Call For Papers: What Young Historians Are Thinking Symposium

Posted on April 2, 2018 by JoelHNofziger

June 2, 2018

The Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, in partnership with the Sider Institute for Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan Studies at Messiah College, and with the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, welcomes paper proposals for its event “What Young Historians Are Thinking.”

Invited to participate are high school students, undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students, those who have just started careers in history, as well as those who are “young” in scholarly study of historical topics (no matter what their age). All must be engaged in original research using chiefly primary sources (written and/or oral). All should be a part of a Historic Peace Church (Amish, Brethren in Christ, Church of the Brethren, Mennonite, Religious Society of Friends/Quaker, etc.) or focusing on one or more of these traditions.

Those interested should submit a 250-word proposal, for a 20-minute paper to be given at the symposium, along with a brief autobiographical sketch and full contact information. Send these to Joel Nofziger at Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, 2215 Millstream Road, Lancaster, PA 17602, or at younghistorians@lmhs.org. A limited number of travel scholarships are available. Please note in the proposal whether this will be needed. The symposium will take place at Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, 400 Campus Rd, Elizabethtown, PA., at 1:30 p.m.

For the sixth year in a row, young historians are being invited to share their research findings with others in a symposium in the Lancaster area. This event was conceived by Joel Nofziger and Devin Manzullo-Thomas, who were concerned about how few venues there are where young adults engaged in historical research and writing are the focus of attention, especially for those from Historic Peace Churches. In the symposiums, three of the proposals received are accepted for papers to be given in a public event. In addition, the papers are subsequently published in Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage.

In the past, papers have included topics such as John F. Funk and the dissemination of information to the scattered churches of America, Quaker Anne Knight and her lifelong efforts for the rights of the disenfranchised, and the peace position of the Church of the Brethren, among others.

Proposals are due April 20, 2018

Symposium Planning Committee: Jeff Bach, Simone Horst, Jason Kauffman, Devin Manzullo-Thomas, Joel Nofziger, and Anne Yoder.

Re-Shaping the Chaco

Posted on March 29, 2018 by benjamesnt

In early 1930, 1500 Russian Mennonite refugees arrived in the Gran Chaco—a semi-arid, lowland region of dense bush on Paraguay’s western frontier. While their new home may have seemed far-removed from the conflict that had characterized their lives in post-revolutionary Russia, only two years later these pacifist Anabaptists found themselves at the center of the largest inter-state conflict in twentieth century Latin American history.

Anabaptist Historians readers are invited to read the complete article, “Reshaping the Chaco: Migrant Foodways, Placemaking and the Chaco War,” which explores the strategies that these Russian Mennonite settlers employed to solidify their tenuous claim to an unfamiliar and highly-contested landscape (Instructions for accessing the article are available at the bottom of this post).

Mennonite colonists engaged in a range of seemingly contradictory place-making practices—from the agro-environmental and the political, to the spiritual and the cultural. Ideas of food security, seen in terms of both production and consumption, linked these diverse exercises. In the Paraguayan Chaco, these former Russian wheat farmers experimented with new crops and foodways. Although pacifists, they supplied the Paraguayan military efforts and provided food aid to wounded soldiers even as they also sent symbolic shipments of their new crops to Nazi Germany. Finally, as an ethnic group practicing endogamy and seeking isolation from their neighbors, they unexpectedly initiated a campaign to evangelize the Chaco’s indigenous population centered, in part, on reforming the latter’s ‘deficient’ diet.

These diverse practices are evident in the pages of Mennoblatt, the small German-language newspaper that colonist Nikolai Siemens published and distributed to his fellow settlers in Fernheim colony. In Mennoblatt, colonists debated issues from the mundane to the dramatic. An article advocating for bread produced from varying portions of sorghum or manioc flour would appear next to a reflection on Mennonite’s place in the global Volksgemeinschaft. A discussion of the Chaco’s intense heat and the recent cotton or peanut harvest might follow an account of military troops passing through the colony or a report on the status of Mennonite’s new mission work among the Enlhet, a local indigenous group.

Published in the Journal of Latin American Studies, this article also seeks to bring the experience of Latin American Mennonites (a rapidly growing community of over a quarter of a million) into greater dialogue with Latin American history. Mennonites arrived in Latin America at times, and in places, that provide a compelling window on agro-environmental change, food security and state formation. Over the last century, they settled in frontier zones like the Gran Chaco on lands that governments considered of ‘marginal’ agricultural value. While the Russian Mennonites in question arrived in Paraguay immediately prior to the outbreak of the war, Canadian Mennonites settled the frontiers of Mexico and Bolivia in the wake of national revolutions and along Belize’s contested border with Guatemala as that small nation gained independence.

In those regions, Mennonites formed endogamous, isolated and ‘traditional’ colonies, but also became ‘model producers’ for domestic economies. In doing so, they consolidated and successfully leveraged a form of agricultural citizenship to sustain a conspicuous autonomy characterized by religious, educational and military exemptions. By turns considered ‘Russians’, ‘Canadians’, ‘Dutch’ or ‘ethnic Germans’, Mennonites benefitted from a racialized ideology of immigration as ‘whitening,’ even as their settlement was conditional upon a legally sanctioned refusal to assimilate into national society. They also maintained strong connections to their brethren throughout the Americas and Europe. This simultaneous engagement with a dispersed diaspora and distinct national identities might have represented an untenable paradox for earlier scholars of an assimilationist paradigm. Recently historians have adopted a more fluid approach to the complex, but often complementary, transnational–national negotiations among Latin American migrant communities. Finally, as one of the earliest Mennonite settlements in Latin America, the experience of Chaco colonists remains critical to understanding this evolving state–settler bargain as Mennonites—and their accompanying foodways—expanded across Latin America.

