Intro to Dave Nelson Part 1

and number one I need to mention all the things that are on this table over here will be the raffle items for tonight to some of the signature books at donated quite a few books and they did that every year which is just I'm really thankful for that and the authors of any of the books that are out for Sparrow just won't be spelling in themselves and I think that the beginning of I mean at the end of this session I'll have those off the stand up so you'll know who you need to find if you're interested in buying them and I think that's it I am very excited to hear this presentation I have read the book and it's absolutely fascinating and it is just gonna been spend a penny I think for how the approach was made to me about the book and a lot of people they have lunch with him one time and get to know each other better and I am I just need this pieces you know I mean we've concentrated a lot of doctrine as our exit out of the church and this month reveals a piece of history that it's just very unknown by by anybody at least to any extent that not even close to what he has covered in the book so I'm going to turn the time over now to be able to give us his presentations thank you [Applause] what good morning my name is Dave Nelson and I am an ex because I copy about 15 years ago when I decided to leave Mormonism after a period of about 13 years I still remember my first morning of Mormonism I went down to the coffee shop on the Texas A&M campus and had my first java in 13 years and it tasted so good I really recommend it for you Peter gave you some very good advice I am grateful to sue Emmitt and to the board of directors of the ants Mormon foundation for inviting me and my wife Ruth here this weekend I'm so happy to be able to talk to you my personal religious journey has provided me with a fascinating topic for historical research and I'll get into how that happened a little bit later but when I talk about the Mormon Church in Germany under the Third Reich I checked my religious prejudices at the conference room door I consider my work to be scholarly and objective the presentation I will give this morning would be the same as if I were presenting it at the American Historical Association the American Academy of religion the Mormon History Association the Sunstone symposium the John Whitmer Historical Society some symposium the Brigham Young University or as unlikely as it might seem if I were invited to speak on the same subject at fair Mormon no chance so if you'll bear with me I want to give you a little bit of a flavor of my book and I'm gonna read a certain bit of passage from it and if it starts to bog down and the skip loads of same things but this is this comes from chapter 14 entitled Mormons and Jews and inconvenient Association even an ankle burr twice was a Mormon of Jewish descent a member of the Vienna branch of the Swiss Austrian mission in 1938 although few details of his life have survived the historical record offers a reasonable synopsis of how he lived before and after Hitler's troops marched into Austria in March of that year Jews had enjoyed full rights of citizenship in the Habsburg Empire since a degree from them from Emperor Franz Joseph in 1869 under the Austrian Republic that emerged after the First World War Mormons likewise peacefully coexisted with others even though their small religious denomination numbered in the hundreds and exerted no political influence as a citizen of Jewish origin in the 1930s wife's probably could have been counted among Austria's intellectual intellectually and commercially privileged some 62% of Vienna's lawyers 47% of its medical doctors and 29% of a.g University faculty were Jewish according to the Nazis own estimates 1/4 of Vienna's businesses were owned and operated by Jews including 60% of those in banking or quote big industry with the Nazis took control of Austria the Mormon mission leaders at one concern hug we configure the boundaries of the german-speaking missions to conform to the new the reality brother Weiss as his fellow Mormons called him had more serious worries regardless of his devotion to Mormonism his pedigree branded him with the indelible mark of Judaism after Austria became a member of the Third Reich all of the dangers and indignities that Germany's Jews had experienced over the past five years hit the Austrian Jewish community like a sudden thunderclap in just one day when Jewish students were banned in Australian universities lost 40% of their students shortly after the entres ever - established central office for Jewish emigration in Vienna which was really an agency to promote intimidation of Jews and pressure them to leave the rank for those Jews who remained it later coordinated ghettoization in deportation to the concentration camps its subsidiary age agency the asset transfer office stolen Jewish possessions and transferred them to non-jews the horror of Kristallnacht did not stop at the former national border in Econ ysus vienna paramilitary thugs burned 42 synagogues vandalized and looted 4038 Jewish shops and desecrated the city's Jewish cemeteries if ysus residence was like most others occupied by Jews he watched a mob destroyed with no other recourse brother Weiss took a pendant hand and appeal to his Mormon co-religionist in the American Zion on November 23rd 1838 two weeks and the Kristallnacht he wrote to the First Presidency in Salt Lake City then he addressed eight additional letters to former missionaries in Utah and Idaho whom he had