Tag Archives: Benjamin Goossen

Article Note: Benjamin W. Goossen, “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000”

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Article Note: Benjamin W. Goossen, “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945-2000,” Antisemitism Studies 5, no. 2 (Fall 2021): 233-265.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Benjamin Goossen is among the most active scholars among the historians currently preoccupied with re-examining the history of Mennonite Christians and the Second World War, and especially their relationship to Nazism and the Holocaust. In his new article “The Making of a Holocaust Denier: Ingrid Rimland, Mennonites, and Gender in White Supremacy, 1945–2000,” Goossen tackles the person of Ingrid Rimland, the Mennonite novelist who became a prominent Holocaust denier in the 1990s after years of acclaim for her literary accounts of women’s suffering in the Soviet Union.

Rimland was born in 1936 into a Russian Mennonite family, which followed Hitler’s retreating armies westwards in 1943 to escape Bolshevik rule. After the war, the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) facilitated her family’s immigration as refugees to Paraguay. As an adult, she moved to the United States and became took up writing. In her debut novel, The Wanderers: The Saga of Three Women Who Survived (1977), Rimland compared Mennonite women’s suffering to the persecution of the Jews under Nazism. She fictionalized her own experiences of displacement, flight, and emigration but was silent about the collaboration and perpetration of crimes by Mennonites in the Holocaust.

As a single mother caring for a disabled child in the 1980s, Rimland struggled to maintain her literary career. The end of the Cold War also diminished her impact, as the theme of her work–suffering under Communism–became passé. In response, she turned to antisemitic conspiracy theories, becoming intellectually, financially, and then romantically involved with the infamous Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel. Zündel was born in Germany in 1939, later immigrated to Canada, and was the subject of a serious of high-profile hate-speech trials in the 1980s and 1990s. Rimland launched the website Zundelsite.org from her home in California, in order to help Zündel spread his Holocaust denial while avoiding Canadian anti-hate laws. The site was a primary source of online Holocaust denial in the 1990s, while Rimland also sent out daily “Z-Grams” through a listserv.

Rimland also used Zundelsite.org to promote her own literary work, including her three-volume novel Lebensraum! (1988). In it she depicted Mennonites as racially pure Germans and wrote about two Mennonite settlements, one in Ukraine and one in Kansas–each threatened by Jews. The novel included a sub-plot about a global Jewish conspiracy (the “New World Order”).

Goossen sees Rimland’s life as an exemplar of how far-right extremism migrated from Hitler’s Third Reich to present-day North America. Her own turn to neo-Nazism was rooted in her long history of equating Mennonite suffering with that of the Jews in the Holocaust. “As counterintuitive as it may seem, Mennonites’ propensity to self-identify with Jews opened a path for Rimland’s racist trajectory” (236). But when a scholar suggested Canadian Mennonite views were not so different from those of Rimland, a broader controversy erupted, revealing that Canadian Mennonites had never examined the theological implications of the Holocaust for their Anabaptist theology (242).

Goossen explains Rimland’s novel The Wanderers and its appeal among Mennonite leaders, along with her slide into antisemitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial. He concludes that various influences played a role in her fate–her association with Ernst Zündel, to be sure, but also the background of Mennonite silence about collaboration with Hitler and her uneasy relationship with male Mennonite elites who used her depictions of female Mennonite suffering but refused to support her career.

Webinar Note: Humanitarian Entanglements: A Report on Recent Research on Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 4 (December 2021)

Webinar Note: Humanitarian Entanglements: A Report on Recent Research on Mennonite Central Committee, Mennonite Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism, November 4, 2021

By Alain Epp Weaver, MCC

Since its inception in the second half of the nineteenth century, modern humanitarianism has operated within fields of power, with humanitarian actors seeking to carve out space to carry out their work in accordance with their principles such as impartiality and neutrality. Humanitarian practice has always run the danger of becoming entangled in different ways with government agendas and with the complicated histories of individuals and communities displaced by war that humanitarian agencies seek to assist. On November 4, 2021, a group of historians gathered at a virtual roundtable convened by the University of Winnipeg on the theme, “Mennonite Central Committee, Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism,” to discuss one example of such humanitarian entanglements before, during, and after the Second World War. The roundtable built on the fall 2021 issue of Intersections (a publication of Mennonite Central Committee, or MCC), that featured examinations by 12 historians from Canada, the United States, Paraguay, France, Germany, and the Netherlands of the complex ways in which MCC, as a Christian humanitarian agency, interacted and was bound up with Nazism and its legacy from the 1930s into the mid-1950s. Several articles featured in Intersections benefited from extensive consultation of MCC’s archives in Akron, Pennsylvania.