Instructions for Interested Readers:

Published by the Journal of Latin American Studies and currently available on Cambridge Core’s First View the article can be accessed for free at the link below.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-latin-american-studies/article/reshaping-the-chaco-migrant-foodways-placemaking-and-the-chaco-war/B50DFA1959426C9471CEF6D98B95646C

Use the Sharing Code: 4375333AB40A9D06B132046D5D7B57B3

To use the access codes above, please follow these steps:
1. Log in to your Cambridge Core account or register for an account
2. Once logged in, navigate to ‘My account’, then ‘My content’
3. Enter your access code into the ‘Redeem access code’ field and click ‘Activate’.”

Why collect a Nazi flag?: Kauffman Museum’s Role in Confronting Our Past

Posted on March 27, 2018 by Guest Contributor

Renae Stucky, Kauffman Museum, Collections Manager

In November 2016, a donor approached Kauffman Museum at Bethel College with the offer of this Nazi flag for consideration for donation. The flag belonged to the donor’s father who traveled to do relief work in Europe following WWII. The young Mennonite volunteered as a “Seagoing Cowboy” helping tend and deliver livestock being transported to war-torn countries by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the Heifer Project. The donor believes that the flag was given to his father by a man he befriended during his time in Germany.

While the flag has Mennonite connections, usually a decisive factor in the museum’s collections policy, its Nazi connections made it a controversial case. The decision about whether or not to accept the object evoked many questions. What would it mean to have the flag in our collection? Would accessioning the item show insensitivity to those who suffered under the Nazi regime? Or could we use the flag to expose and confront this difficult history? What role did the flag play in our mission to tell the Mennonite story?

Due to the controversial nature of the artifact, the flag was brought to the full Kauffman Museum board for consideration and discussion. Members of the board, staff, and Bethel College history faculty were invited to offer their expertise and insight to the conversation. A variety of viewpoints were presented. In preliminary correspondence, the potential donor of the flag asserted that if there was no interest in the artifact by an historical institution he would likely destroy it ceremoniously in memory of those who perished. The members of the history faculty acknowledged the sensitivity of the object, however they ultimately agreed that “there are more constructive ways” of dealing with troubling historical topics if used or displayed in the “appropriate interpretative context.”

After much discussion among the board about the flag’s Mennonite connections, the importance of not denying “painful history” and the need to address recent scholarship related to Mennonites and the Holocaust the board voted unanimously to accept the artifact into the museum’s permanent collection.

The flag was officially accessioned at the end of 2017 with the understanding that it would be used to acknowledge the difficult history surrounding the symbol, and to confront hate rather than celebrate it.

In conjuncture with the recent conference “Mennonites and the Holocaust” held at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, the flag was displayed across the street at Kauffman Museum along with several other Nazi artifacts from the museum’s collection (including artifacts brought to the United States from Mennonite colonies in South America.) The artifacts were displayed in a tall narrow case with the flag as a backdrop to a Luftwaffe dagger, an iron cross medal, and a commemorative pin from the Nazi era, and a copy of Mein Kampf. Accompanying the artifacts was interpretive text explaining the museum’s thoughtful consideration and acceptance of these Nazi artifacts, specially the flag, entitled “Why collect a Nazi flag?”

Why would Kauffman Museum collect a Nazi flag? In the same way that the conference continued the conversation about Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust, a museum has a unique opportunity to use artifacts, like this flag and others objects like it, as a catalyst for conversation about historical and current topics. We talk about these difficult issues, and display these controversial symbols, in order to confront the troubling parts of our past. If we ignore or destroy evidence of our misdeeds we risk forgetting them, letting them gather dust in the dim corners of our memory—or in this case our storage space. However if we literally, put them on display for all to see, we are forced to come face-to-face with the reality of our past, which could change our future.

Call for Papers–“Health and Well-Being in Amish Society: A Multidisciplinary Conference”

Posted on March 26, 2018 by JoelHNofziger

June 6-8, 2019

The international conference will focus on health, healing, health care, and individual and community welfare and well-being in Amish life. Since at least 1964, with the publication of the essay “Genetic Studies of the Amish,” by Victor McKusick, John Hostetler, and Janice Egeland, scholars have identified the unique contribution that Amish communities play in advancing medical knowledge. In the years since then, clinical studies, ethnographic research, and creative new avenues for providing health care have flourished with the active participation of the Amish.

The conference will highlight topics such as genetics, culturally appropriate care, Amish understandings of healing and well-being, mental health, alternative and complementary medicine, preventive medicine, health and Amish spirituality, insurance, aging, and death and dying. Speakers will address cultural resources for, as well as barriers to, health and well-being.

Conference planners welcome proposals from scholars and practitioners working in disciplines such as social science, medicine, public policy, and human services. Proposals may address the conference theme, other aspects of Amish life, or other traditional Anabaptist groups. Proposals for papers, panel discussions, or poster sessions are acceptable.

Specifications: A clear statement of topic, methods, and significance (350 words or fewer) and a one- to two-page résumé of the presenter

Submission: By e-mail attachment to amish2019@etown.edu

Deadline: October 1, 2018

Decision: December 1, 2018

Mennonites and The Holocaust: Five Ideas I Brought Home from The Conference

Posted on March 24, 2018 by Guest Contributor

Joy Kraybill

When I saw an advertisement for a 2-day conference on “Mennonites and the Holocaust” at Bethel College, I jumped at the chance to attend. My family is of Swiss-German Anabaptist descent, and in college in the mid-90s, I had majored in German. I had recently read Ben Goossen’s 2017 book, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era and suffice it to say, I had many questions about Mennonite activity during World War II. So I took two vacation days off of work, and flew to Kansas to learn more.

The conference was intense and almost overwhelming. I came home awash with thoughts and feelings and ideas. I found it useful to synthesize the things that were running through my mind into a few key ideas. While I’m sure each attendee experienced the conference very differently, I wanted to share the five main realizations that I brought home from it:

1. Despite what we might have hoped, Mennonites seem to have reacted to the Holocaust and Nazism in much the same way as the bulk of mainstream society did.

