, which is a quote from The Burden of Guilt saying, "Everybody in Germany needs to surrender their will and give it to the Führer or to Hitler and embody themselves in his great will so we can go on with the Third Reich." The Third Reich was to be a thousand-year Reich. In order to make this happen, everybody needs to forget themselves and just join in this movement. And there he is, the man who pioneered this kind of concept.

A quick question. What's this? Someone said, "Swastika." Do you know that when I give this in several different places, people sometimes don't know what this is? I suppose you know if you mess around with that today, you can get into big trouble. That is how much Nazism is hated today. In 1924, a Mennonite West Prussian congregation wrote about the rise of Adolf Hitler, "God gave our German people a Führer who knows how to unite our nation with God's strength. Our prayers go out to him.

May God bless him and arm him with his strength, not only to become a leader toward unity, but also a leader for us and for our German people toward God and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ." In 1933, the German Mennonites wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler, and this is what they said, "The Conference of the East and West Prussian Mennonites meeting today in Teggenhagen in the Free State of Danzig is grateful for the great uplift which God has given our people through your strength of will and also pledges its

enthusiastic willingness to cooperate with the building of our fatherland with the strength of the gospel, true to the motto of our fathers, 'On other ground can no man lay a foundation than Jesus Christ,' which is Menno Simon's favorite verse." They wrote this to Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler wrote back to them, and this is what he said to the Mennonites, "The content of your letter reveals true loyalty to me and your readiness for the cooperation with the construction of the German Reich, and I extend my sincere thanks." The German people commonly believe that the Jews were responsible for the German loss of World War I. The Treaty of Versailles unfairly held Germany responsible for large war reparations, angering the Germans as well as Adolf Hitler.

Thus, Hitler could easily portray the Germans as the victims and the Jews as the victimizers. I don't know how much you know, but the Jews often associate themselves with communism, especially in Russia. The Jews would need to be dealt with. This is Adolf Hitler in his book for Mein Kampf. He says, "By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work. Today, I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator." Adolf Hitler promoted the idea of social Darwinism.

The strong survive, the weak die off because they lose in the competition. And that's in contrast to Christianity because Christianity and its notion of charity, he thought, should be replaced by the ethic of strength over weakness. Peace, humility, and meekness were weakness. This is Adolf Hitler writing to Hermann Rauschening. He says, "This comes from a book, The Burden of Guilt. We must free ourselves of all sentimentality and become hard.

When I give the order for war one day, I shall not worry about 10 million young men whom I thus send to their death. What impresses is cruelty, cruelty, and brute force. If someone is so effeminate that he cannot endure seeing someone writhe in pain beside him, he must join a monastery, not my party comrades." Hitler said this, "History will recognize our movement as the great battle for humanity's liberation, a liberation from the curse of Mount Sinai.

God is a tyrant who orders one to do the very things one doesn't like." Hitler said, "I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of conscience, imperious, relentless, and cruel." And he lived that out himself with things like Auschwitz. How many of you have ever been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington? The rest of you need to go. You're not really finished with your education until you visit that place, and you need to be there more than just an hour. There's an awful lot there. Okay.

So we have Mennonite principles such as separation from the world, conformity only to the will of God, swearing no oaths to any kind of earthly ruler, and who maintain non-resistance. And we have Nazi principles that demand conformity to Nazism, demand loyalty through an oath, and they're going to subdue the world forcibly in Hitler's name. Now, those two do not fit together. Once again, as I said, they were poles apart. Something has to give.

And so the desire to remain in Prussia, to be German, led the Mennonites into a pattern of compromise. A Protestant movement of openly Nazi German Christians was established, whose philosophy was summed up by one of its leaders, Pastor Luthauser, who says this, "Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler.

We have only one task: to be German, not Christian." Adolf Hitler himself said, "The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity and invention of the Jews." So in 1933 now, Hitler is changing his tune. He is now saying, "One is either a German or a Christian. You can't be both." Once again, got to make a choice. Now, in cases like this, every so often, somebody has their head screwed on straight. And this man, Joseph Gingrich, was one such man.