At the roundtable, four authors from the Intersections issue highlighted key findings from their research on MCC’s postwar resettlement efforts with displaced Mennonites, with Anna Holian, author of a landmark study of uprooted groups in Germany after WWII, offering a response.[1] This roundtable also drew on sustained scholarly attention from the past few years on transnational Mennonite intersections, entanglements, and even complicity with Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s.[2] This brief report highlights findings from both the November 4 roundtable and the fall 2021 issue of Intersections, outlining the various ways that MCC entanglements with Nazism were bound up with broader Mennonite entanglements with Nazism.

MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism emerged as a byproduct of the organization’s efforts to assist Mennonites seeking to leave the Soviet Union.[3] MCC was founded by Mennonite churches in the United States in 1920 to respond to the call of Mennonites in southern Russia (soon to become part of the Soviet Union) who, along with their neighbors, faced both war and a devastating famine. In the first half of the 1920s, MCC operated feeding and agricultural development programs in parts of southern Russia home to Mennonite communities. While MCC distributed humanitarian assistance, other actors, such as the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization (CMBC), worked to help Soviet Mennonites migrate to Canada, with Soviet officials sometimes suspecting MCC of supporting and encouraging such migration efforts.[4]

The conditions facing Soviet Mennonite communities progressively worsened in the 1920s, with the Soviet state dispossessing Mennonite landholders and imposing increasingly strict restrictions on religious expression. By 1929, the situation had worsened to the point that up to 15,000 German-speaking Soviet citizens (Mennonites, but also Catholic, Lutherans, and others) descended on Moscow to demand that they be allowed to migrate. This pressure eventually led to 4,000 Mennonites receiving permission to leave the Soviet Union for Germany—with financial loans from the German government (guaranteed by MCC), these Mennonites then migrated to Paraguay where, with MCC assistance, they established the Fernheim colony in the country’s Gran Chaco region.

MCC’s entanglements with National Socialism emerged from this period. Once the Nazis assumed power in Germany in 1933, MCC de facto became a debtor to the Nazi government. To help with negotiations with the German government to postpone payment on this debt, MCC relied on pro-Nazi Mennonites, including Benjamin Unruh (one of the Mennonites from Russia who had appealed to U.S. Mennonites for help in 1920 and who had ended up in Germany).[5]

Strongly anti-Communist, Unruh also dreamed of Mennonite settlement in eastern European lands to be conquered by the Nazis and helped nourish the hopes of some in the Mennonite Fernheim colony in Paraguay of a return to Europe following anticipated Nazi victories. MCC grew increasingly concerned throughout the 1930s and into the war years by the growing pro-Nazi feeling within this Paraguayan Mennonite colony it had helped to set up and continued to support. MCC sought to nurture commitment to the traditional Mennonite doctrine of nonresistance among Fernheim’s colonists, while also avoiding direct involvement in Fernheim’s governance. However, once the tension within Fernheim between the völkische (German nationalist) and wehrlose (unarmed, or nonresistant) factions erupted into violent conflict in 1944, MCC, under pressure from the U.S. government, in turn pushed colony leadership to expel the völkische leaders.[6]

Mennonites and other groups classified as German by the Soviet authorities faced sustained and harsh persecution under the Stalinist regime in the 1930s, including the deportation of half of the Mennonite population from what is now Ukraine to Siberia. The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine in 1942 brought a reprieve for Mennonites and others identified as Volksdeutsche who were viewed favorably within the Nazi racialized hierarchy. During the Nazi occupation period, not only did Mennonites receive favored treatment, but some also actively implemented Nazi genocidal policies, including the massacre of Soviet Jews.[7]

As German forces retreated from the Soviet Union, many Soviet Mennonites fled with them. Nazi authorities settled some of these Mennonites in Germany and some in occupied Poland, depending on how ideologically trustworthy the Nazis viewed specific individuals. Mennonite men of eligible age served in German military units; some served in the Waffen-SS and in the paramilitary death squads of the Einsatzgruppen. These displaced Mennonites received houses and other goods stolen by Nazi authorities from Poles, Jews, and others. The vast majority of these displaced Mennonites accepted German citizenship.