Most Mennonites really didn’t behave any “better” or any “worse” than most other European and Russian populations did at that time. As one example, we learned at the conference about a Mennonite family who bought a store as part of the “Aryanization” efforts which essentially robbed Jews of their property and gave that property to Nazis and/or non-Jews. Apparently Mennonites were not separate from this commonplace practice at the time. Likewise, I picked up a book at the conference about a Mennonite pastor who served for 5 years in Hitler’s army. (A Witness in Times of War and Peace: The story of Gerhard Hein, a Mennonite Pastor who served in the Wehrmacht during World War II by Wilfried Hein, 2015) Next on my list is another book from the conference, Mennonite German Soliders, by Mark Jantzen, 2010. These are just some examples of many. I do not know exactly what to do with these stories just yet, but I commend the people who are finding the courage to come forward and share them. To learn about these kinds of stories within Mennonite communities is sobering and shocking, because it does not at all correlate with the image of Mennoniteism that most of us held in our minds. We assumed that Mennonites might have acted differently, and we are now learning that they generally did not. It’s hard to know what to do with this information.

2. The story likely feels different, based on your exact Mennonite roots.

Most of my family came from Switzerland, fled to Germany for about 40 years to escape the Swiss government, and then emigrated to the U.S. by the early 1700s in search of better farming conditions. By the time Hitler rose to power, all of my relatives had already been living in the U.S. for over 200 years. As I sat in the conference, I realized that this perspective probably distanced me quite a bit from the topic, in comparison to Mennonites whose families were still living in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, for instance. Likewise, it was clear to me that Mennonites whose families were living in Poland or Germany in the 1920s and 1930s had much closer ties to the Holocaust topic than my family did. I’m not saying one situation is better or worse; I’m saying that I suddenly realized that because my family line was 200+ years removed from the countries in which the war directly took place, it distanced me from this topic more than other Mennonites may feel. Your specific Mennonite ethnicity and lineage probably matters a lot, when it comes to this topic.

3. This begs the question of what each of our individual accountability is, for the role of Mennonites in the Holocaust.

I sat in the conference, reflecting on the fact that we were discussing Mennonites’ actions in other countries, about 30-40 years before I was born. And I began to ask myself: As a person of Swiss Mennonite heritage, what is my accountability in all of this? The issues in question happened on another continent(s), decades before I was born. But despite that, I don’t think that allows me to say, “Oh, but I’m not one of those Mennonites—my family was Swiss Mennonite, and we had already been in the U.S. since the 1700s.” Drawing that kind of a line seems to negate the point of belonging to a group, and doesn’t seem like it would lead to anything good. However, on the flip side, does that mean that I share accountability for anything that any Mennonite in any country, in any time period does? If I identify as Mennonite, do I bear the responsibility for what Mennonites in Europe were doing before I was born?

4. When it comes to history, we need to rethink our Mennonite school curriculums.

I am a graduate of a Mennonite high school and a Mennonite college. I never heard a thing about Mennonites and the Holocaust from any Mennonite educational institution. I realize that we are just first now learning about Mennonite roles in the Holocaust, in very recent years. This explains why it was not discussed during my education in the 1990s. However, what this has also led me to reflect upon is the amount of classroom education I received about the history of the original Anabaptist church formation vs. the amount of classroom time spent discussing how Anabaptists applied their faith during major historical eras over the following centuries. The difference is shocking. We were schooled extensively on the original founding of the Anabaptist faith, and almost not at all on how Anabaptists applied that faith during the major historical eras of the following centuries. Hopefully this balance has shifted since my schooling in the 1990s. We clearly need to move away from reveling endlessly in the stories of the 1500s and also prepare students for how one applies that same faith in other settings over time.

5. The Mennonite world hasn’t confronted its role in World War II, and it doesn’t seem to have made any amends for it. We have to do better than nothing.

Towards the end of the conference, one of the speakers concluded his presentation with a very compelling observation that the Mennonite world has not confronted its role in World War II, and that it hasn’t processed it, and that it hasn’t attempted to reconcile it in any way. I would love for someone to show me how that speaker’s assessment is wrong, but from what I can tell so far, he is exactly, and painfully, right. I do not pretend to know how one makes right things that are so wrong. Huge, overwhelming atrocities have occurred, and they cannot be easily righted—most of them can’t really be righted at all. However, I do hope that we, as a faith community, can do better than doing nothing. We are going to have to do better than nothing, if we want to uphold the values we believe in. It seems to me that at the bare minimum we want to be thinking about what our apology statement might look like, and who (which organizations) an apology statement would come from. We clearly have a very, very long way to go on all of this—what I am flagging here is that I don’t really see us as having a choice not to do anything further, now that we are suddenly learning the truth.

In conclusion, I want to note again how grateful I am to the people who have been courageous enough to share their stories. It is only because of the people who have bravely shared their stories that we are able to grow in our group identity and better understand ourselves as a faith community.

How Mennonites Reckon with our History in the Holocaust

Posted on March 23, 2018 by Guest Contributor

Lisa Schirch

Bethel College should be applauded for taking the leadership to organize the “Mennonites and the Holocaust” conference March 16-17, 2018. Because of a generous grant from Israel/Palestine Partners in Peacemaking initiative of MCUSA, I was able to attend the conference. Across the street from Bethel College’s campus, the Kauffman Museum portrays a history of Mennonites that illustrates the type of commonly told positive narrative of our beliefs, pacifism, martyrdom, humanitarian work and community. While there are stories of Mennonites opposing the Nazis and hiding Jews in this history, the recently revealed story of Mennonites and the Holocaust feels like a betrayal of everything I’ve been taught over the last fifty years of attending and working for Mennonite institutions. There is a terrible chapter in our history that has been intentionally silenced and absent from my education. Records of Mennonite history are like Swiss cheese: full of holes that leave out our participation in the holocaust. It is important for the church to reflect on how we reckon with this history and what this history requires us to do.

