"The Mennonite Nazis" Part 1 - Chester Weaver

Lesson Transcript

Guide me, O the great Jehovah, pilgrim through these barrenness. Well, good morning and welcome to Hope for Wandering Amish. We're so glad to be together here this morning and so happy to have Chester Weaver on from Texas. I'll let him introduce himself a bit once he gets started. Yeah, he was on last month and shared on the Rush of Mennonite History, which that's recorded and available to listen to. But this morning he's starting a two-part series called The Mennonite Nazis, which is a really sad title.

But there's a lot of sad things in history that we can learn from that will hopefully prevent us, as we learn these things, hopefully that'll help us prevent from repeating those things again. So, Brother Chester, welcome here this morning. I'll have a prayer for you, and then the time will be yours. Father, we thank you for this morning. Thank you for blessing us so richly with your word. And also, thank you for blessing us with the history that we'll be learning here this morning.

And Father, we just pray your blessing on this meeting. Thank you for everyone in the audience. Just bless our time, and may it be fruitful, and may your kingdom be advanced in a further way. Bless us in the precious name of Jesus. Amen. Amen. All right, the time is yours, Chester. Okay, so good morning, everyone. The story that I have to tell you this morning is an awful story. It's a terrible story, but it's a cautionary tale. And since there's nothing new under the sun, all the old stories are the new stories.

It's just new faces and new places. And so there's a principle behind all this as to why I need to tell this story. And hopefully, as we go along, you'll understand the significance of this story. Several years ago, I presented a shorter version of this same Mennonite Nazi story to the high school students at Terry Hill School in Laxter County, Pennsylvania. That shorter session is recorded as episode 98 on Anabaptist Perspectives as a YouTube video. Now, today, I'm giving a longer version. This is two-part.

We'll do one part this month, and we'll do the second part next month. And we'll try to close early enough that you can ask some questions on each part. Well, since that time, I compiled a 250-page book entitled The Mennonite Nazi Story, and this is what it looks like. Can you see that okay? Yes, I think we can see that quite clearly there. And where can that be purchased at?

Okay, you can contact me, write to me, or send a check to me, $40 plus $5 shipping, 45 total, to Chester Weaver, 504 North King Street, Itasca, I-T-A-S-C-A, Texas, 76055. Okay, this 250-page book is intended for high school students or Bible school students, but many people have been buying it for themselves. But it's intended as a student resource for anybody who wants to look more deeply, do further research on some part of this large subject. This is a very large subject.

And the unfortunate thing is that this is such a terrible story that this large subject has been kept hidden for many years, for 50 years since World War II ended. It's only in the last 30 years now that the story is coming out. There are two complete books now that are telling the story, and they're referenced in my book. My book is just a compilation. I did not write the book. I just compiled from various sources. And here's one of the books. It's entitled European Mennonites and the Holocaust.

This is a very valuable book for people who would like—this is not mine at all. This is a book for people who are seriously interested in studying that. The second book is this book, Chosen Nation, by Ben Gosen. And it's referenced in my book. I have pictures of the covers. My book is just a resource book to show people where to do further study. And since I gave this presentation in Maryland one time, somebody told me that there's a lady in the area that I need to visit. And her name was—she was Ruth Reimer.

She's now Ruth Yoder. And so somebody wrote her story, which is called A Place for Ruth. You can buy it from different places. I think maybe CLP Publishers, Christian Light Publications has it, or Sermon on the Mount Publications. And then this book—I'll reference this book in my presentation this morning—Mennonite German Soldiers.

This traces the 100-year period and documents how the Mennonites in Germany lost their non-resistant principles a little bit at a time so that they were ready to participate, fully ready to participate with the Nazis whenever the Nazis came along. So this is a very large subject. And I'm introducing this to you. The job of a teacher is to work himself out of a job. If you can—I can never tell you everything you need to hear.

But if I can show you where to do further research yourself, then I will accomplish my purpose. So many of the slides that I'm going to present this morning show their documentation. I didn't dream this up out of my own head. This comes from some kind of source. Many of them show their sources. But some of them don't. But like I said, I'm going to go halfway this morning. The other half will be for next month. Okay, so now I'm ready to present, Elam. So are you ready for me to present?