After the Allied defeat of Nazi forces, these displaced Mennonites found themselves in a precarious situation, under threat during the first couple years after the war of deportation back to the Soviet Union. [And, in fact, around half of these displaced Mennonites were returned to the Soviet Union, where they faced a deeply precarious future.] Mennonite refugees seeking options within the emerging postwar international refugee system had multiple strikes against them—their acceptance of German citizenship, service in the German military, and the assessment by international refugee bodies that Mennonites had left the Soviet Union voluntarily.

Alongside broader postwar humanitarian efforts, including active participation in the joint efforts of the Council of Relief Agencies Licensed to Operate in Germany (CRALOG), MCC worked to assist displaced Soviet Mennonites (along with Mennonites from the Danzig/Vistula Delta region who had fled after the war) and to help them migrate to the Americas (especially Canada and Paraguay). To counter the strikes that displaced Mennonites had against them, MCC workers advanced different arguments in different contexts, making a variety of arguments regarding Mennonite “nationality” (e.g., that they were Dutch, or that Mennonites should be viewed as having their own nationality, similar to Jews), contending that Mennonites had been coerced into accepting German citizenship, and downplaying Mennonite participation in Nazi military bodies. When one argument failed, MCC staff advanced others in their sustained lobbying efforts for Mennonite refugees. Over the course of the decade following the war, MCC succeeded in resettling around 15,000 displaced European Mennonites in the Americas, including approximately 12,000 Mennonites from the Soviet Union.[8]

The University of Winnipeg’s November 2021 roundtable on “Mennonite Central Committee, Refugees, and the Legacies of National Socialism,” chaired by Ben Nobbs-Thiessen, the co-director of the university’s Centre for Transnational Mennonite Studies, examined this latter part of the story of MCC entanglements with Nazism, with four historians who contributed to the fall 2021 issue of Intersections briefly sharing key highlights from their research.

Benjamin W. Goossen, affiliated with Harvard University, initiated the roundtable with remarks underscoring the importance of contextualizing Mennonite and MCC entanglements with Nazism within broader and longer histories of Mennonite antisemitism. Goossen highlighted how antisemitic attitudes can be found in the writings of leading anti-Nazi Mennonites in the United States, Canada and Europe—not only among overtly pro-Nazi Mennonites. MCC’s postwar comparison of Mennonites to Jews, deployed as part of efforts to secure Mennonite migration, was, Goossen contended, disingenuous, covering over the complex, multifaceted ways that Soviet Mennonites had not only benefited from Nazism but had in different ways been actively complicit with it, including, in some cases, participation in the Holocaust. The postwar public narrative promulgated by MCC workers among Mennonite communities in Canada and the United States of the providential, Exodus-like rescue of a persecuted Mennonite community not only grossly simplified a much more complicated reality but also chilled Mennonite postwar grappling with legacies of antisemitism and investigation into Mennonite involvement in Nazism’s genocidal program.

Many MCC workers in postwar Europe expended considerable time and effort to convince groups such as the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (IGCR) and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) of Soviet Mennonite eligibility to migrate from Europe (and to receive international assistance to do so). In her presentation, Erika Weidemann of Texas A&M University traced how IGCR officials debated internally about Soviet Mennonite eligibility for Displaced Persons (DP) status and examined the evolving arguments MCC workers advanced to convince the IGCR and IRO of that eligibility. On the whole, Weidemann noted, these MCC efforts proved successful. International refugee bodies sought to articulate an unambiguous approach to Soviet Mennonite refugees, but in practice the approach was constantly shifting, with MCC adjusting to those shifts in its efforts to interpret Mennonites to international refugee agencies and to advocate for their favorable treatment.