befriended when they served in the German speaking missions wife complained that quote conditions are terrible for us Jewish people and we have absolutely no hope of working at our learning trades it is simply that we must get away from here unquote addressing the church presidency as dear brother he asked for help quote to make the necessary affidavit to enable his family to escape to America Weiss assured his church leadership that his family had adequate financial support for the journey and to sustain himself upon arrival in the United States quote we can't enter the United States without having resonant Americans about Jiang for our integrity and possible worth his future citizens quote his letter closed your brother in the gospel no of the a local record reveals a response the Jewish pleas for help addressed to the Mormon hierarchy ran into a solid resistance from the second ranking member of the LDS leadership triad J loop and Clark Clark dispatched boilerplate responses to most historian D Michael Quinn who wrote two biographies of Clark summarize the language used by the Mormons first counselor whenever such a plea came across his desk quote in regard to your interesting letter President Clark began his standard to reply to desperate Jews and gender in 1939 we have had so many requests of this sort from various persons including members of the church that we have said we have found it necessary to ask to be excused for making the required guarantee his letter recommended that the petitioners some of whom were LDS contract contract Jewish organizations propel the church's response to another life long mormon austrian mormon of Jewish lineage was not as perfect but it contained the same refusal Richard Sieben shine also of the NRO two letters dated December 25th and 28 1938 addressed directly to Heber J grant with whom zip and shine claimed to have shared an apartment when both served as Mormon missionaries in Tokyo in 1901 claiming that he wanted only an affidavit as required by the laws of the USA for entering into your country Granite's former missionary companion pled we are not in trouble through fault of our own except for our Jewish descendants this time J Reuben Clark responded with a chatting letter that detailed the present circumstances of each missionary with whom zband shine served in Japan at the turn of the 20th century he said President Grant was away from the city but that the Prophet would be pleased to know zeep and shine remembered him and had written him then in a startling switching tone Clark reverted to his form letter verbage asking to be excused from providing such assistance because the church has received so many requests of this sort the LDS church thus erected a firewall between the three sources and the Jews who needed them to leave Germany even if they had converted to Mormonism it did not however refrain from using its influence to seek diplomatic health for those not tainted by a Jewish heritage several months prior to the arrival of voices please using a term made infamous by the Nazis Clark requested the assistance of his former State Department colleagues and expediting the immigration to the United States of a Mormon couple well she and her husband are Aryan natives and Nationals of Switzerland subsequently according to Clark a to Mike Wynn Clark cried privately urged the State Department not to help Jewish children to leave Nazi Germany if their prayer parents were trying to send them to the United States thus if a non Jew needed assistance the LDS hierarchy sometimes stood ready to help if a Jew asked it not only refused but at least in one case Clark urged its government we talked to the system it's this kind of heart-rending discovery that characterized my 15 years of research into the Mormon Church's history in Nazi Germany more than two decades ago my 13 year old stepson who posed a question at the dinner table Jeff was in the seventh grade he was taking his first world history course his teacher told him that prisoners in Hitler's concentration camps were colored triangles on their armbands to indicate their reason for confinement political prisoners were red triangles common criminals Green Street bums and the work-shy black jehovah's witnesses purple and jews a yellow star of david which could be seen as two yellow triangles placed atop one another Jeff have learned the Orthodox version of Mormon history and Sunday school and primary the Mormons have been persecuted everywhere they went he believed so obviously German latter-day saints must have had their own colored bands in the concentration fingers that kind of question had never occurred to me so it did some research some time later I got back to him with an answer one that is true believing warm and mother didn't like very much Sun I said the Mormons in Nazi Germany didn't have much to do with the concentration camps but those who did were as likely to the guards the research entity answer Jeff's question turned into a graduate-level paper at Texas A&M later an award-winning paper at the year 2000 Conference of the Mormon History Association and eventually my doctoral dissertation in history at each level I strove not only to tell how the Mormons survived and prospered in the Third Reich but how they remember those events today historical memory sometimes called collective memory is a term scholars use to describe how the descendants of historical actors reconciled the often imperfect behavior of their forebears and how they come to terms with it today in