Yeah, you should be able to go ahead and share your slides there. Okay, can you see that now? I can see your entire computer screen right there. All right, so let me go to—there. Is that going to work? Yes. Yes, you're presenting your slides now. So the fact that the German Mennonites became Nazis, why did that happen? And so it's going to take two sessions to explore this. And hopefully, by the end, if even this first session, you'll begin to understand why this happened.

Okay, so 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. So we have not helped ourselves by not studying this story in the past. We are helping ourselves by looking at this terrible, terrible story. So by deletion, we did not help ourselves. By selecting or by choosing to look at this painful story, we will determine or help determine our own future.

Okay, if you look at this map, you'll notice that this is Europe, and there's two big circles. One that says 1, 1525, and the other says 2. Okay, so most of the people who are watching or listening to this subject this morning have their origin in Switzerland in 1525. This Anabaptist movement is now about 500 years old. Okay, in the process of time, many of our people went west to America, as you see with number six. You'll notice that they migrated to other places as well. That's not my story this morning.

Number two is the Netherlands. And this is where Menno Simons was from. And this is where we get the term Mennonites. Okay, so when the Mennonites began to be persecuted, they went east, like you see to number eight. This is Danzig and Deprescha. This is the map that I wanted to have last time that I didn't use. Okay, so the people in Danzig, the local people in Danzig, wanted these Mennonites to come, these Anabaptist people, because they knew how to drain swampy land and create good farmland.

That's what they did back in the Netherlands. Well, they did the same thing in Danzig. But they were never really appreciated there. They were tolerated in Danzig, in Prussia. Well, there was a lady who we learned to know, as history knows, as Tsarina Catherine the Great. And she knew about these prosperous farmers in Danzig. And so when she became Empress of Russia, she wanted these same kind of farmers to come to Ukraine.

If you look at number 10, that's where the story that I gave last week unfolded in some of the land that is being fought over right now by Russia and Ukraine in the war that's going on over there. Okay, so I don't want to pursue that any further. We looked at that prior. All right, let's go back to numbers one and two. This story is about the people who did not move, or if they moved from Netherlands, went to Prussia. This story is only partly about some of the people in Ukraine.

Okay, but it's also our people who did not move to America. This is a story about the people who stayed in Europe. And so our ancestors, some of us who are listening, our far distant cousins also became a part of this Mennonite Nazi story. And it turns out, if you study history, you discover that it's usually the more conscientious people, the more closely or more intently some people are dedicated to Christ, are the ones who move.

It's the people who are tied to their businesses, who aren't very conscientious, who are just ethnic, that like to stay. Well, that explains some of why we had some of the problems in Europe that we did. Okay, so I don't want to linger there too long. Let's move on. History is not the facts of the past. Rather, history is the written record of the past. We talked about this a little bit earlier. The written record is selective. The author chooses what to include or omit.

And the material included is slanted from the author's point of view, either by being sanitized, portraying only the best about the subject, or being demonized, portraying the worst about the subject. And so history readers must always read with discretion. I'm going to try to do my best in being objective with this story this morning. But it's impossible for me to be completely objective. So you have to ask Christ to tell the story.

He would only be the only person who is able to completely tell the story as it was. So that's just a fact right up front. And so if we take the three words, American, Mennonite, and Christian, and we put them together, would we, you and I, it'd be fun to do this in person with you. Would you consider yourself a Mennonite Christian American? Would you consider yourself a Christian American Mennonite or American Mennonite Christian? Well, when you go to school, you understand that nouns are more important.

They have more weight. And so the noun in English is last. We put adjectives in front. Okay, so the only proper position to be is either American Mennonite Christian or Mennonite American Christian. Well, the story I'm going to tell you is people in Germany who decided that they're not going to be Christian first, they're going to be German first. And so this is the consequence of what happens when people decide that their ethnicity or their cultural background is more important than their faith.

So ideas have consequences. In scripture terms, sowing given time yields a reaping. We call this the law of sowing and reaping. When it comes to scientific terminology, we say a cause given time produces an effect. But ideas do have consequences. And that's why we need to get this terrible story out of the closet and look at it. Because if we don't think properly with the two kingdom doctrine, we will experience unnecessary consequences.