Jerusalem at Sunrise

Beyond Academic Discussions

This is not just an abstract, academic conversation among historians who compete to document the facts of this history. Many people in the audience at the conference were experiencing intense emotions because of the shocking revelations about Mennonite complicity and participation in the Holocaust.

I grew up in the Mennonite community of Bluffton, Ohio, where I never heard anything anti-semitic. I was encouraged to read Jewish literature as a kid and was taught to have nothing but respect for Judaism. I was taught to commit to “Never Again” and took up a career in peacebuilding to prevent genocide. On the other hand, I never heard any Mennonite discuss broader church responsibility for the anti-semitism or the Holocaust. In hindsight, this is problematic. Christians are generally unaware of the long history of Christian persecution of Jews.

Last fall, I led Eastern Mennonite University’s study abroad program to Israel and Palestine where we focused on Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilding efforts. My husband is Jewish, and we are raising our children to be both Jewish and Mennonite. We know at least fifteen other Jewish-Mennonite families. For us, this is not just history. I was flooded with emotion hearing about Mennonites participating in massacres of Jewish families or Mennonites taking Jewish land.

My first thought was this: ethnic Mennonites went from participating in the Holocaust, to helping Palestinian refugees, to denouncing Israeli occupation. Where in this story did ethnic Mennonites help Jewish refugees or stand up for Jewish rights at the same scale? How dare Mennonites act self-righteous in their relentlessly critical stance toward Israel when these Mennonites literally pushed Jews out of their homes and some of those Jews fled to Palestine, where my Palestinian friends were pushed out of their homes. This is a sick and twisted history where Mennonite victims hurt Jewish victims who hurt Palestinian victims. And of these three groups, Jews suffered the most.

The role of Mennonites in the Holocaust has direct impacts on Mennonite-Jewish families, the integrity of Mennonite peacebuilding efforts in Israel and Palestine, and our collective voice on issues of peace and justice.

Synagogue Bimah in Migdal, beside the Galilee, where Jesus studied. The bimah is the Seed of Life symbol, a symbol used to represent the sacredness of life in many religions.

Emotional Intelligence and Personal Sharing

During the first few panels of the conference, members of the audience shared personal stories. These were a necessary part of the audience digesting and processing the information provided by researchers. But it was not without consequence.

A Mennonite holocaust denier, Bruce Leichty, attended parts of the conference. Leichty is a California-based lawyer known for representing the Holocaust deniers Ernst Zundel and his Mennonite wife Ingrid Rimland Zundel. Leichty has passed out anti-semitic literature at the past several MCUSA gatherings. At the introduction of the conference, the organizers told the audience there was someone attending the conference who they were watching. But many were not in the room or did not understand what was being said. When Leichty began to ask an offensive question during the conference, the organizers removed him by calling campus security, but did not inform the audience of who the man was or why he was being removed. The lack of communication confused many in the audience.

Minutes earlier, a Jewish participant in the audience shared about her discomfort at the emotionally inappropriate discussion of these topics. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for her to stand up in a room where she was alone in representing the Jewish people to a group of Mennonites. She noted the lack of acknowledgment that the stories being told were about people like her and included her relatives. She expressed offence at the laughter and lighthearted comments that were tone-deaf to the seriousness of the stories being told. For example, one panelist mentioned there were “fifty shades of Mennonite collaboration” which was met with laughter. She asked, “you’re laughing at the number of ways your people were involved in the genocide against my people?” I felt pain and embarrassment over the behavior of “my people.” Perhaps Mennonites are so allergic to grief that some choose to laugh inappropriately instead? This was so awkward and uncomfortable. But what came next made it worse, not better.

Panel moderators immediately told the audience we were no longer allowed to share personally. They informed us we were only allowed to write down our questions on slips of paper and submit these to the moderators. Coming immediately after the sharing of a Jewish woman, while a number of us in the audience were in tears, it was hard to understand the logic. No one explained this decision.

A trauma expert, facilitator or pastor could have helped the conference audience recognize and make space for the personal impacts we might experience during the conference. We could have acknowledged that people in the room would feel a range of emotions. We might have been reminded that laughter can be therapeutic but that we need to be careful to understand that inappropriate laughter can also be harmful.

The body and brain are not separate. I have attended many academic conferences that also include elements that address emotion and spirituality. It is not either/or. A conference can be both academic and address the intense emotional significance of a subject.

It is not possible or desirable to have an academic conference on a topic involving discussion of Mennonite complicity in the genocide of six million Jews and other groups without the expression of emotion. This insistence that the conference ONLY be academic and heady, without allowing other people to participate in shaping elements to support emotional, spiritual and personal responses was harmful. Because several conference attendees had mentioned this need for a grief room, candle or prayers to the conference organizers before and during the conference with no response. It appeared as if the organizers themselves were unable to imagine or acknowledge the emotion that might emerge from the academic discussions, overwhelmed when audience members shared their personal responses, and felt deeply uncomfortable with giving up some control of the conference and allowing others to help facilitate aspects of the program.

For a conference about Mennonite collaboration with the Nazis, it felt in form like Mennonites are still infected with some lingering patriarchal, authoritarian mindsets. There was only one person of color involved as a panel moderator. White men were in charge. No emotion was allowed. Participants were restricted in how they participated. Offers to help facilitate grief circles were seemingly ignored. There was no collective accountability or statement of responsibility. The tone and form of the conference felt offensive given the weight of the facts presented.