Steve Schroeder of the University of the Fraser Valley focused his intervention on MCC’s assistance to uprooted Mennonites from the Danzig/Vistula Delta region. To help secure Mennonite emigration from Europe, Schroeder explained, MCC workers argued that Danziger Mennonites had an identity that transcended Germanness and portrayed these Mennonites as victims. In reality, Schroeder continued, these Mennonites had fully assimilated into German society decades before the war.[9] During the war, Danziger Mennonites voluntarily served in the army, some worked as concentration camp guards, and some used enslaved labor from concentration camps on their farms. Like Goossen, Schroeder underscored how MCC’s constructed narratives about displaced Danziger Mennonites contributed to and furthered a distorted narrative of European Mennonites having been removed from or above the fray of the war (or of having been victims of the war), a narrative that covered over the varied forms of Danziger (and broader European) Mennonite complicity with Nazism.

The final panelist, the University of Winnipeg’s Aileen Friesen, began by urging historians to recall the individual toll of the Holocaust, naming the individuals murdered by people carrying out Nazism’s genocidal program. On the Yad Vashem website, one can search the towns and villages in Ukraine once home to large Mennonite communities like Molochansk and find the names of Jewish people like Maria Sheffer and Mendel Ioffe who were murdered in the Holocaust. Friesen discussed how MCC’s postwar attempts to present Soviet Mennonites as having “Dutch” nationality was a reinvention of older arguments and discussion about where Mennonites fit into the emerging order of nation-states. Drawing from her Intersections article, Friesen suggested that the assessment of international refugee organizations after the war that Mennonites had left the Soviet Union “voluntarily” did not square with how the Mennonite refugees perceived their departure. Interpreting Soviet Mennonite actions during the Nazi war-time occupation and as German forces retreated cannot, Friesen stressed, be divorced from the backdrop of two decades of increasingly harsh persecution faced by Soviet Mennonites.

Building on her research in MCC’s archives, Friesen discussed how MCC workers providing humanitarian assistance to displaced Soviet Mennonites sought to make sense of those Mennonites as they learned about the ways those Mennonites had been entangled and had collaborated with Soviet authorities and then with the Nazi regime. Tensions among displaced Mennonites in MCC-operated camps in post-war Germany simmered and sometimes erupted with recriminations about different forms of collaboration. The response of MCC workers as they learned in piecemeal fashion of these Mennonite entanglements with both Soviet communism and Nazism was to “let it all go”—rather than seeking to establish a true account of what choices different individuals under MCC’s care had made during the war, MCC instead focused on constructing general accounts of Mennonite victimhood in efforts to secure Mennonite emigration from Erope. This hands-off MCC approach enabled someone like Heinrich Wiebe, who served as mayor of Zaporizhzhia during the German occupation, to present himself to MCC and CMBC as a pillar of the Mennonite community who had remained distant from Nazism, when in fact he had been involved in the ghettoization of the city’s Jewish population and the expropriation of their property and was active as mayor when the city’s security apparatus, which included Mennonites among its leaders, executed the city’s remaining Jews in 1942.

In her response to the panel, Anna Holian of Arizona State University placed MCC’s postwar refugee resettlement efforts within the broader context of the emerging international refugee regime in which “nationality” functioned as the key concept. Holian explained that in this postwar system, one’s “nationality” (understood in both political and cultural terms) determined where one supposedly belonged, even if that was not where one had previously lived or was where one wished to be. Mennonites were not the only group seeking to classify themselves as a distinct nationality as they sought favorable outcomes for themselves in this postwar system: Jews and Ukrainians also sought to disentangle themselves from other national identities.

Holian’s response and the discussion that followed pointed to questions for further research: How did MCC postwar work with displaced Mennonites change over time? How did MCC understand (or fail to understand) the Mennonites whom it sought to assist? Mennonites were not free of the varied forms of antisemitism that marked Christianity in Europe, the United States, and Canada—what role did that antisemitism play in MCC (and broader Mennonite) entanglements with Nazism? To what extent did MCC shape or dictate Mennonite refugee narratives about themselves and their war-time experiences—and to what extent were MCC narratives about these Mennonite refugees shaped by how the refugees narrated their experiences to MCC? The rich conversation at the November 2021 roundtable on these and other questions highlighted that much fertile scholarly ground remains to be explored regarding Mennonite and MCC entanglements with Nazism and its legacies before, during, and after the Second World War.

Alain Epp Weaver directs strategic planning for Mennonite Central Committee. He is the author of Service and the Ministry of Reconciliation: A Missiological History of Mennonite Central Committee, C.H. Wedel Series No. 21 (North Newton, KS: Bethel College, 2020).