telling the story of how today's Mormons choose to remember their experience in Nazi Germany I used it terms terms like memory beetles and dimmer switches latter-day saint history during the Third Reich told without these filters of post-war manipulation of memory does not paint a pretty picture first we will talk about history then we'll get into the manipulation of collective memory which makes jerk Mormon history and Nazi Germany tolerable for today's faithful we will start with a few important points punctured punctuated by some relative examples first Mormons were not persecuted in Nazi Germany nor did they fear the German state any more than get ordinary Germans German Mormons were ordinary Germans as historian eric johnson has written most germans slumping at night work productively by day and enjoyed their lives during the peacetime years of national this rule why should they not have the economy was improving most were finding employment and their country was regaining its pride and was still at peace they knew there was a strong police presence a circuit of laws placing limitations on personal freedom and potential danger for those who refused to comply with Hitler's wishes many grumbled and complained privately but most found little difficulty in conforming Nazi terror pay posed no threat to most ordinary Germans second when a Mormon got in trouble of the National Socialist government it was because of an individual transgression not because it is religion furthermore the Nazi government only went after the individual transgressors the LDS Church as a whole never felt the hot lash of Hitler's disfavor when some Mormons transgressed this applied both to German members and American missionaries for example in 1939 a German district leader in Hamburg asked for the mailing addresses of young Mormons who were in the military he wanted to send them church publications that got the attention of military counterintelligence which ordered his arrest and interrogation but the incident did not spill over or affect Mormons in other parts of Germany during the same year a pair of immature young American missionaries photograph themselves start naked except for wearing a Nazi flag as a breechcloth when the employees of a camera shop earn owned by German Mormon reported the incident after the missionary sent in the film for development the shop owner was sent to a concentration camp and the missionaries had to flee the country but their companions in the same town were never in trouble third with notable exceptions woman's did not resist the government of the Third Reich in 1937 a politically astute young American named Alvin shovels reported to Nuremberg as his final area of labour he had worked as an office missionary in Basel Switzerland for most of his mission but was transferred to Germany in order to make a few conversions before he headed home work to have a few visionary battlefield you know conversion stories so we can talk a testimony accustomed to criticizing the government in his letters of home from Switzerland the young man made the mistake of writing unflattering things about the Third Reich which were intercepted by Nazi postal censors arrested and imprisoned he received health permission president Philemon Kelly who enlisted the aid of the American Council in Munich the mission president also hired a lawyer on the young man's behalf after three weeks he was expelled from Germany but no other missionaries are members suffering because of his transgression forth when a few individual Mormons didn't resist their actions met with disapproval from church leaders and fellow members we'll talk in more detail about this when I discuss the noted German Norman resistor helmet humour and a courageous branch president who we don't know very well max Russian one who had the filters applied to his heroism v when Hitler came to power the American mission presidents formulated a survival strategy but it quickly became apparent that the that Nazi Germany afforded the Mormons opportunities they had not enjoyed in philhellene Germany or the Weimar Republic the LDS Church exploited commonalities between Mormonism and National Socialism not only to survive but also to prosper in the Third Reich I'm not the first person to have discovered this Staffordshire University historian Christian Elizabeth King first notice these synergies in her groundbreaking mormon groundbreaking work on the new religions in Nazi Germany she entitled that the Nazi state of the new religions and she published it with a bellend press in 1981 three decades ago she said that the Nazis and the Mormons shared a common vel poncho that is a conjunction of worldviews there were historical and cultural reasons the church had equity to protect in Nazi Germany by 1930 Germany had surpassed Canada to have more latter-day saints than any country except the United States when Hitler came to power in 1933 the American mission presidents feared losing control over their German congregations no passage can be found in their correspondence that expresses the fear that the Nazis would shut down German congregations instead the mission presidents were afraid that the government might send the missionaries home they responded by dusting off an old statement of belief the 12th article of faith in essence the Mormons version of the gospel of John's admonition to render unto Caesar that which is Caesars but the Mormons had not always obeyed civil authority at home or abroad especially during the first 80 years of Mormonism