Statue of Mother Mary standing on Jewish Covenant representing Supercessionist Theology

Ramifications for Mennonite Theology, History, and Institutions Today

For decades, Mennonite historians and theologians have searched for a coherent statement of our history and theology. History impacts theology. While the Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS) is planning a theology conference to address this history in 2020, it feels strange to try to completely separate out a history conference from a theology conference or to have to wait two more years to take church action on this history. Mennonite complicity with the Holocaust requires action in the present. This is not just an academic historical topic – this history disrupts Mennonite narratives about ourselves, our history, our theology, and our current struggle with racism in the church. Mennonite Nazi connections and theologies of racial superiority continue to have impact today.

The role of Mennonites and the Holocaust requires an acknowledgement and a statement to Jewish groups that we are undergoing a process of accountability and repentance and invite their participation in how we best do that. I am curious to understand the rationale for not inviting Jewish participants to attend these conferences where we are wrestling with how we are accountable.

The Bethel conference included papers about German and Dutch Mennonite theology, Some challenged Nazi theology. Some justified Nazi theology. But these scholarly panels made no reference to how the story of Mennonites and the Holocaust seriously disrupts today’s narrative of Mennonite theology.

Some Mennonite theologians took part in Nazi racial science, opened church records, and asserted with Nazis that “morals pass through blood.” This is seemingly in direct opposition to Anabaptist beliefs about adult baptism.

Some Mennonites in the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ukraine and elsewhere rejected pacifism and joined the military to defend national interests. This directly challenges the narrative of Anabaptist nonviolence.

Just as West Germany went through a process of self-reflection and intentional de-Nazification, so too does the Mennonite Church need an explicit de-Nazification effort to address the lingering anti-semitism that informs our history and church culture.

Mennonite-born White Nationalist leader Ben Klassen is one of the two main figures of the white nationalist movement in North America. Ben Klassen grew up in a Mennonite colony in Ukraine and read Mein Kampf there. He credits Mennonite theology for his white supremacy. Regrettably, Klassen is not an aberration. Some Mennonites have reinforced the ideology of white supremacy in unique ways in US and Canadian history. White nationalism is a serious threat to Muslims, Jews, First Nations, African Americans, Latinos and all people of color and non-Christians in North America today. The white supremacists in Charlottesville last summer were carrying the words of Mennonite-born Ben Klassen. In sharing the history of Mennonite roles in the Holocaust with friends on Facebook, the strongest response has been from African American friends who repeatedly reported that they were “not at all surprised.” Racism and anti-semitism stem from the same superiority narrative and belief that “morals pass through blood.” Friends recounted how they didn’t get jobs at Mennonite institutions even though they were clearly more qualified than the “ethnic Mennonites” who were hired. Our current work on racism needs to be informed now by this history.

The Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) story has been told in a way that has suppressed the fact that Russian Mennonites were both victims and perpetrators. At the conference, we heard that MCC storyteller Peter Dyck told stories that intentionally deceived not only immigration agents, but also the Mennonite church at large. MCC has hidden the fact that some Russian Mennonites were Nazi leaders and collaborators. The whole story of MCC needs to be retold. MCC needs to reckon with its founding, its relationship to Jews, and its programming in Israel and Palestine which to date has focused almost entirely on the Palestinian narrative without acknowledging Jewish connection to the land and need for control over their safety following centuries of persecution. MCC is holding a 100-year anniversary conference in 2020. Hopefully, this awful history can be addressed, and real action can take place to be accountable for both these historic wrongs and the glaring absence of attention to Jewish connections to the land of Israel just as Palestinians are connected to the land of Palestine, and the need for safety for both Jews and Palestinians.

Who will be held to account for suppressing this awful history? Some scholars in the audience at the conference shared that they had tried to raise this history with Mennonite institutions thirty to forty years ago. Church leaders intentionally silenced these voices, diminished the Mennonite role in the Holocaust, and continued to leave out this history. Even today, I’ve heard a dozen Mennonite scholars assert that Ben Goossen’s historical survey of this history in his book Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era is an “exaggeration” or “not footnoted carefully.” When I ask for specifics, it turns out they haven’t yet read the book. But they are clearly eager to downplay the significance of this history (which, as a fellow scholar, I think is well footnoted). This failure to take responsibility and to illustrate accountability and repentance is familiar to those of us who have worked on the history of sexual abuse in the Mennonite church. Mennonite leaders practice denial and suppression of any facts about Mennonites that are not flattering. They give speeches over and over about Mennonite values, our humility, our history of persecution, our work for reconciliation and justice. But they leave out any truthful acknowledgement of our failings. They seem to think they can keep these terrible histories down by ignoring and suppressing them. But truth always has a way of coming out. And the church is more likely to suffer lack of integrity by the failure of Mennonite leadership to confront these problems than it will if it admits the failures of the past.

Mennonites and Jews have a unique history. For centuries before the holocaust, Jews and Mennonites were persecuted together. European states applied special taxes, restrictions on public office, and allowed Mennonites and Jews only to live in certain areas. Helen Stolzfus is a Mennonite friend also married to a Jewish man, and also raising her children as both Mennonite and Jewish. Helen gave a reading of a play she and her husband wrote about their discussions of this painful history of Mennonite roles in the long history of anti-semitism. In the play, her Mennonite ancestors and her husband’s Jewish ancestors talk to each other. I know fifteen or so other Mennonite-Jewish families, at least. I don’t know that many Mennonites married to any other groups, not Mennonite Catholics, or Quakers, or Muslims. So why do Mennonites and Jews intermarry so often? And what more can we learn about the history of this, for Mennonite friends have also found they have Jewish blood. Mennonites also need to look into this broader history between Mennonites and Jews.

Finally, Mennonites pride themselves as being “authentic” Christians who attempt to return to the teachings of the early church, before the Council of Nicaea and before Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Of course, Jesus and the early church were Jewish. Jesus was very clear he was an observant Jew and was not trying to start a new religion. While traveling though Galilee last fall with my students from EMU, we visited the synagogues where Jesus studied. We learned many new things about Jesus, seeing him through the eyes of our Israeli and Palestinian guides. If Mennonites actually want to practice an authentic way of following Jesus, we are going to need to learn more about Judaism.

