Were Latter-day Saints Nazis? Secret Files Revealed | Informed Saints

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Were Latter Day Saints Nazis? There were thousands of Latter Day Saints living in Germany in the 1930s. Everyone wants to be on the right side of history. No one wants to be Hitler's best friend. And so were Latter Day Saints resistant to the Nazi regime or were they enthusiastic supporters of Hitler's mission? And most importantly, was LDS Church Ball a tool of Hitler's Nazi regime? Welcome to Informed Saints. I'm Jasmine Rapley. I'm joined in studio by Book of Mormon researcher Neal Rapley and Latter Day Saint Nazi researcher Stephen Smooth. [00:00:27] Speaker B: Thank you for the qualifier Nazi researcher. That's important. [00:00:31] Speaker C: I have known Stephen for 15 years and that entire time he's been a little more obsessed with German culture, a. [00:00:39] Speaker B: Little too much into German, a little too into German culture purely for academic reasons. I have a background in German studies from byu. Okay, yeah. [00:00:47] Speaker A: Purely theoretical. [00:00:49] Speaker B: Yes, that's right. [00:00:49] Speaker A: So to kind of set up the problem of what people's concerns are about the Latter Day Saints in this era of history, what? We have dug through the Internet and found some very informative tweets on ldx mostly. Neil has researched and dug these up. [00:01:05] Speaker C: So we're just had to contribute something. [00:01:07] Speaker B: What could possibly go wrong? Looking for Nazi stuff on Twitter, right? [00:01:10] Speaker A: That's right. [00:01:12] Speaker B: Okay, let's see here. [00:01:13] Speaker A: This one from Fully Loaded Exmo says. Not sure who needs to hear this, but you don't get to play some hypothetical who would be on the Nazi side game with the Mormons. We already know. Here's a photo of Heber J. Grant. J. Reuben Clark supported their cause. Mormon dissidents were excommunicated. So that is pretty strong word. [00:01:32] Speaker B: That's a sizzling hot take right there. Look, there's Heber J. Grant himself. And without any further context at all for that photograph, it's gotta be really bad, right guys? [00:01:41] Speaker A: That's right. All right, next one. Teo Red Octo said. I can't even read the rest of that. Mormon Nazis new book uncovers LDS support for the Third Reich. A startling new book argues that German Mormons in the 1930s were not just tolerant of Hitler, but often enthusiastic about his policies. Color meet depressed. And it's sharing an article talking about how this new book talks about Latter Day Saint involvement with the Nazi regime. That sounds pretty legit to me. [00:02:07] Speaker B: And by new book, that book came out like 10 years ago. [00:02:10] Speaker C: Yeah, new being 10, a decade old, but okay. [00:02:12] Speaker A: Mormon Speak says during the Holocaust the Church of Jesus Christ remained neutral regarding Hitler, while the Catholic Church worked tirelessly to smuggle hundreds of thousands of Jews out of Germany. We claim to be the only true church, but too often are on the wrong side of history. [00:02:26] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. Almost 500 people like that tweet. Wow. [00:02:30] Speaker A: So, obviously, props to the Catholic Church for doing wonderful work to help Jews during this time in history. [00:02:36] Speaker B: But not so much for the rat lines they had running through the Vatican to escape Nazis to Argentina. But we'll. We'll ignore that part about the Vatican. Yeah. [00:02:44] Speaker A: But clearly there's a lot of concern about, like, were Latter Day Saints really. Is this a true church, or were they mixing and not philandering? [00:02:54] Speaker C: That's not fraternizing. [00:02:54] Speaker B: Fraternizing with the Nazis. [00:02:56] Speaker A: With the Nazis, which is kind of like the universal punchline of bad guys. [00:03:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:01] Speaker A: So let's get into this. Stephen, bring us back to the 1930s in Germany. [00:03:07] Speaker D: Okay. [00:03:08] Speaker A: Since you are. You've studied German studies and you are a Latter Day Saint researcher. This is an intersection of a lot of your interests. What was Germany like during this time? How many Latter Day Saints are there? What is the church looking like at this time? Just kind of paint the picture. [00:03:20] Speaker