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Spring 2022 · Vol. 51 No. 1 · pp. 120–124 

Book Review

European Mennonites and the Holocaust

ed. Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 337 pages.

Reviewed by John D. Roth

Few topics have generated more historiographical energy—and moral anguish—among Anabaptist-Mennonite scholars in recent years than the renewed conversation about the complicity of German-speaking Mennonites in Hitler’s rise to power and the subsequent atrocities committed by the Nazis against Jews, Communists, homosexuals, and people with disabilities. For decades, Mennonite historiography has either ignored or greatly minimized the level of Mennonite support for National Socialism, focusing instead on the extreme suffering Mennonites endured in Russia as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution and the famines in the early 1920s, and on the {121} repressive policies of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, who targeted German-speaking minorities as class and political enemies of the emerging Soviet state.

To be sure, publications in the 1970s by Hans-Jürgen Goertz and Dieter Goetz Lichdi sparked a brief contentious conversation among German Mennonites. In 1999, John Thiesen’s excellent monograph, Mennonites and Nazis? explored local enthusiasm for National Socialism among immigrant Mennonites in Paraguay and Brazil; James Lichti’s dissertation a year later raised difficult questions about the responses of pacifist churches to National Socialism. But these works tended to be isolated, and they frequently met with indignant and defensive responses. If Mennonites were indeed complicit with National Socialism, the arguments went, it was an understandable reaction to Stalin’s “Great Terror,” or it was only a few “bad apples,” or they must not have had any other choice. Like the Jews, Mennonites were victims, not perpetrators, according to these accounts.

During the past decade, this picture has changed significantly. In 2010 Gerhard Rempel’s essay in The Mennonite Quarterly Review (“Mennonites and the Holocaust: From Collaboration to Perpetration”) presented primary source evidence that individuals from Mennonite communities in the Ukraine openly greeted the advancing German army as liberators, supported the National Socialist cause as administrators, translators, and military recruits, benefitted from Jewish slave labor, and were directly involved in execution squads. In the years that followed, a younger generation of scholars, led by Ben Goossen and Imanuel Baumann, have sparked sustained interest in the subject that resulted in three major academic conferences—in Germany (2015), Paraguay (2017), and the US (2018)—each of which led to a significant publication.*

The collection of essays gathered in the volume under review here originated in the most recent of these conferences—a gathering held in March 2018, at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas. {122}

In the introduction to European Mennonites and the Holocaust, editors Mark Jantzen and John Thiesen, along with historian Doris Bergen, offer a superb overview of the context of European Mennonites in the late 1930s, along with a brief summary of the literature, and a highly nuanced reflection on Mennonite complicity that addresses many of the complexities associated with the topic. Does a Mennonite surname in the sources, for example, adequately identify the perpetrator as a “Mennonite”? Does a focus on Mennonite complicity minimize the suffering they experienced? Can the sources be trusted, especially in circumstances where individuals were quick to shift their identity as a survival strategy? But even as the editors acknowledge these important nuances and caveats, the conclusion of the volume is unescapable: “Mennonites landed on the end of a spectrum tilted toward enabling, participating in, and benefiting from Nazi German rule, which included the genocide of the Jews” (4).

The twelve essays included in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, all by leading scholars, draw on a wide range of sources, cover a geographical scope that includes Germany, Soviet Union, Poland, and the Netherlands, and address topics that range from antisemitism to theology, historiography, and collective memory.