Mennonite history classes, books and museums need to tell this newly-revealed story of Mennonites and the Holocaust. The positive narrative of Mennonites needs to include the angels and demons in our histories. We can’t wait another few years to address Mennonite history and theology. It will take a lifetime for me to recover a positive sense of identity after learning all of this. And Mennonites have some serious work to do in taking responsibility for those Mennonites who did these terrible things. We urgently need to begin talking about the ramifications of this history now.

As a witness to this conference and this history, I feel shame, grief, and immense sadness. This history disrupts my world, my identity, and my relationships.

Mennonites and the Holocaust: Personal and Literary Responses

Posted on March 21, 2018 by JoelHNofziger

Session Five: Personal Impacts

“The Missing Pieces of Our Narratives,”
Connie Braun, Trinity Western University

Braun opened with her poem “Ecclesiastical Artifacts,” reprinted below with permission:

Ecclesiastical Artifacts

Burning pyres, screws
hammered through tongues
of pious mouths, in ashes.

Births and deaths,

marriages, lineages.
Our tome is thick
with sorrow.

ii.

Between the Nogat and Vistula
and the sea.

iii.

Faith without icon, or Christs
hanging on crosses (He is risen,
He is risen, indeed).
Our ministers thanked God

for sending an army,

Jesus became Aryan, the cross
grew twisted, we, the Volk,
looked the other way

our neighbours’
wooden synagogues doused with gasoline.

We were a berm that could not hold
the river’s current.

Our ancestors’ gravestones
paved Stalin’ roads.

iv.

In green pastures
lower than the sea,
the shells

of our churches and housebarns,
rows and rows

of lindens we planted centuries ago
cast shadow and filigree.

Connie Braun Notes: I apologize that the unpublished draft of the poem to which James Urry refers held a line about gravestones that he points out was inaccurate in its attribution. The error was amended in later drafts long before his comment came to my attention and was most surely not intended as perceived. This I profoundly regret. (June 8, 2020)

Presenting what she termed an “Afterward” to her 2017 book, Silentium, Braun went on to identify two main streams that are missing from the stories Mennonites often tell themselves. First, Mennonites should be mourning not just their own losses and those of their families, “but mourning [also] the loss of the Other. That is the narrative that has been missing from our stories.” Braun also noted that Mennonites’ prejudices are missing from the narratives they construct.

“A Usable Past: Soviet Mennonite Memories of the Holocaust,”
Hans Werner, University of Winnipeg

When the Wehrmacht initiated Operation Barbarossa and shortly thereafter occupied Ukraine’s large Mennonite colonies, residents experienced intense relief that they were free from Stalinist oppression. Mennonites in these areas considered themselves German and were viewed as Germans by the invading army. They were seized with euphoria by their liberation at the same time their Jewish neighbors made a desperate escape to the east, with forced labor and death awaiting those who were caught by the advancing German army. Under occupation, Mennonites were engaged across all possible roles, although for this presentation Werner focused on those who were witnesses rather than active perpetrators of genocide
Werner enumerated four frameworks used by postwar memoir-writers to render their memories usable: 1) Remember/write only about the Soviet Period, but do not talk about the Holocaust; 2) Write oppositional memoirs rejecting National Socialism and its manifestations, a typology dominated by Mennonite women who married Ukrainians; 3) Feature narratives that acknowledge the stories of Jews whom the writers knew, including their execution; 4) Construct memoirs in such a way as to alleviate guilt, telling stories that portray the Wehrmacht as innocent and/or try to equate Nazi and Allied actions.
The presentation concluded by noting that the clearest intersection of the collective and individual memories among Mennonites who experienced Nazi occupation in Ukraine is of Hitler having saved the Mennonites. In the postwar years, members of this cohort grasped for other memories rather than dealing with their own roles in the murder and persecution of Jews and others: “They made their prewar experience under the Soviets into their own Holocaust.”

“Family Responses to the 1930s and ’40s in West Prussia,”
Joachim Wieler, Fachochschule Erfurt

Wieler was born before World War II in the eastern German city of Marienburg, and in 1945 fled along with his mother as a refugee to Dresden, which he remembers burning. He recounted the experience of recently being given a box of family documents after his parents had died. Inside the box, he discovered, among other surprises, a thank you note to his mother for supporting the German war effort in the World War I. One letter from after World War II, sent by his father to family from a Soviet prisoner of war camp, read: “Since we did not do any injustice to anyone and since you also love to work, I believe we will see each other again. In this sense I am greeting all of you with justified confidence and with a strong heart.”
Documents from the Nazi period included a letter that Wieler’s father sent from the French front, mixing heavily patriotic language and strong religious overtones: “All soldiers who are fighting here for their fatherland are performing worship in the truest sense of the word.”
Wieler ended his presentation by expressing gratitude to Mennonite Central Committee and North American families for their role in supporting refugee families as well as the United States Government’s Marshall Plan for the rebuilding of Germany. He also asked, “How many more boxes are out there?”

Session Seven: Literary Responses

“Readings from Silentium: And Other Reflections on Memory, Sorrow, Place, and the Sacred,” Connie Braun, Trinity Western University

Braun is a poet, memoirist, speaker and instructor. Having written and published widely in diverse genres including poetry, memoir, book reviews and academic papers, her work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies. Her areas of interest and expertise include Mennonite Studies and Creative Writing. Connie writes on themes of family history, ethnicity, immigration/emigration, loss, (dis)placement and (dis)location.
She read from chapter 4, “Running through the heart of storms,” from her 2017 book, Silentium and Other Reflections on Memory, Sorrow, Place, and the Sacred (Wipf and Stock), proceeded by a poem, “Kanada.” Silentium is based on three visits to Poland–first to her mother’s village, a second to Krakow and Auschwitz (reflected in the excerpt Braun read), and a third that included visiting the Stutthoff concentration camp.