Notes:

[1] Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

[2][2] See especially Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen, eds., European Mennonites and the Holocaust (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).

[3] For an analytical overview of MCC entanglements with National Socialism, see Benjamin W. Goossen, “MCC and Nazsim, 1929-1955,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021):

[4] Esther Epp-Tiessen, “MCC and Mennonite Emigration from the Soviet Union, 1920-1932,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 13-17.

[5] Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “Benjamin Unruh, Nazism, and MCC,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 17-27.

[6] See John Eicher, Exiled among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Eicher, “MCC and Nazi Impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite Colonies in the 1930s and 1940s,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 27-32; John D. Thiesen, Mennonite and Nazi? Attitudes Among Mennonite Colonists in Latin America, 1933-1945 (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 1999); Daniel Stahl, “How the Fernheimers Learned to Speak about the Nazi Era: The Long Historical Echo of a Conflict,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92/2 (April 2018): 285-298; Stahl, “Paraguay’s Mennonites and the Struggle against Fascism: A Global Historical Approach to the Nazi Era,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 92/2 (April 2018): 273-284; and Stahl, “Between German Fascism and U.S. Imperialism: MCC and Paraguayan Mennonites of Fernheim during the Second World War,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2022): 32-35.

[7] See Martin Dean, “Soviet Ethnic Germans and the Holocaust in the Reich Holocaust in the Reich Commissariat Ukraine,” in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, ed. Ray Brandon and Wendy Lower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 248–71 and Aileen Friesen, “A Portrait of Khortytsya/Zaporizhzhia under Occupation,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, ed. Mark Janzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 229–249.

[8] For examinations of MCC’s efforts to resettle displaced Mennonites after the Second World War, see Ted Regehr, “Of Dutch or German Ancestry? Mennonite Refugees, MCC, and the International Refugee Organization,” Journal of Mennonite Studies (1995): 7-25; Benjamin W. Goossen, “MCC and Nazism, 1929-1955,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 3-12; Erika Weidemann, “Identity and Complicity: The Post-World War II Immigration of Chortitza Mennonites,” in European Mennonites and the Holocaust, ed. Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 269-289; Weidemann, “Facing the Future, Reinterpreting the Past: MCC’s Solutions for Successful Mennonite Immigration after the Second World War,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 45-50; Aileen Friesen, “Defining the Deserving: MCC and Mennonite Refugees from the Soviet Union after World War II,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 50-54; Steven Schroeder, “National Socialism and MCC’s Post-War Resettlement Work with Danziger Mennonites,” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 54-60; and John D. Thiesen, “John Kroeker and the Backstory to the ‘Berlin Exodus,’” Intersections 9/4 (Fall 2021): 40-45.

[9] See Mark Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772–1880 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

Conference Report: “Religion and Migration: Institutions and Law”

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 4 (December 2018)

Conference Report: “Religion and Migration: Institutions and Law,” Sponsored by the Religious Cultures Network, German Studies Association, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2018.

By Christina Matzen, University of Toronto

Five scholars convened a Religious Cultures Network-sponsored panel on September 29, 2018, at the German Studies Association conference in Pittsburgh, PA. The panel consisted of presenters Rebecca Carter-Chand, James Niessen, and Christopher Stohs, while Josiah Simon delivered commentary and Benjamin Goossen moderated the panel.

Rebecca Carter-Chand began with her paper, “The Transplantation of the Salvation Army to Germany, 1886-1918.” Using the horticultural metaphor of transplantation, she traces how the London-based Salvation Army took root in Germany, developing into a “noisy” but respected organization. The 1890s proved an important decade for the German Salvation Army because its newly-adopted mission to address social reform and poor relief corresponded with Germany’s ever-increasing concern with the “social question.” It soon had a sturdy presence in major German cities and received acceptance as a social and religious German movement. Indeed, the German Salvation Army, which grew into a de facto church and social welfare agency, employed innovative strategies of evangelism that reverberated with notions of the German Volk. Thus, when war broke out in 1914, the organization would be able to survive its British parent association, in large part due to the leadership’s successful efforts at presenting itself as a patriotic German movement with an internationalist mission.