And that's my goal this morning for us to learn to think the way Christ thinks with a strong two kingdom doctrine so that we don't end up with the consequences that the German Mennonites experienced. 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. Okay, if this was a high school class, I would love to just stop and talk about that for a while. But this is why many of our people today know little about this story and really don't need to feel it necessary to even learn about this story. We're having such a good time right now. We're making a lot of money right now.

And things are good right now. So why think about a story, a terrible story like this? Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it. And it's kind of humorous, but it's very serious. I mean, those who don't know the past are condemned to repeat it. It's just that simple. And so let's look at this a little further. Why this topic? I just mentioned those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it.

That's why I'm paying my debt to you this morning. I owe you this. So why did this Mennonite Nazi story happen? Well, we can put it into a nutshell. Jesus Christ, through the Holy Scriptures, was no longer the ultimate authority. That is the first point of the essence of the Anabaptist vision. When I teach Anabaptist history and theology at Bible school, I make the students memorize that. We talk about that and three other points in the very first class. And we mention this every class. And it's also on the test.

And this is where we are falling short again today. Jesus Christ is no longer the ultimate authority for many of our people. I'm embarrassed to admit that, but it's just the way it is. So in our story today, the pride in being German replaced the Christ-centered Anabaptist identity. Okay, so this two kingdom doctrine is understood in several ways. So the Roman Catholic and the Protestant people, who have a state church concept, understand the two kingdoms as church and state, each functions in its own sphere.

But they remain organically connected. That's why we call it a state church. Whereas the Anabaptist concept has to do with a completely different understanding. It's the kingdom of God versus the kingdom of this world, where there is no organic connection. The church and state function in completely different spheres with completely different responsibilities. And so when Jesus Christ of the Holy Scriptures is no longer the ultimate authority, then something else happens. Dualism replaces wholeness.

And that's a whole subject in itself. I talk about that on another issue, on another presentation in Anabaptist perspectives. Okay, this is a big, big subject, an important subject, but we can't go into that right now. Okay, so back to our story. These German Mennonites, the humiliation of German defeat in World War I, invited a new paradigm of how you look at history. The church began to be looked at as transnational and transracial. But the state was dedicated to a particular nation and a race.

But they were connected. Okay, so we understand today as Anabaptists, the church is transnational. It's transracial. But we call that the universal church. But we live in the state, and we obey the government as long as it does not make us disobey what Christ says. Jesus Christ of the Holy Scriptures is the ultimate authority. Okay, when these people lost this basic two kingdom doctrine, it legitimized participation in the Nazi state and created a blind spot for Nazi crimes.

That comes right out of one of these books I introduced earlier, European Mennonites and the Holocaust. Okay, this comes from another book that I referenced, I think last time, Smith's Story of the Mennonites. Since the days of their origin in Switzerland and the Netherlands, the Mennonites had become a separate people because of their faith and status in the society wherever they went.

Those that feared they would lose their identity, be this by compulsion or by gradual adjustment, moved on to countries where they were able to retain it. Consequently, by the time Hitler came to power, the Mennonites that had remained in Western Europe, in other words, the people who stayed, had surrendered much of this identity.

It's one task to describe this period and another to go back and trace all the steps of surrender of the original Anabaptist conception and testimony, as well as lift up the price that many were willing to pay to remain faithful to the Lord through the centuries. Concerning basic Christian convictions, one can have them, one can lose them, one can, by the grace of God, even regain them. But history indicates that very, very few times do people regain lost truths once they've lost them.

And so to keep them, to hold on to principles and practices that we have had for centuries is just super important if we're going to maintain the faith. Because once people lose, I'm not talking about dead traditions now. I'm talking about Christian traditions and Christian doctrines. Once they're lost, they can be regained, but it's very difficult. So we think that Mennonite nationalism, or German Mennonite nationalism, or Mennonite Nazis is a contradiction in terms.

Because Mennonites have historically been bound by faith, not by blood. In other words, Christianity is determined by faith, not by being connected blood-wise to a line. Okay, I come from the Swiss side. I have bloodlines. I have an ancestor that's mentioned in the Martyrs' Mirror. That doesn't really make me anything special at all. It's there. I'm very grateful for it. I don't want to break that chain. But that's really not our basic connection. It's faith, not blood.

