Notes on Latter-day Saints and the Third Reich, Then and Now

Last updated on: November 12, 2024 at 12:57 pm by Dan Peterson

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Notes on Latter-day Saints and the Third Reich, Then and Now 2024-11-12T12:57:47-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The following note went out yesterday to the subscriber list of the Interpreter Foundation. I’ve redacted it slightly, so as not to make public the contact information of the Interpreter volunteer who is overseeing this matter. I don’t want to expose him or her to the tender mercies of the obsessive critics who monitor my blog every day and who continually seek to exploit it as a weapon. If you are interested in helping us in the way described below, please reach out to me at [email protected], and I will put you in contact with the appropriate person.

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I mention this yet again, in order to establish my earnestness on the matter: The liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen, near Linz, Austria, on 6 May 1945, by elements of the Eleventh Armored Division of General George Patton’s Third Army. My father was there that day, although I can’t identify him in this photograph. He raised me with the express moral obligation that he himself felt, to try to help ensure that the crimes committed at Mauthausen and at other such camps must never be forgotten. And I HAVEN’T forgotten.
(Photo from Wikimedia Commons public domain)

I’m not easily “triggered” and, truth be told, this piece by Jana Riess didn’t even come close. Still, I want to respond to it, at least briefly: “Dear Mormons, our history of worrying about ‘impure blood’ doesn’t end well (RNS) — Latter-day Saints are once again on the wrong side of justice, the wrong side of the gospel and the wrong side of history.”

First of all, full disclosure: I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. (I also didn’t vote for Kamala Harris.) So, in a certain sense, I have no dog in this fight. But I know — and I like — very many people who did vote for Mr. Trump.

I vigorously reject any insinuation that they are Nazis, crypto-Nazis, proto-Nazis, quasi-Nazis, or in any significant way philosophically or morally adjacent to Nazis. As we all do, they voted in the way that they did for uniquely personal mixtures of reasons, but sympathy for Nazism was almost certainly not in the mix.

I freely grant that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” shocked and troubled me, as do dehumanizing allusions to immigrants, even illegal immigrants, that use terms related to animals and insects. And I didn’t need to wait for outcries from the news media for such rhetoric to alarm me. I’ve been to Buchenwald and Dachau and Mauthausen. I’ve visited the Topographie des Terrors and the Holocaust Memorial (the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) in Berlin, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Helmuth Hübener is a hero of mine, as is Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Having grown up the son of a soldier who, as a non-commissioned officer in General Patton’s Third Army, participated in the liberation of one of the major Nazi concentration camps, having served a German-speaking mission, and having deep historical interests, I’ve been acutely aware for my entire life of the unspeakable crimes committed by the Hitler regime, and acutely sensitive to anything — including rhetoric — that so much as faintly savors of them. Moreover, in 2017, during President Trump’s first term, I was proud to be among the nineteen signers of a brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals over President Trump’s proposed “Muslim travel ban.”

But I also very much dislike casual accusations of Nazism or fascist tendencies. (My anonymous Malevolent Stalker, who has thus far never met a slander against me that he has failed to endorse, likes to suggest that I’m a closeted Nazi sympathizer, for example — which is a rather surreal experience for a limited-government conservative such as I, who favors free markets, strict construction of the Constitution, and federalism, and who leans libertarian.) Such accusations are so potent that they should be used only very rarely and very carefully and only when almost unavoidable. They are a kind of “nuclear option” that should not be lightly deployed. I resent their use to stigmatize my neighbors, the members of my ward, and the apparent majority of American Latter-day Saints who voted for Donald Trump.

Although I myself did not vote for him, I can certainly understand — and sympathize with — some of the reasons why people whom I know and respect did. And, from my point of view, there were good reasons not to vote for Kamala Harris — as, in fact, I myself did not.

If, as Jana Riess reports, a third of American Latter-day Saints genuinely think — in a genuinely National Socialist sense of the phrase — that immigrants are inferior and that they are “”poisoning the blood of our country,” that is reprehensible and must be called out and combatted. It is a heresy against the God who “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26) and a rejection of the teaching of the Book of Mormon that the Lord “inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile” (2 Nephi 26:33).

But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that the people with whom I associate at church hold to anything remotely like a Nazi racial doctrine regarding immigrants. I would require far more evidence to believe it than I’ve seen thus far. And, in my judgment, it is inflammatory and unjust even to hint otherwise.

And one final aside: The Helmut Hübener case is more complicated than Jana Riess acknowledges. Perhaps I’ll need to post on that matter some day, though I’m not up to speed on it right now. (It’s been some years since I’ve occupied myself with it.) The relationship between German Latter-day Saints and the Third Reich is also rather more complex than she may realize. For a very helpful recent summary of salient facts on the matter, some of which challenge her apparent views, see Mormonr’s “Latter-day Saints and Nazi Germany.”

Jan Brueghel the Younger, “Paradise” (ca. 1650). As long as religion exists, paradise will be beyond our reach. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Lest you begin to feel too comfortable in this religion-plagued world of ours, I need to remind you of at least a few of its horrors. So here’s something to upset you from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. Clearly, the outrages continue unabated:

“By the Numbers: How the Church Is Helping to Build Self-Reliance: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seeks to help individuals build self-reliance through free courses, lifelong learning, and projects and volunteer work”

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