James Niessen’s paper, “The Role of Christian Churches of German Europe in the Hungarian Refugee Crisis of 1956-57,” examines the Austrian-Catholic response to the nearly 200,000 people who fled Hungary in 1956 after Soviet forces suppressed the Hungarian Revolution. Niessen argues that Austria’s assistance was altruistic but also opportunistic, as the nation sought to compensate for its role in Nazi crimes. For faith-based groups, however, he maintains that an ethical imperative took precedence over opportunism, which can be understood through scripture mandating care for the homeless. Despite religious differences among these organizations, their leadership was united in the interests of the refugees. Niessen profiles four Austrian Catholic leaders who were instrumental in aid efforts: Archbishop of Vienna Franz König; Leopold Ungar; Stefan László; and Fabian Flynn, C.P. He also notes that Protestants quickly mobilized to provide aid to Hungary and its refugees. In his conclusion, Niessen makes clear that these humanitarian reactions should also be understood in the Cold War context of Christian anti-communism.

In the final paper, “Sprich, sing und bete Deutsch: The Lyrical Campaign against the Bennett Law,” Christopher Stohs traces Wisconsin’s 1889 Bennett Law and its implications for German immigrant life in nineteenth-century America. The law made English-language instruction compulsory for reading, writing, math, and U.S. history classes. Many German-Americans in the Midwest perceived this law to be an assault on their parochial schools and thus their religious, linguistic, and cultural freedoms. Stohs examines prose and poetry that opponents of the law wrote and published in Germania, a Protestant-leaning German-language newspaper and Wisconsin’s most widely circulated periodical at the time. He argues that these pieces stoked fears in Republican Lutherans, motivating them to join forces with Democratic Catholics to repeal the Bennett Law, which they accomplished in 1891.

Review of Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era

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Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 3 (September 2017)

Review of Benjamin W. Goossen, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 266 + xiv Pp., ISBN: 978-0-691-17428-0.

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

From the outside, the Christian tradition of Anabaptism, of which Mennonites are the largest branch, is often known simply for its German ethnicity and its pacifist theology. In Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, Benjamin W. Goossen employs post-structuralist history to carefully and thoroughly dismantle these notions. “If Mennonite theologians could both justify and oppose pacifism, if Mennonite nationalists could both embrace and reject Germanness, it makes little sense to think of either category as coherent, limited, or unchanging” (4). Rejecting traditional definitions of religion and nationality, Goossen depicts Mennonites as a socially constructed and historically situated collectivity forged through processes of contestation, their identities continually (re)negotiated in response to the course of modern German history. Needless to say, his differentiated portrayal of Mennonites unsettles several cherished myths: that Mennonites were thoroughly German (their Dutch roots notwithstanding), that Mennonites were marked by pacifism, or that Mennonites were apolitical. It also asks hard questions, such as whether Mennonitism was or is based on heredity or belief? The result is a thought-provoking examination of Mennonite identity centred on Mennonites’ fluid relationship with Germany from the time of nineteenth-century nationalism and political unification to the present.

Chosen Nation argues that “Mennonitism should not be understood as a single group—or even as an amalgamation of many smaller groups.” Rather, the book seeks to uncover “what the idea of Mennonitism has meant for various observers” and “how and why interpretations have developed over time” (7). Goossen’s transnational history argues that Mennonites appropriated German nationalism when it was in their interest to do so and suppressed or abandoned it when it became problematic. Into the 1800s, Mennonites had commonly understood themselves to be a global confessional community. As the century wore on, however, they began to portray themselves as “archetypical Germans” (13). As Emil Händiges, the long-time chairman of the progressive Union of Mennonite Congregations in the German Empire (established in 1886), put it, “Do not almost all Mennonites … wherever they may live—in Russia, in Switzerland, in Alsace-Lorraine, Galicia, Pomerania, in the United States and Canada, in Mexico and Paraguay, yes even in Asiatic Siberia and Turkestan—speak the same German mother tongue? Are not the Mennonites, wherever they go, also the pioneers of German language, customs, and culture?” (13). Whether the Mennonites in these far-flung locales—or even in conservative congregations in the new German Empire—understood themselves as the promoters of German culture was another matter entirely.