Joseph Gingrich wrote this, and this is a quote from Houses on the Sand. He said, "The danger is great because we have become faint-hearted and unaccustomed to struggle after a long period of religious peace and freedom, and because we quite naturally bristle at recognizing a danger that will shoo us out of our compliant contentedness, since it may well shatter our religious as well as our economic well-being." And that's the last I know anything of Joseph Gingrich.

He proudly died in the Holocaust or in the war in some way. And so under pressure, in 1934, the German Mennonite Conference eliminated a non-resistant position from its written confession of faith. People talk first and eventually write down what they say. So they did all this talking for many years. And finally, as Nazism is coming into the picture, they decided to write it, and they were officially no longer non-resistant. German Mennonites repeatedly hailed Adolf Hitler as the liberating savior from communism.

But beginning in 1935, the Nazis blocked all German Mennonite financial assistance to their persecuted brothers and sisters in the Soviet Union. The German Mennonites meekly submitted to their Lord. Let me pause here to say this. Remember, these are the people who stayed in Prussia. Their relatives had gone on to Russia. And Stalin and Lenin and the war, the revolution, dealt a heavy blow to these Mennonites who went to Russia, and they needed financial assistance.

And so the German Mennonites were sending them financial help. Eventually, the Nazis said, "Stop it." Now, if Hitler is their Lord, if the Nazi Party is becoming their Lord, what choice do they have except to say, "Yes, sir." So they no longer could support their friends and brothers in Russia. By occupying the Rhineland in 1936 in defiance of treaty, Hitler had taken a gamble and won. "Hitler succeeds at everything," people said. Not long later, Hitler won 98.8% of the vote in an election.

"Triumph upon triumph," gloated Goebbels, the soon-to-be Nazi propaganda minister. "We did not dare hope for this. In our wildest dreams, we were all stunned." The Führer was very still and said nothing. He only laid his hands on my shoulder, and there were tears in his eyes.

Later that year at the Nuremberg Party Conference, Hitler proclaimed, "It's the miracle of our age that you found me among so many millions and that I found you is Germany's great fortune." And again, it would be interesting to park here and talk about that. Now, this is an interruption. This is a quote from Ambrose of Milan. This is not an Anabaptist, but he says this, and it applies to what's going on here.

"He who knows evil is being done and does nothing to stop it is guilty with the evildoer." It's called complicity. So what are the Mennonites going to do about this? At one time, both Jews and Mennonites were welcomed by German princes who needed their tax money. And by the way, governments through the years have found out that it's good to have Mennonites around because they are good tax income. Both groups, Jews and Mennonites, aroused popular resentment and persecution because of their economic prosperity.

Eventually, German political correctness showcased the prosperous Mennonites for their honesty and industry while declaring that Jewish prosperity undermined German values. So again, you can't have both. One's going to have to go. The Mennonites stayed, the Jews went. There was an old saying back there in Germany, "You have to get up pretty early to hoodwink a Jew, but if you want to bamboozle a Mennonite, you can't even go to bed the night before." It's a quote from Houses on the Sand.

Said of German Mennonites in the 1930s, "This German ethnic mania transformed the public profile of Mennonites. The one-time pesky sect now epitomized Germanness with its steadfast adherence to thrift, sobriety, piety, honesty, and industry. Perhaps the most significant was the Mennonite preservation of racial purity." Now, let me pause right here.

Now, the reason they said that is because when the Dutch left Holland and went to Prussia, they were not allowed to evangelize anybody, and they could only baptize people into their church who were their own children. If a Prussian Mennonite married a girl or a boy outside the Mennonite faith, the children of that marriage could not be baptized Mennonite. And so people did not want that to happen. So they mostly only married in the church, and thus they kept their racial purity.

And the Mennonites had become good Aryans without even trying. And look at this next statement, "No other German free church was lauded with such praise." The Nazis said, "Look at those Mennonites. They already know how to do this." So the Mennonites just stood there and smiled. "We are the good guys." Adolf Hitler spoke of Germany as a body with himself as the doctor. He wanted to make Germany healthy by eliminating diseased, unhealthy parts of the body. Early on, this meant killing the disabled.