But the Mennonite Nazi idea had to do with blood. And because of that, it was bankrupt from the start. Those Mennonites who were ignorant of their story, along with those who rejected their story, were duped into shameful behavior and were thrust into the ridicule of history. Okay, as I mentioned in this Mennonite German soldiers book, it traces a 100-year period. It says in this book, nation, religion, and family in the Prussia era from 1772 to 1880.

So that by the mid-1700s, the Mennonites in Germany were losing their Anabaptist worldview. They spent 100 years losing their non-resistance, one step at a time. And so by 1900, they were ready to take up arms. And when World War I happened, a number of Mennonites went to war. So that there were 400 Mennonite boys who died. But they had come to love the martial spirit of their times.

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 by being blood German and wanted to participate fully in German society. And you'll notice the reference that I get this from down below there. They were tired practicing Gelassenheit, tired being humble, tired living for other people and not themselves, tired of the non-exciting faith.

And they didn't really have an active faith anymore, or they would have never been tired of it. 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 while they were tired of it, they wanted to keep part of it as well. Because Mennonites are a group that are tied to history. And that's where we get a lot of our identity.

The Prussian Mennonites were familiar with the Martyrs' 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? The German Mennonites outgrew their Anabaptist forefathers, such as Menno Simons. Instead, they adopted the ideas of Julius Welhausen, a German rationalist scholar. Friedrich Schleiermacher is another man that they bought into.

His higher criticism claimed that the Bible was a sublime collection of human documents. Human reason was to be trusted, not the supernatural claims of the Bible. But 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. And again, it would be fun to park right here and talk about how that works, why that is so important.

But we must move on. And so part of the Mennonite involvement with German culture was they wanted to have trained preachers. They were tired of having ordaining leaders from among themselves. They wanted trained preachers. But where do you go for training? Well, they went to the Lutheran and Baptist universities. And in both of those cases, they believed in state church concepts. And so when you send your men off to be educated, they absorb the concepts of the institution.

This 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. So once the Mennonite ministers had switched over to a state church kind of mentality and doctrinal foundation, then the Nazis could move in.

And so when it comes to conscience issues, Anabaptists think in terms of a God and I. I'm responsible to God. I will be judged individually for my words and actions. But Anabaptists also believe in a collective. No man is in Christ apart from his brother. God relates to us individually, but he also relates to us as a group. And so that's the historic Anabaptist conscience, the historic Anabaptist mindset, as compared to the Protestant mindset, which is a God and I thing. I'm responsible to God alone.

You don't need to be in my hair, and I don't need to be in your hair. You do your thing. I'll do my thing. Well, by being trained in this new way, we lost the collective kind of thing, and we moved toward the individual. And so if the Prussian Mennonites had a liberal individualized theology, and you put that with conservative political views, that's how you get Mennonite German Nazis, minus the two kingdom concept.

And when that happens, then that turns into impotence against Satan, and it was recognized by the Nazis. So Adolf 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." Okay, the Jews were considered a pestilence, a spiritual pestilence worse than the Black Death. Why? The Jews fought with ideas. Their power was everywhere. The only way to remove the plague was to eradicate it.

If one Jewish family remained, it could infect the entire continent. And so we have to get rid of the Jews. This is what the Nazi mindset said. And the Mennonites began to buy into this kind of a mindset. And so in 1924, Adolf Hitler wrote, "By their fruits, ye shall know them. Puritans, Anabaptists, Jehovah's Witnesses, those are the juiciest ones. In each of them sits the Jewish maggot." That means that for our people, Anabaptists, we have had respect for Jewish people.

When I went to public school, there was a Jewish boy in my class, and my father said, "Make sure you're friends of that boy." We don't reject Jews. We appreciate Jews, recognize Jews for their Jewishness. And we could go into that further, but we will not at this point. Adolf Hitler said, "Five years later, we tolerate no one in our ranks who attacks the ideas of Christianity. Our movement is Christian." Now think about these dates as we go along here. October 27, 1928, Adolf Hitler said that.

Now this comes from a book entitled Mennonites in Canada by Frank Epp. One of the first tasks of the new regime, now we're talking about the Nazi regime, was a domestic cleanup to do away with corruption, with treason, immorality, and thievery. That's the old Germany. The Nazi Germany would become well again, socially and morally, so that the old Prussian spirit of purity, honesty, sincerity, and uprightness would prevail again. The people were optimistic and happy. All were working, young and old alike.