“A Mennonite Wife, A Jewish Husband, and the Holocaust,” dramatic reading from Heart of the World, Helen Stoltzfus, Black Swan Arts and Media, Oakland, California

Stoltzfus reflected on her time as co-artistic director, playwright, and performer for the internationally-acclaimed “A Traveling Jewish Theatre,” in which she was the only non-Jewish member of the ensemble. This group’s original works for the stage were produced worldwide, including the Los Angeles Theatre Festival, the Kampnagel Hamburg Sommer Festival, the Fool’s Festival in Copenhagen, and the Baltimore International Theater Festival. The group traveled the globe–from Toronto to Oslo, and Prague to Appalachia.
“Heart of the World,” written twenty-five years ago, looks at the experience of a Mennonite wife and a Jewish husband as they are expecting a child and discussing how to parent their offspring, with the question, “Who will this child be?” driving the story. The play uses archetypal characters “Ancestral Mennonite” and “Ancestral Jew,” into whom the characters regularly transform, as a way to express “that we all carry our ancestors inside of us, whether we are conscious of this or not.”
Speaking about the play and its reception, Stoltzfus recalled, “We sought connections where others saw separations.”

Mennonites and the Holocaust: Soviet Union and Mennonite-Jewish Connections

Posted on March 20, 2018 by Aileen Friesen

Session Two: Soviet Union

“Survival and Trial: The Post-War Experience of Chortitza Mennonites”
Erika Weidemann, Texas A& M University

Using the life stories of two women, Erika Weidemann explored how the actions of Mennonites from Chortitza during the Second World War influenced their ability to create new lives in the post-war environment.
She demonstrated how Mennonites (and other ethnic Germans) attempted to re-characterize their wartime experiences to fit the categories created by the Allied powers of displaced peoples worthy of assistance; sometimes they were successful, other times they were not. Often this re-characterization involved emphasizing their victimhood and reinventing their identity in pursuit of survival.
Weidemann’s study shows us that identity politics, which performed an important role in shaping the options and opportunities available to Mennonites during the war, continued to be one of the main factors in determining access to resources and routes out of Europe in the post-war era.

“The Mennonites under the Nazi Regime in KGB Documentation, Ukraine 1941-44”
Dmytro Myeshkov, Nordost-Institut (Lüneberg)

Dmytro Myeshkov presented fascinating new materials from the recently opened SBU (KGB) archives in Kiev that reveal many hidden stories about Mennonites before, during, and after the Second World War. While he illustrated the limitations of these sources, which must be read with caution, he also demonstrated their incredible potential in allowing us to trace the life stories of Soviet Mennonites.
On the basis of these sources, Myeshkov described the case of Ivan Klassen, a doctor from Molochansk (Halbstadt), who was tried and convicted by the Soviet of a number of offenses. During the German occupation, Klassen visited a hospital in Orloff with disabled people (including children) to determine whether the patients could work or not. After his visit to the site, about half of the people were executed by the Germans. Klassen’s case raises questions on the role of Mennonite doctors in the Holocaust.
Finally, Myshkov discussed Mennonite women who served as translators in Crimea. These translators assisted in locating Jews for elimination and they received Jewish property and goods in return for their service. His research cautions us against assuming that only men belong in the category of perpetrators and against viewing the activities of translators under German occupation as benign.

“The Mennonite Search for Their Place in the Struggle Between Germany and the USSR”
Viktor Klets, Dnipropetrovsk University

Viktor Klets provided an overview of Mennonite experiences during the Second World War, showing this period in all of its complexities. He reminded us of the deportation of part of the Mennonite population in Ukraine by the Soviets before German occupation and their treatment in the labour army.
By demonstrating not only how Mennonites collaborated with the Germans, but also how Mennonites did not quite fit the expectations of these occupiers, Klets illuminates how the Soviet environment had shaped Mennonite life in the years preceding the war.
He also offered a window into how Ukrainians viewed Mennonites during this period. Some Ukrainians remembered Mennonites as willing collaborators, who readily adopted a superior attitude toward their neighbours based on their Germanness while others emphasized that Mennonites reacted in similar ways to other Soviet citizens.

Session Three: Mennonite-Jewish Connections

“Jewish-Mennonite Relations in Gabin, Plock County, Masovian Voivodeship, Poland, Prior to and during World War II”
Colin Neufeldt, Concordia University of Edmonton

Colin Neufeldt investigated Mennonite experience in Poland through a microhistory of the village of Deutsche Wymyschle. Based on a combination of archival sources and oral interviews, Neufeldt showed the variety of ways in which Mennonites in this area collaborated with the German occupiers as their Jewish neighbours faced discrimination and then destruction.

Neufeldt also shared the story of Erich L. Ratzlaff, a native of Deutsch Wymyschle, who would become well-known as a teacher, editor of the Mennonitische Rundschau, and minister in Canada. After Germany invaded Poland, Ratzlaff became a full member of the Nazi Party, serving the party cause as the mayor of Gabin. Similar to a number of other prominent Mennonite men from this period, this wartime history has never been fully incorporated into Ratzlaff’s biography.

“Mennonites and Jews in Soviet Ukraine”
Aileen Friesen, Conrad Grebel University College

My presentation explored issues surrounding perpetration and rescue among Mennonites living in Khortitsa. By detailing the massacre of Jews just outside of Zaporizhia and the celebration of Easter by Mennonites, both events which took place in the spring of 1942, this presentation forces us to address the reality of occupation: Mennonites benefitted from the racialized policies of the Nazis which victimized their Jewish neighbours.
By exploring cases of Ukrainians providing assistance to Jews in the province of Zaporizhia, this presentation also raised uncomfortable questions about why we find so few stories of Mennonites helping Jews during this period.