But because the Nazis also believed that Jews possessed bad genes, they too came to be portrayed by public health experts and scientists as a threat to racial purity and a healthy nation. And so among the Mennonite people, genealogical associations archived and cataloged large volumes of Mennonite ancestral information for determining whom to count as Jewish versus Aryan. As a means of ensuring the collective Aryanness of Germany's Mennonite community, genealogical research was extremely effective.

Individual members obligated to fill out racial passports were often able to do so with the help of church archivists or other local genealogists. At least one congregation met to fill out race forms as an official church activity. One participant said, "Until now, a Mennonite was considered Aryan without question. A single case would ruin our reputation." And so this is right straight from the Mennonite Quarterly Review.

If you want to know what if you were a good Aryan, a good Mennonite, this is what you looked like. In fact, the principal of the school I taught last year, his name was Jacob Peters. He looks like this man. These people have kept many of them have kept their racial purity up to the present. The German Mennonites engaged in anti-Semitic communication both verbally and in print. They noted that Jews were a part of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and profited financially from World War I.

They agreed that violence should not be used against Jews, but that legal restrictions were proper. This attitude was all the Nazis really needed to implement their final solution. The German Mennonites would be passive and silent as the Holocaust happened in their midst. In contrast, the Quakers corporately and individually refused to be passive and silent, actively aiding the Jews where and when they could.

One of the reasons why these people were so much against Jews and willing to participate in their persecution is because they looked across to Russia and saw what was happening to their people. Many Mennonite survivors of the Stalinist terror and anti-Kulak and deportation campaigns expressed virulent hatred. Now, get that. Mennonites are hating Jews and communists as equivalent evils.

Mennonites generally resented, envied, and despised Jews because so many of them seemed to have been found in the ranks of the Soviet secret police and the Communist Party cadre, as well as among the supervisors and managers of the collective farms and local government agencies. Let me point out to you this man right here, Gerhard Rempel, has been devoting himself to uncovering this story. I'll talk more about that later. So why have the Jews been mistreated throughout history?

It'd be interesting to park here for a while and talk about this. Here's at least two ideas. They have been above average in intelligence, and other people have been jealous of them. But the facts are notable Jews of recent times. Ever hear of Albert Einstein? Jew. Karl Marx, father of communism, was a Jew. Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State, Jew. Sigmund Freud, Jew. Jonas Salk, Jew. Mayor Rothschild, Jew. And their occupations and their focus of work is there.

The Nazis used the cross, the swastika, which is a broken cross, and the Bible as they did their work against the Jews. And the Jews ended up crushed and dehumanized and all the more alienated from the gospel because the symbols of redemption were used by their abusers. So that today, most Jews are atheists. Drowning people abused by the life preserver turn to the safer worlds of agnosticism, atheism, or the vague pluralistic feel-good spiritualism, which is the position of most Jews today.

The Jews say there could not have been a God in heaven who allowed the Holocaust to happen. And so they became atheists. Not all, but many of them today are atheists. Even the nation of Israel is mostly atheist today. So the German Mennonites would only help Jews if it did not put their own lives in jeopardy. Compare that with Corrie ten Boom and what she did. Probably the only person who had any chance of hampering Hitler was the pope, who had the ear of 40 million German Catholics, but he barely said a word.

When German forces occupied Rome, he opened his sanctuaries to give refuge to many thousands of non-Aryans, but he was committed to neutrality in his search for peace and feared provoking Hitler, so he opened not his mouth. And that's exactly what Hitler wanted. Nobody to say anything. Shut your mouths. If you open your mouth, you will only rock the boat. The most harshly persecuted Christian group in Nazi Germany was the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Of a population of 20,000, about half spent some time in concentration camps. At least 1,400 died in concentration camps, and about 250 were executed for refusing to bear arms. These people did open their mouths. And you see what happened to them? They got put in a camp or killed, but the Mennonites would not. From 1920 to 1940, this is back in Russia now, one-third of all Russian Mennonites were arrested and disappeared.

