Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 4 (Winter 2025)
Review of Escape from Germany, Directed by T.C. Christiansen, Remember Films, 2024.
By Martin Menke, Rivier University
“Escape from Germany” tells the story of how U.S. missionaries of the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) or Mormons, fled Germany in 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland. There are many good films about National Socialism and religion. This is not one of them. It fails as cinema and, even more, as history.
The cinematic weaknesses are many. First, the settings and costumes are often implausible. While supposedly shot on location in Budapest, the train station building is sided with clapboard, and many buildings feature American windows. The relatively modern kitchen shown, and the American diesel engine pulling barely American railway carriages, doubling as vehicles of the Deutsche Reichsbahn, undermine the film. When the film suggests that the escaping missionaries were able to gain control of a diesel locomotive and put it in motion without any knowledge of railroading, one can only compare this to the later sequels of “The Dirty Dozen.” A train shown later consists of post-war German carriages of the post-war Deutsche Bundespost. Many of the uniforms worn are either inaccurate or the product of a fertile imagination. The script suggests that, in 1939, German bread contained sawdust, which it did not. Finally, a supposed border sign “reading: Halt! Zonengrenze – Bundesgrenzschutz” clearly belongs to another era. Second, the acting is poor, perhaps because of a woodenly stiff script. The male lead delivers his lines like an automaton.
While an audience willing to suspend disbelief might be unaware of these flaws, the history being told is wildly inaccurate and suggests not an effort to make a docudrama but an emotionally appealing motivational film. First, the film suggests that American LDS missionaries had to return home in the months before the war. Yes, the imminent outbreak of hostilities made it advisable for Americans to return before travel became difficult. Still, the German LDS community never faced direct persecution, which is what the film suggests. In fact, unlike Jehovah’s Witnesses and other religious groups, German Mormons faced little persecution as long as they accommodated themselves to the regime, as many Protestants and Catholics did. Also, for two years after 1939, Germany and the U.S.A. remained at peace, even if transatlantic travel became perilous. Scenes such as the one in which one of the missionaries asks travelers in a train station if they have seen Mormon missionaries, or when a conductor throws the missionaries off the train because of their faith, exaggerate German fear and awareness of the Mormon church.
Another improbable scene underscores the missionaries’ relative safety. Repeatedly during the action, the missionaries encounter a Jewish family seeking to leave Germany by train. The missionaries witness an official yelling at the family for attempting to board the passenger carriages of a train. In 1939, Jews were not yet forbidden to travel by train. Later, the missionaries encounter the Jewish family at the border, where officials turn back the family. While this did occur in 1939, the fact that the missionaries were permitted to leave emphasizes their relative safety.
Perhaps the film’s greatest distortion is its exaggeration of the relevance of the Church of Latter-Day Saints to the history of the period. There were, and are, so few church members in Germany that Germans might be forgiven for never having heard of them. It seems that the filmmakers wanted to create an image of Mormon missionaries as heroes barely escaping evil, as if they shared the story of persecution by the National Socialist regime like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the members of the White Rose group, Franz Jägerstätter, and others. This film harms rather than serves that goal.