The collection opens with an essay, adapted from an unfinished book manuscript by Gerhard Rempel, that draws on evidence from the US Department of Justice Office of Special Investigation clearly identifying people from Mennonite families as war criminals or as witnesses, enablers, beneficiaries, and bystanders of war crimes. The next four chapters, focused on social structures and theology, provide a broader context for making sense of these responses. James Irvin Lichti outlines the development of Nazi church-state policies. By claiming free church status as a “denomination” (rather than a sect), Mennonites “portrayed the Nazi state as a defender of those principles” and came to regard themselves as “racially qualified for the entitlements of German freedom” (90). Imanuel Baumann traces a growing identity among German Mennonite youth early in the Nazi dictatorship as an “ethnic community” (Volk), a racial category that made them vulnerable to anti-Semitic propaganda and solidified their ties to the German state. Arnold Neufeldt-Fast and Pieter Post explore developments in Mennonite theology during the National Socialist era. Neufeldt-Fast concludes that German Mennonites had few theological resources to resist National Socialist ideology or policies and argues that a conscious post-Holocaust theology still remains a desideratum for Mennonite theology. In his essay on Dutch Mennonite theology during the Nazi era, Post contrasts the avid support for National Socialism expressed by Cornelius Hylkema {123} with the pacifism of Frits Kuiper. Not surprisingly, postwar scholarship has celebrated Kuiper’s role while virtually ignoring Hylkema.

The next cluster of essays move beyond the German context to explore Mennonite reactions to National Socialism in other settings. Colin P. Neufeldt, for example, provides a detailed account of the response of Mennonites in Deutsch Wymyschle, Poland, to the plight of local Jews early in the Nazi occupation. In 1939, Mennonites suffered violence at the hands of local Polish mobs, so their inclination to greet the advancing German army as liberators was understandable. But as Neufeldt demonstrates, they then quickly went on to express both passive and active support for Nazi brutality against local Jews.

Dmytro Myeshkov and Ailene Friesen extend this analysis to Mennonites in the Ukraine at the time of the Nazi occupation. Mennonites and Jews had lived alongside each other in the region for more than 150 years. Their relations, focused especially on commercial exchange, were largely cordial. But the experience of collectivization, famine, and the Great Terror left ethnic Germans—including many Mennonites—with a keen sense of victimhood, making them susceptible to National Socialist propaganda against “Judeo-Communism.” Myeshkov describes both active Mennonite participation in the massacre of Jews as well as indirect support, offered especially by Mennonite women, as informers and translators. Friesen draws on Jewish as well as Mennonite, German, and Soviet sources for her intimate description of Mennonites in Khortytsya and Zaporizhzhia, whose collaboration was often passive, remaining silent in the face of atrocities and then hiding behind a facade of naivete in the aftermath of the war.

The final essays in the volume, by Erika Weidemann, Hans Werner, and Steven Schroeder, explore various aspects of postwar memory and justice. Together, they raise haunting questions about the seductive attraction of “Mennonite exceptionalism” and the dangers of selective readings of the past that too quickly absolve Mennonites from moral accountability.

One outlier in the volume, Alle Hoekema’s “Dutch Mennonites and Yad Vashem Recognition,” describes several acts of individual sacrifice and heroism among Dutch Mennonites. But the overwhelming evidence in these essays confirms, in one way or another, a story of Mennonite passivity, indifference to, or active support of the policies of National Socialism.

For readers who may feel overwhelmed by the volume of books and articles that have appeared in recent years, European Mennonites and the Holocaust offers an excellent summary of the current state of scholarship. Anyone looking for an entry point into the rapidly growing {124} literature on this sober, if controversial, topic would do well to start with this collection.

* The presentations at the German conference appeared as Mennoniten in der NS-Zeit: Stimmen, Lebenssituationen, Erfahrungen, ed. Marion Kobelt-Groch and Astrid von Schlachta (Bolanden-Weierhof: Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein, 2017). Most of the presentations from the conference in Paraguay were published in Jahrbuch für Geschichte und Kultur der Mennoniten in Paraguay 18 (2017), with four of these essays appearing in English translation in a special issue of The Mennonite Quarterly Review (April 2018) devoted to Mennonites and National Socialism. Benjamin Goossen’s Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) also played a significant role in drawing attention to the topic, especially among North American Mennonites.

John D. Roth
Professor of History and Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Anabaptism
Goshen College, Goshen, Indiana

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