For Goossen, the free-for-all of Mennonite identity-building (“collectivism”) was “constrained by the situations in which they found themselves” (16). Over the course of seven rich chapters, he guides us along the twisted road of Mennonite identity formation. Initially, around the time of the formation of the German Empire in 1871, Mennonite activists like Hinrich van der Smissen (despite his Dutch name!) developed “a common narrative based on German nationality” (19). They drew together Mennonites from three non-German regions—north German Mennonites with roots in the Netherlands, South German Mennonites with connections to coreligionists in Switzerland and Eastern France, and Prussian Mennonites living in former Polish and Lithuanian territory—who had been loosely connected by migration, commerce, marriage, and a long memory of religious persecution (fostered by the influential Martyr’s Mirror). This nascent German identity was fostered by print publications, by participation in political and military activity, and by improved communications—not least through congregational address books linking churches throughout the unified German territory (31). During these early years of Imperial Germany, there were three important developments: German replaced Dutch as the language of Mennonitism; the notion of a Mennonite diaspora was invented (further entrenching the notion of Germany as the movement’s homeland); and Mennonites became closely associated with agriculture and traditionalism (never mind the urban modernity of many of their intellectual leaders).

One key point of conflict, and the reason many Mennonites resisted this narrative of Germanness, was the notion that pacifistic Mennonites should enter military service in Imperial Germany. Whether in fighting or in noncombatant roles, military service was a means to improve Mennonite standing in the new Germany and attaining full civil liberties for their congregations. Many Mennonites rejected this political transaction, however, and emigrated. (Russian Mennonites faced a similar quandary after the passage of a draft law in 1874, and about 18,000, or one-third, emigrated to North America.)

The 1886 German Mennonite Union was slow to develop. At first, only 17 of 71 congregations joined, and most of them were progressive urban congregations in northwest Germany (71). Claiming to speak for all Mennonites, progressives portrayed conservatives who shunned the Union (and, with it, participation in modern Germany) as both nationally and religiously indifferent, and invoked fears of mixed marriages and Mennonite population decline to coerce reluctant conservatives from the South and Northeast to join the Union. In this, they achieved a measure of success. By 1914, 70 percent of Mennonites were members of the Union, and rural Mennonites even outnumbered their urban coreligionists (94).

The culmination of this Mennonite entrance into the national life of Germany came during the First World War. For Mennonites in Germany, war offered them the fullest opportunity to participate in national life, by fighting and dying for the Fatherland. Of the roughly 2,000 German Mennonites who entered military service, only one-third chose noncombatant roles. Abroad, Mennonites had little interest in supporting German war aims, but failed to convince their neighbours. Their Germanness and their refusal to fight against Germany (not out of love for Germany, but because most were pacifists) made them persecuted outsiders in Russia, the United States, and Canada. In Russia, about 6,000 Mennonite men did enter the non-combatant forestry service, while another 6,000 served in the medical corps. Many rejected any German identity, claiming that “not a drop of German blood flows in our veins” (103)!

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 mobilized Mennonites in Europe and North America to try to rescue about 100,000 of their coreligionists from the violence of the Russian civil war (97). After 1918, Russian Mennonites subject to anti-German reprisals and marauding brigands formed self-defence militias. Suffering under persecution and famine, many sought to emigrate. To do so, they adopted the language of national self-determination and of race to present themselves both as oppressed minorities and as white agriculturalists worthy of resettlement in North and South America. Goossen describes this as the embracing of “a Zionist-like form of religious nationalism” (16). “Between 1923 and 1926, 20,000 settlers—one-fifth of all Mennonites in the Bolshevik empire—relocated to Canada” (115). About 4,000 more established a “Mennonite state” in the Chaco, in Paraguay, primarily because it afforded them cultural isolation and refuge from persecution (119). Though there was still much debate about whether Mennonites constituted a “cohesive trans-state identity,” the experience of the First World War and its aftermath “consolidated the idea of a global Mennonite community” (120).