in Germany during the pill haoming period during the 19th century to the beginning of the First World War American Mormon missionaries were in constant conflict constant conflict with German government when one missionary would be expelled from a German state instead of going home he would exchange places with another expelled missionary from another state if a postal censor refused to allow the printing of a religious tract in one town the missionaries would find a sympathetic censor elsewhere and printed and then circulated the banned pamphlet under the nose of the original censor American missionaries during the 1800s were constantly misrepresenting themselves as students English teachers and commercial entrepreneurs in order to circumvent bands on Mormon missionary work in the various German states but in the Third Reich the Mormons became the skinniest observers of the law in Hitler's Germany Mormons would be both good church members and good citizens but then the story takes an interesting turn the Mormons in Germany did more than what was necessary to survive they exploited areas of commonality between Mormonism and National Socialism the opportunities available under the Third Reich were simply too good to pass up they learned to work the system to their advantage sometimes it was a mutual interest in genealogical research during imperial and blackboard Germany pastors and priests often denied Mormons access to parish registers and archives simply what they didn't want their Catholic or Lutheran parishioners to BiPAP ties posthumously into the LDS Church but with the Nazi penchant for genealogy the Mormons celebrated newfound access to the archives a deseret news article in late 1933 only 11 months after this article frankly admitted that the church was benefiting from the urgency to prove that quote one's grandmother was not a Jewess unquote during the Bible our Republic from the end of the First World War until Hitler's rise to power of 1933 a Mormon district they didn't have stakes back then a Mormon district might have a single genealogical specialist during the Third Reich Mormon jenny logical research exploded and you talk temples were flooded with German with German pedigree charts and family group records most districts and many branches would call full genealogical stamps consisting on the President to councilors secretary missions held Mission wide genealogical Sundays special genealogical youth activities one Mormon was questioned by the Gestapo because they suspected him of being Jewish he knew he had to produce his three generation pedigree chart to prove his Aryan purity instead he astonished the secret policeman by pulling out proof of seven generations of the pure blooded German heritage he bragged I passed with flying colors the race to exploit the German peasant or Gemological research did not stop at the Second World War in the immediate post-world War two ERA the acting German missions president paul along heinrich sought the permission of soviet occupation authorities to take possession of whatever german family records he could find in july 1945 two months after the end of the war german civilians were subsisting on an average daily nutritional intake of 800 calories per person despite the urgency of providing for his flocks physical welfare long Heinrich found time to forage through the ruins of burned and bombed out Jewish synagogues looking for names of holocaust victims that he could submit to Salt Lake City and you thought that perhaps this Holocaust victim things started in midnight 95 no it was going on for decades brighter than that they got caught in the last decade of the 20th century prior to the 1936 Olympic Games of Berlin the LDS missionaries provided rudimentary basketball instruction for the German Olympic team this came about when Germany a country with no basketball tradition felt the necessity to feel the team in every mental sport only a handful of foreign university students and the Mormon missionaries by the way knew anything about this American game American elders taught the Germans second-string handball team designated to compete as the German Olympic basketball team however the dribble pass shoot and play defense this occurred in the midst of a well publicized worldwide effort to boycott the Berlin Olympics which Hitler planned to use as a showcase of Aryan supremacy articles appeared regarding the boycott effort within the news columns of the church owned Deseret News they came over The Associated Press and UPI waters then the Deseret News Church section ran a six column picture of a Hitler saluting basketball team along with an article that stated quote hair Hitler has sought the services of the elders to teach basketball to the team that he hopes will achieve a Nordic victory the church published deseret news and it's warm and religion section never hesitated to publish pictures of church leaders in conjunction with swastika symbolism this is the picture of church president Heber J grant appearing at a banquet in Frankfurt in summer 1937 the rented building belonged to the National Socialist Teachers Union naturally it came equipped with a large swastika flag as in all such venues in Germany the time one year earlier the same Deseret knew this church section ran a large picture of european mission president Joseph F Merrill standing bully beneath a large swastika flag

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Length: 28min 19sec (1699 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 20 2017