E: Right. [00:03:21] Speaker B: Okay, so let's go back to January 1933. That's when Hitler becomes the Chancellor of Germany. [00:03:26] Speaker E: Right. [00:03:27] Speaker B: And very quickly he's going to consolidate his power and he will become the totalitarian ruler of Germany. [00:03:34] Speaker E: Right. [00:03:35] Speaker B: At the time Hitler comes into power, 1933, there's about, like, 8,000 Latter Day Saints living in Germany and Austria. Those are the numbers reported by the mission president, Oliver Budge, in letters to the Gestapo when they're asking him, hey, what's the deal with you Mormons? [00:03:48] Speaker E: Right. [00:03:49] Speaker B: So you're. You're about 8,000 people, right. In this country, you're a small religious minority then and now. The church in Germany is typically called a Zechte in German. A sect, Right. Yep. And that carries both the, like, technical legal language. It's probably different today. I'm not sure exactly, but in the 30s, they were a Zekda, which means, like, legally, you weren't a fully qualified church. [00:04:15] Speaker E: Right. [00:04:16] Speaker B: Like, you didn't have, like, the legal status of a church, but you. But you did have some legal recognition. [00:04:21] Speaker E: Right. [00:04:22] Speaker B: So you're kind of this, like mid tier of legal recognition. So you weren't Catholic, you weren't Evangelical Protestant. [00:04:27] Speaker E: Right. [00:04:28] Speaker B: Lutheran. Those had, like, state recognition, but you're something sort of below that culturally. A sect or a secta in German then and now basically means like a cult. [00:04:37] Speaker D: Okay. [00:04:38] Speaker B: So Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, even like the Baptists and the Methodists back then, basically non German American, foreign Christian groups. Minority groups are just a zekda, a cult. Okay, so you're a religious minority in a totalitarian. A country with totalitarian rule. [00:04:54] Speaker E: Right. [00:04:55] Speaker B: Hitler and the Nazis have a deeply ambivalent attitude towards Christianity. Hitler's not. I mean, he's nominally Catholic because he's from Austria. [00:05:03] Speaker E: Right. [00:05:03] Speaker B: But he's not like a practicing Catholic. Nazis see Christianity as useful for their political ends, but they're not really enthusiastic Christians. They see Christianity as a threat to their power and so forth. So with that set up here, I want to ask you and Neil, Jasmine, you have three doors in front of you, okay? Door number one, you can become openly, ardently anti Nazi. [00:05:27] Speaker D: Okay? [00:05:27] Speaker B: This is the door the Jehovah's Witnesses go through. [00:05:29] Speaker E: Right? [00:05:30] Speaker B: They bravely stand up and boldly denounce Nazism and they refuse to participate in state functions and so forth. You get to be on the right side of history for that. [00:05:39] Speaker E: Great. [00:05:40] Speaker B: But guess what? You go to the camps. You and your family and your friends, you go to camps. So that's door number one. Door number two, you can do what Ludwig Muller did and set up the Reichskirche, the Reichs Church. [00:05:52] Speaker E: Right. [00:05:52] Speaker B: And you can be ardently pro Nazi. You can suck up to the regime and you can encourage people to become Nazis. That will ensure your safety in the regime. [00:06:01] Speaker E: Right. [00:06:02] Speaker B: But that's going to, of course, basically cost you your soul. And you're definitely super duper gonna be on the wrong side of history that way. That's door number two, door number three, and this is the door that the Church walks through. You can remain politically neutral, meaning you're not going to endorse or vocally officially oppose the regime. And you're going to adopt an accommodationist approach to the regime, saying, we recognize that you are the rightful rulers in the country. We will obey, honor and sustain the law, and we are not going to officially oppose you. [00:06:33] Speaker E: Right. [00:06:33] Speaker B: In the sense of, like, open armed resistance or whatever. [00:06:35] Speaker D: Okay? [00:06:36] Speaker B: Those are your three doors. Which one do you go through? [00:06:39] Speaker A: Well, I think it can be really easy to want to say, like, well, obviously door number one's the right answer. [00:06:45] Speaker B: And I would do it. I would for sure