After Hitler and his National Socialists came to power and led Germany into a racialized conquest of Eastern Europe, discourses of Mennonitism shifted once more, as pro-Nazi Mennonites formulated the notion of “a four-hundred-year-old ‘racial church’—an Aryan version of the Jewish ‘antirace’—entitled to a share of the Führer’s spoils” (16). Indeed, German scientists had begun racial research in Mennonite communities already in the Weimar era, with the consent and often support of Mennonite leaders. In the Third Reich, Mennonites proved to be “more Aryan than the average German,” according to Nazi researchers, in large part because of their cultural resistance to intermarriage. They were, in a sense, racial nationalists before the fact, and not a few tried to work their way towards the Führer by campaigning for a centralized, united, hierarchical Mennonite Union in the image of National Socialism. While many Mennonites were critical of the pro-Nazi “German Christian Movement” for attacking the Old Testament and some questioned whether one could be both a Christian and a National Socialist, most were content to enter into inner emigration, focusing on the purely spiritual activities of church services and abandoning education and youth work to the Nazis (125-126). Most Mennonite officials swore oaths, and most Mennonite men abandoned non-resistance, which they viewed as a dangerous relic of the past. Mennonites adopted racial discourse, encouraged Nazi racial research which depicted them as pure Aryans (“anti-Jews”) and even adopted aspects of antisemitism, complaining about the Judeo-Bolshevik persecution of Russian Mennonites in the Soviet Union (140). Goossen notes the ways in which Mennonite intellectuals produced their own Aryanism, striving to prove their Germanness by contrasting themselves to Russians and Jews. Hundreds of articles were written to make this point in the middle 1930s (143).

Goossen argues Mennonites were implicated in the Holocaust, in part by fashioning narratives of Aryanism that justified antisemitic laws and “implicated the confession in policies of internment, expropriation, and genocide’ (123). SS Chief Heinrich Himmler met extensively with Mennonite leader Benjamin Unruh, and established an SS Special Command R to comb the Ukrainian countryside for Mennonites to resettle in Wartheland, even as SS Einsatzgruppen were combing the Ukrainian countryside for Jews to round up and kill. As ethnic Germans, Mennonites were rewarded with social services and material goods, such as the clothes, shoes, and homes of murdered Jews. As Goossen puts it, “welfare and mass murder were two sides of the same coin” (149). In the Nazi vision for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, pure-blood Mennonites were the ideal German settlers who could colonize (for them, resettle) Ukraine. SS leaders singled out Mennonite settlements like Chortitza and Molotschna as model German towns. Alfred Rosenberg described his visit to the former as “the most moving moment of the entire trip” he made through occupied Ukraine in 1942 (152). For these Mennonites, the war served to spark a religious and political revival, in which they gained status and power in the occupied territory. They complied with and at times participated in the Holocaust, occasionally as killers but more often as the inheritors of land expropriated from Jews among whom they lived (164).

As the war turned against Germany, Mennonites in the East were evacuated en masse. From fall 1943 to spring 1944, 200,000 German colonists (including 35,000 Mennonites) made their way on foot, horseback, wagon, and train westward into occupied Poland, swelling the German population in Wartheland. Here, too, Mennonites participated in the racial categorization underway, as the Nazis sought to identify ideal German settlers (169). Ultimately, though, as the Nazi empire collapsed, 45,000 Mennonites ended up fleeing from Ukrainian, Polish, and East Prussian territory into Germany.

After 1945, as Allied officials began sorting out the tangle of displaced persons and refugees, Mennonites faced a dilemma. If they identified as Ukrainians or Russians, they risked deportation to the USSR. If they identified as Germans, they risked the charge of collaboration and made themselves ineligible for aid. At first, some tried to identify themselves as Dutch, and a few made it to the Netherlands. Others began to claim Mennonitism as an alternative to German or Russian ethnic identity, not because of an awakening of religious nationalism but as a “temporary response to historical contingencies” (175). Though the International Refugee Organization was skeptical, about 15,000 Mennonites were nonetheless allowed to immigrate to Canada in the 1950s, mostly because they were white, Christian, anti-communist, agrarian settlers (179, 181).

In recent decades, Mennonite identity has remained fluid and contested. Mission work and the establishment of new Mennonite churches in the non-Western world has prompted questions about the relationship between Germanness and Mennonitism. Ironically, while the Mennonite migration from the collapsing Soviet Union to the newly unified Germany was predicated on Mennonite claims to German citizenship, questions remain about their Germanness.

In the end, Benjamin W. Goossen’s Chosen Nation demonstrates that, over the past two centuries, Mennonite ethnic and religious identity has been anything but stable and self-evident over the past two centuries; rather, it has been constructed, controversial, and changeable.