They loved Hitler. This is what Hitler was understood to be. He was getting rid of the old corrupt Germany, and he's bringing in a new Germany dedicated to purity, honesty, sincerity, and uprightness. And that made German Mennonites happy. They at least had some morals and some values and some disciplines yet from their heritage.

From the same book, Adolf Hitler was the one Western nation that stood up bravely against the threat from the East that Russia now represented, all the evils of the day, including atheism and modernism and immorality and human exploitation. Adolf Hitler was standing against that in Russia. Hitler had proved himself a greater enemy of communism than the church. The Führer was sympathetic to Christianity. The Russians were atheistic and communist. And so the Russians were the bad guys.

And the good guy was Adolf Hitler standing up against the bad guys over in Russia. And the reason this was significant is because the German Mennonites had relatives over in Russia. And the relatives in Russia were communicating with them and telling the Germans how bad they were experiencing the communist people under from the time the Bolsheviks took over. It's just an awful, awful, awful story. And they were telling the German Mennonites, "You folks have it good.

Just thank God that you have a leader like Adolf Hitler who is saving you from the terrible situation where we are." Adolf Hitler says this, "Today, Christianity stands at the head of this country. I pledge that I will never tie myself to those who want to destroy Christianity. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral development in literature and theater, the arts." And in the my pictures along the side are preventing me.

Is there any way I can get rid of this, Elam? Yeah. Are your pictures like if you go to the top of that little screen? Oh, yeah. Okay. Can I just go? There should be there's like a small line. Yes. Yeah. I got it. Got it. All right. Let me read that again. We want Adolf Hitler saying this, "We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral development in literature, theater, the arts, and in the press.

In short, we want to burn out all the poison of immorality, which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess of the past for a few years." Hitler said that in a speech. That sounds good. Now, this comes from a book called The Burden of Guilt. On page 124, this quote, "In his declaration of policy, Hitler was the wolf in sheep's clothing.

He explained that the government aimed at creating conditions for a deeply felt and truly personal religion, that it placed the greatest value on friendly relations with the church, and that the German nation wanted to live in peace with the world." A few pages later, page 166, we have this, "In no field did Hitler disorient the minds as thoroughly as in his approach to the relations between Nazism and Christianity. Positive Christianity was already in the party platform.

Now, that's the Nazi version of Christianity. Because of this, many people were induced to believe in all seriousness that Hitler had saved Christianity from red persecutions, that he would allow the free exercise of religion. Hitler further confirmed Christians in this belief by declaring that he was concerned only with the state and politics, not with the supernatural." Two pages later, we read this, "Hitler's real plans were well known to his inner circle, where he dropped all pretense.

The church may take command of the German in the hereafter. The German nation, through its Führer, takes command of the German in this world." Hitler told Rauschening that he would completely stamp out Christianity in Germany. So he's talking out of both sides of his mouth. And most people in Germany believed only what was coming out of the one side that they liked to hear. And there's a picture of Adolf Hitler.

And when I do this publicly, I like to ask students, "What do you call that on Hitler's left arm, that swastika?" And Nazism is so hated today that you could get into trouble just by being careless with that symbol. 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 to Adolf Hitler a letter.

And in this letter, they say this, "The conference of the East and West Prussian Mennonites meeting today in Hegenhagen 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." That last statement, Menno Simon's favorite verse.

Okay? They write this, Adolf Hitler. And he writes back to the Mennonites, "The content of your letter reveals true loyalty to me and your readiness for 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. The Jews would need to be dealt with. And I have an entire presentation on this, how he went about to create, and this is a marvel to me, how he used propaganda to change an entire nation's mind by vilifying the Jews. Different story. Better let it go. The stated German rationale, the moral imperative as to why the Jews need to be eradicated, was this.

And this is put forth by Joseph Goebbels, who was the Nazi minister, head of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda. "The Jew is a primordial evil in the world, completely satanic and devilish. We are now fighting this fight against him until his ultimate end. That is why this fight has become so hard and so ruthless. The Jew wants our blood and the blood of our children, and we want his destruction in Europe. In between, there is no compromise.

If the Jew wins, then all who are of German blood will be destroyed, sterilized, tortured to death, and slaughtered. If we win, then Judaism will, according to the words of Führer, be eradicated from the world." Hitler said, "Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge from the dirty and degraded self-mortifications of a false vision called conscience and morality.