The watching German Mennonites said in 1936, "The recently resurrected German Reich has become a protective bulwark against the Bolshevik assault. We have remained spared from the horrors suffered by comrades that share our faith and our racial stock in the Soviet Union." They could say, "Thank God for Adolf Hitler. We're not experiencing what our people in Russia are experiencing. Oh, we're so grateful to God for that." You see, Stalin said, "Death is the solution to all problems." No man, no problem.

He was willing to kill 20 million of his own people to get rid of the problems. Adolf Hitler says, and this is in the burden of guilt, "My educational method is hard. The weak must be chiseled away. In my order castles, young people will grow up who will frighten the world. I want a violent, arrogant, unafraid, cruel youth who must be able to suffer pain. Nothing weak or tender must be left in them. Their eyes must speak once again the free, magnificent beast of prey. I want my young people strong and beautiful.

I shall train them in all kinds of athletics, for I want youth that are athletic. That is first and foremost. Thus, I will face the pure and noble raw material. Thus, I can create the new. I do not want an intellectual education. With knowledge, I will spoil the young. I would vastly prefer them to learn only what they absorb voluntarily as they follow their play instinct. They shall learn to overcome the fear of death through the most arduous tests.

This is the historic stage of heroic youth." And so you've read about these things. There's the Hitler Youth. Those are the boys. And you were really out of sync. You were not cool in Germany if you did not join the Hitler Youth. That's the boys. And it didn't stop with the boys. Here are the girls. These are the League of German Maidens. John F. Kennedy is the source of this quote.

He says, "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic." And these people, the German Mennonites, were willing to buy into that myth. In 1937, Eberhard Arnold's German Hutterite community was forcibly dissolved because its members stood up against Hitler, and Hitler would not tolerate it. He chased them out. Its members deported from Germany.

But the German Mennonites, to distance themselves from these people, wrote, "The Hutterites belong neither to German Mennonite churches nor to any other organization within our free German Mennonite church." In other words, we don't know these people. We don't have anything to do with them.

In 1938, official church president Friedrich Werner gave orders that on Adolf Hitler's 49th birthday in April, all Protestant pastors must swear an oath of allegiance to their Führer and Reich Chancellor, which is Hitler's two titles. Werner's decree included the words, "Anyone who refuses to take the oath is to be dismissed." German Christians took the oath immediately with joyful hearts and in obedience to inner command.

And once again, the German Mennonite church joined the Protestant flow and said, "Yes, sir." Official German Mennonite publications supported the Third Reich, praised the Nazi armies. This is official church publication. Rejoiced in their victories and called for Mennonites to lay down their lives for their friends. With the 1939 reunion of Danzig with Germany, the Prussian Mennonites praised the act as nothing short of the merciful will of God.

In a few short years, the victories crumbled into ashes and bitter tears. And this is you're not going to be able to see a whole lot on this picture, but that's what Danzig looked like by 1945. Just a bombed-out city. Until its ceased publication in 1941, the German Mennonite Periodical, blah, blah, blah, continued to laud Hitler and his policies, as well as to provide theological and biblical reasons for supporting them. In 1937, Hitler ordered all German children into government schools.

He said, "The youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason, we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community." At a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled, this Reich stands and is building itself up for the future upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.

Here's some more quotes from Adolf Hitler. "He alone who owns the youth gains the future." He said also, "How fortunate for leaders that men do not think." It's always more difficult to fight against faith than against knowledge. Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it. He said in 1941, "I can't break the church over my knee.

It has to be left to rot like a gangrenous limb, but the healthy youth belong to us." Heinrich Himmler, which is not Hitler's right-hand man, said, "We shall not rest until we have rooted out Christianity." When the Nazis permitted German Mennonites' freedom to exist as a church only if they abandoned all critical public commentary, they had no anchor. And once again, they said, "Yes, sir." While the public face of German Mennonites consistently supported the Nazi regime, this was not a result of cold calculation.