Mennonites and the Holocaust: Panels on The Netherlands and German Mennonite Responses

Posted on March 19, 2018 by jasonbkauffman

Session Four: The Netherlands

“Dutch Mennonite Theologians and Nazism”
Pieter Post, United Mennonite Church of Heerenveen and Tjalleberd

Post contrasted the thought and practice of Cornelis Bonnes Hylkema (author of Werkelijkheids-theologie [The Theology of Reality] (1932), among other works) and Fritz Kuiper (author of De Gemeente in de Wereld [The Church in the World] (1941) among others). Hylkema was a retired minister from Haarlem who regarded himself as an idealist and historian. Kuiper was a minister in Alkmaar, a member of the Social Democratic Workers Party, and founder of the “Committee for Socialism and the Church.” Post analyzed how each understood the relationship between church and state, Anabaptism, nonresistance, and the faith community.
Hylkema emphasized love of God as an example for the National Socialist party and believed that Christians should submit to the state as part of God’s creation order. Hylkema agreed with the Anabaptist tenet that violence was not in the spirit of Christ but was not himself a pacifist. Instead he argued that “a Christian people is armed and able bodied” who would fight in the name of God. He also understood the church to be a universalist faith community that offered a common grace and a “place of refuge for the spirit in a turbulent reality.”
Kuiper believed in the strict separation of church and state, where the church serves to remind the world of God’s commandments. As a social democrat, Kuiper emphasized the freedom of Christians to choose whichever party expressed biblical justice and believed that the faith community must be prepared to suffer in order to preserve its independence. After the execution of two of his friends, however, he confessed to a friend that he “no longer had the courage to believe in peace work.” He viewed the faith community as a service of reconciliation.

“Dutch Mennonites and the Yad Vashem Recognition”
Alle Hoekema, professor emeritus, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

Hoekema used testimonies collected by the Yad Vashem and other sources from Dutch Mennonite communities to narrate the stories of individuals who aided Jewish neighbors and friends during the Holocaust.
He emphasized the importance of community networks and argued that most people were motivated to help, not because of their religious faith or Mennonite identity, but a more general sense of common humanity.
He concluded by highlighting several patterns that emerged from his analysis of Dutch Mennonites who were recognized. Most were upper-middle class, many were involved in resistance movements, few later spoke about their experiences, and most saw their actions as normal rather than extraordinary.

“From War Criminal in the Netherlands to Mennonite Abroad and Back to Prison in the Netherlands”
David Barnouw, researcher emeritus, Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies

Barnouw narrated the story of Jacob Luitjens, a Dutch collaborator with the Nazi regime during World War II. After the war, Luitjens managed to flee to Paraguay, claiming Mennonite identity and adopting the pseudonym Gerhard Harder. He later moved to Canada but was eventually arrested and extradited to the Netherlands where he was tried and convicted of war crimes.
Barnouw highlighted how Luitjens made strategic use of his Mennonite identity and connections in the Mennonite community to avoid prosecution for his wartime collaboration. In court proceedings, he said “I told my God and He forgave me.”
Luitjens spent time in jail but was release before serving his full sentence. Stripped of his Canadian citizenship and denied the rights of Dutch citizenship, Luitjens exists as a person without a state. Barnouw is unable to confirm whether Luitjens is still living.

Session Five: German Mennonite Responses in Theology and Memory

“German Mennonite Theology in the Era of National Socialism”
Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, Tyndale Seminary

Neufeldt-Fast’s paper used the writings of German Mennonite church leaders to analyze the underlying logic that led most of them – from across the theological and ideological spectrum – to accept and promote National Socialist ideology.
Drawing upon Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of the “gardening state,” Neufeldt-Fast argued that most leaders came to embrace National Socialism’s “order-making, instrumental rationale” of a modern German society in which some plants should be protected and cared for while others should be segregated, contained, removed, or destroyed.
While earlier writings of theologians were not explicitly anti-Semitic, they did not condemn Nazi racial doctrine as heresy. By the late 1930s, however, many actively drew upon contemporary understandings of race and blood purity to argue for the expulsion of Jewish people from Germany.
Neufeldt-Fast ended his discussion with a call for a critical evaluation of Mennonite theology and the need to develop a post-Holocaust theology.

“Judaism as Argument: German Mennonites between Anti-Semitism and the Old Testament God”
Astrid von Schlachta, Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein (paper delivered by John Thiesen in her absence)

In her paper, Astrid von Schlachta used sermons and other publications to explore the range of theological convictions among German Mennonites on the role and use of the Old Testament in the church during the 1930s.
Von Schlachta argued that there was not a unified opinion among Mennonites on the matter and that the influence of National Socialist ideology on Mennonite interpretations of Judaism in the Old Testament depended upon the context.
While some interpretations were clearly anti-Semitic, other authors pushed back against a racialized view of the Old Testament and argued for its continued relevance for Mennonites and other Christians.

“Selective Memory: Danziger Mennonite Reflections on the Nazi Era, 1945-1950”
Steve Schroeder, University of the Fraser Valley

Steve Schroeder drew from oral histories and memoirs to examine how Mennonites from Danzig remembered and explained their experiences during and after World War II. While other Christians in Germany were forced to account for their actions under allied occupation, Danziger Mennonites emigrated and were able to avoid critical reflection on their actions.
Schroeder used the framework of cycles of grief and loss – denial, bargaining, and acceptance – to categorize Mennonite memories of the Nazi era. Although many supported the Nazi regime and identified as ethnic Germans during the war, afterwards many made strategic use of their religious identity as Mennonites, distancing themselves from the German nation in an effort to seek asylum abroad.
Schroeder ended with a call to continue a critical examination of the role that Mennonites have played, not only in the Holocaust, but also colonial and other systems in which they continue to participate and from which they continue to benefit.

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