The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a blemish like circumcision. 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," he said in his book, Mein Kampf. He wrote a book while he was in prison one time, and it's entitled Mein Kampf. And that's where that source is. Adolf Hitler promoted the idea of social Darwinism, where the strong survive, the weak die off because they lose in the competition.

Christianity and its notion of charity should be replaced by the ethic of strength over weakness. Peace, humility, and meekness were weakness. It's the strong that we want, and it's justified by social Darwinism. This is Adolf Hitler writing to Hermann Rauschening. "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 rise in pain beside him, he must join a monastery, not my party comrades." He also said, "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. I want to raise a generation of young people devoid of conscience, imperious, relentless, and cruel." And he did just that.

So if we have Mennonite principles such as separation from the world to conform only to the will of God, to swear no oath to an earthly ruler, maintain non-resistance, and you 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, you can't put those together. They're opposites. And so the Mennonites were forced to choose either their own story of the past or to buy into the new Nazi principles.

And so the desire to remain in Prussia 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 Luther Hauser, which is this positive Christianity. "Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler.

We have only one task: to be German, not Christian." Adolf Hitler said, "The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity and invention of the Jews." And so Adolf Hitler said in 1933, "One is either a German or a Christian. You can't be both," which is very different from what he had said earlier. One honest German Mennonite, Joseph Gingering, noted in 1934. Now, this Mennonite had his head screwed on straight.

He says, "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." This is the last that I know of Joseph Gingering.

I'm sure he had friends who shared some of the same kind of concept, but they had to disappear from history because their concepts did not prevail. And so in 1934, the German Mennonite Conference eliminated a non-resistant position from its written confession of faith. That's five years before World War II began with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Mennonite leaders sought to reassure themselves, the government, and the wider public that their pacifism was dead and buried.

Through the constitution of the Union of German Mennonite Congregations, the principle of non-resistance has been fully abandoned. Today, the German Mennonites perform military duties without any qualifications. Many Mennonites from the Reich voluntarily joined the army. And so by 1935, the German Mennonites had adopted the premise of one people, one state, one leader. This is literal. I have a friend who sent this picture to me.

This is a Prussian Mennonite house, including the brown shirt uniform belonging to the owner of that house. So I guess we're going to have to stop somewhere, Elam. Is that correct? Is it time to stop right now? You had mentioned about you had a certain amount of slides and you were going to get halfway through them. We're not there, but we just got to stop someplace. I mean, I can read this one yet, but unless you want me to keep going a little bit. Well, it's heading close to 7 o'clock.

We should probably give a little time here for people to share their questions or to make comments. All right. May I read this one yet, and then we'll stop? That's totally fine. Okay. So the German Mennonites were with, okay, we're focusing on Mennonites, developed a new definition of neighbor as, quote, "One with whom one shares one's being, in whom your blood also flows, a soul of one's soul. One's people is the area in which a Christian extends love. We are part of the German people.

The German is our neighbor to whom we declare our love and give our strength." Now, the obvious question, does that represent the good Samaritan concept? Of course not. The new definition of neighbor now is my fellow German. It's not anybody else. And so we can see how they're falling into these non-Christian concepts. Okay. So we'll just stop with that. Can you bring me back to where we were? If you stop share, there should be a button on your end. Yes, I do. All right. There it is. Yeah. Wow.

That's some very touching history. Appreciate it very much, Brother Chester. It's a hard history to share, I can imagine. But I owe you this. These are the facts. I'm not dreaming this. Yeah. Thank you for that. And I appreciate you all coming on that are in the audience there. And you should be able to unmute yourself now and ask a question or make a comment. And I just want to say, Chester, I really appreciate your passion for history. And I'm going to say it's contagious. And I'm glad. I'm glad.

I'm going to say you're doing your job. Good. And I know for myself, I wrote some of those names, some of those books down, and I plan on pursuing studying that history. So is there anyone in the audience that would like to make a comment or just tell Chester, "Thank you for sharing this," even though it's difficult and hard? All right. Is there anyone? You should be able to unmute yourself. Elam, I understand that this hard history is difficult to handle.