Neither did it take place in the absence of soul searching. Nonetheless, their faith failed to provide a perspective that transcended the trappings of their culture and their era. And again, it would be interesting to stop and talk about that for a while. And recently, some time ago, when I gave this presentation in Maryland, someone told me that I need to go visit a person in the community, and it turned out to be this girl right here. Her name was Ruth. She was since that time Yoder.

Here are the parents, Johannes and Gerda Reimer, okay, when they were first married, and this is their family, okay? Sorry. This man, her father, became an SS man. Her mother tried to save the family. And when the Russians were coming at the end of World War II, coming out of Russia, invading Prussia around Poland, this lady and her family fled, okay? They got to the sea coast, up close to Denmark, got on a barge.

This lady took a sheet and went around herself and her children so that if a bomb would fall on their barge, they would all die together. And a bomb fell on a neighboring barge, and everybody in that barge died. But barges or rafts kind of bob around like this, and she did not want any of her children falling into the water. And believe it or not, she saved all her children. And eventually, after the war, this man came home.

This girl says, "I do not believe my father was a Christian, but this is a Mennonite family." The biggest flaw of Mennonites was not any immediate error. Instead, it was a natural consequence of years of gradual theological adaptation and compromises to better fit within the German community. So that, get this, not one able-bodied Mennonite man of draft age in all of Germany refused conscription by the Nazi army. Some even joined the notorious SS. And I'm going to be up.

I was going to tell you a story, but I'm just going to have to drop the story. In early 1945, the Mennonites of the former West Prussia, where this lady was from, the Reimers were from, were the hapless victims of the advancing Russian army. A general fear of being caught by the invaders led many to flee to the west. Those who waited remained or waited too long to escape. Usually, the sick, the young, and the elderly suffered mightily at the hands of the Russian army. Now, get this.

I'm sorry to tell you this, girls, but the soldiers that came in, the Russian soldiers would rape every woman they could find. And after they went through, the hospitals filled up with ladies having abortions. It's an awful, awful, awful story. Starvation, rape, bodily injury, torture, deportation to Russia, and loss of life were among the horrific events of those days. Congregations and families were torn apart. Most would never again see their homeland.

The vibrant communities of Mennonites in West Prussia were utterly destroyed. The consequences for the German Mennonites of abandoning their New Testament principles was complicity with the Nazi regime and being collaborators in the Jewish Holocaust.

After the Nazi atrocities became fully known to the public in 1945, the Mennonites found themselves battling the demon of their own creation in the stark realization of having compromised their fundamental tenets of faith by their alliance with one of the most evil regimes in human history. How can it be that people who originate with Anabaptists have martyr stories in the martyr's mirror cooperated with Adolf Hitler? How could that happen?

It took 30 years before writings addressing the Nazi past came to be written by German Mennonites. And for many, this was a very painful process. One of the Nazi concentration camps, Stutthof, was located east of Danzig in the midst of Mennonite farmhouses. A large number of smaller camps belonged to this KZ also. And the inhabitants of the area often saw starving prisoners in striped dress on their way to the places of their forced labor. They're working for Mennonites.

The concentration camp victims were working as slaves for Mennonites. Okay, I'm going to have to quit. This has not ended, but we'll just quit here. I would like to say this. This problem was so big and so bad, it took 50 years for the Mennonites to even acknowledge this. And they had their first official publication in 1995, where they said, "We recognize that we did wrong. All we can say is God forgive us." But that's only some. Probably most Mennonites never repented of this.

And in Paraguay, there's a book that's actually this is actually a book. That's the title. That's what it looks like. Attitudes Among Mennonites, Colonists in Latin America, it says Mennonite and Nazi. This is hard to believe, but in a church in Paraguay, there's a pulpit with Adolf Hitler's picture behind the pulpit. Okay, I'm just going to have to quit. I would have loved to do a Q&A, but thank you very much for your attention. I don't know how to end this except that the clock is saying stop.

I hope you in your heart of hearts sat here and say, "This will not be me." The least you can do is decide, "If everybody else does it, I will not." Do you have a conscience? You know what God says. You've got to live by a conscience. You may not bend your conscience. And you need to speak. Anybody who is silent in the face of evil and says nothing is complicit with that evil. That's where you'd start.