It is so over the top that it takes a while to absorb all this. And if there are very few comments, I understand why. I just wanted to say thank you, Brother Chester, for your labors of love and for bringing this to us this morning. My head's spinning and experiencing a lot of emotions. There's so much to learn from history and certainly from the history that you were bringing out this morning. And I'm sure there's so much more that could have been said, brought out as you went through, but this was very powerful.

Many things I could comment on. The one thing was the one slide mentioned something about not wanting to go there because it was uncomfortable. We like our comfort, and we're going to stay with whatever allows us to keep our comfort, which was a deception. They were not able to keep their comforts. But that's a powerful lesson for us today. I mean, life can seem so easy, so comfortable. We have our American safety and prosperity and all that.

May God help us to be honest with history and honest with the dangers that surround us and the conceptions that can so easily pull us into some kind of dire situation. The exact history that we looked at this morning is never going to repeat itself, but we can learn the principles. We can learn many of those things if we're just wise enough to stop and look at it. So it does my heart good to hear you say this. Is somebody paying attention? I just really, yeah. Thank you again, and look forward to more of this.

And I'll probably be listening to this talk again a time or two to help it sink in a little better. Yeah. Thank you for that, Brother Ephraim. Is there anyone else? Just feel free to chime in. Yeah. I know I wasn't on here all the way along. But the little I heard, I thought was very good. So I'm excited about going back and listening to that all. And Chester, hopefully you don't feel like you're the only one in America feeling that way. I really agree with you. So thanks for sharing. You're most welcome.

Hey, this is Terry Clifton. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you, Terry. Hi there, Chester. Thank you so much for your informative talk. I always enjoy the material that you present. It seems as though, as I watch that history unfold and yet maybe even repeat itself again today and these times, it seems like it all comes down to intent. They're trying to preserve the things in this world. They have a love of the things in this world, and they'll use worldly means to preserve it. And it corrupts them.

They don't even see that it is not with methods of eternal value because their mind is not on things that are from above of eternity. You understand, Terry. That's very perceptive. Yeah. Thank you very much for that, Terry. And we have time for more questions or more comments, so please bring them on. I'm just really amazed with reading history. I don't know if amazed is the right word or not, but I just see so many how history repeats itself.

And just simply seeing that in church history, in the early church, you had 300 years of a unified vision of what it meant to be a Christian and following Christ and following his teachings. And then you had Constantine kind of marrying or blessing the church and giving the church power. And then you see the corruption of the church. And that is really scary. And we see it with the German Mennonites there. And it seems like history just kind of keeps repeating itself in that way.

So that brings up an important thing. It doesn't have to. It usually does. But for people who learn history and act on it, don't repeat it. They stand by, sometimes, like I said earlier, helplessly while other people repeat it. But we don't have to. There is hope here. We're not doomed here. We can step aside whenever we learn. Yeah. Thank you for the encouragement. May we always be watching and waiting for the return of the Lord and have our minds on eternal things rather than earthly things.

And I think Terry said it well about the thought of trying to preserve something. What are we trying to preserve? And he brought out the thing of, yeah, that being worldly, like preserving earthly things. We want to preserve the faith that was once delivered to us. That's right. All right. We're about coming to the 7 o'clock hour. Is there anyone else? I'd love to hear from more people. It's always a joy to hear from you. All right.

If there's no one else, yeah, we just want to say thank you for coming on this morning and look forward to seeing you next month, the first Saturday. We're in November now, so that would be December. So the first Saturday of December, Chester plans to come on to share a second part of this series. And if you don't get through it, Chester, we'll have to just bring you on for a third part. Well, we'll just try to get through the next part. Two parts is enough.

I think we're all enjoying it and being really challenged by it, and we really appreciate that. So would you close us in prayer, and then we can consider ourselves dismissed? Heavenly Father, we thank you for these moments where we could share some terrible history where people have failed to learn. But I do thank you that you intend your people to learn and that you've been very fair with us in sharing with us biblical history and preserving history since Christ was here for 2,000 years.

And I pray that you would give us grace to be discerning for our times and be able to understand and perceive what is really going on and refuse to be sucked into the world system around us. So I ask for your perception, your wisdom, your guidance to help us discern the issues of our times. So bless each of us now as we go forth this day. Give us your wisdom, your grace, and your peace for Jesus' sake. Amen. All right. Y'all have a blessed day. Thank you.

Guide me, O the great Jehovah, pilgrim through these barrenness.