be an anti Nazi and resist them, because I'm a big, brave, bold person on Twitter in 2025, and that's exactly what I would do. [00:06:53] Speaker A: Well, you know, you think of the moral calculus and you're like, obviously, hindsight's 20 20, and we know so much more about the German atrocities now than Anyone would have known in the 1930s. But even saying that, like you can even if you knew that harm was being hap. Was happening to minority populations and you're like, well, of course I need to stand up for them. That's the right thing to do. If you walk through door number one, though, and you stand up for those people, there are still going to be harm done to other people you love as well. I mean, if you're going to incriminate the entire Church of Jesus Christ, that it's also your family and your friends. [00:07:24] Speaker B: And your neighbors and your neighbors ward. [00:07:26] Speaker A: Community people are going to be harmed no matter what. So it's it. [00:07:30] Speaker C: And, and your actions, especially if you are a small minority, like Latter Day Saints, were right. Your actions are probably not going to be much of a deterrent for harm. [00:07:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And you're going to do very little to stop that. [00:07:42] Speaker C: You're going to do very little to stop the harm you want to speak out against while bringing additional harm upon people. Others. People that you love and care about and within your social circles. So I think, like you said, it's really easy to make these brave, bold declarations under a pseudonym, no less, on the Internet. [00:08:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:08:03] Speaker C: About how you would have responded under those circumstances or what the right way to respond is under those circumstances. But I think we all, most people should understand that when you're actually like there in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the, the calculus and the optics just look really different. You have to, you, you have to weigh a lot of other things. But the other thing that I think is worth maybe saying here is that like, we celebrate the people who had the courage to stand up and to risk life and limb to try and do the right thing. And I think that's great. I think it's really important that we celebrate and valorize those kinds of actions. But we shouldn't. At the same time as we valorize the people who made those choices and, and had the courage to do so, we should not villainize the average everyday citizen who wasn't okay with what was going on, but was just trying to like, protect themselves and their family and to survive the best they could. We don't celebrate the heroes for the purpose of villainizing the ordinary everyday people. That's not what it's for. Right. And so the villains are the villains and the heroes are important, are exceptional, but caught in the everyday people who are more or less victims on some level or another. [00:09:25] Speaker A: And I would hope that we all could agree that going through door number two, being like an ardent enthusiast Nazi supporter is the wrong door. [00:09:32] Speaker B: That's the wrong door. Yeah. Let's be very clear about that moral relativist thing. What I'm saying is Anil caught it perfectly, is in the time, in the situation, there are difficult choices people have to make in terms of surviving and coping with a totalitarian regime. [00:09:46] Speaker D: Okay. [00:09:46] Speaker B: I want to make one thing very clear because we saw it in one of these tweets, it is a lie that the church, like ever supported the Nazi regime. [00:09:53] Speaker D: Okay. [00:09:55] Speaker B: There is no statement of any church leader, not Heber J. Grant, nobody getting up there and saying, we are totally down with the Nazis. We want all of our church members to be Nazis. We're all about the Aryan race and liquidating the Jews and conquering Eastern Europe. Nothing like that. [00:10:10] Speaker D: Okay. [00:10:11] Speaker B: So I see. I have to say this because I see it. And we saw in some of these tweets here. [00:10:14] Speaker E: Right. [00:10:14] Speaker B: So there's no record of this. The Church's position was accommodation with the regime, which basically said, we are not going to like, resist you, openly resist you. We will accommodate your rule and we will encourage our members to remain politically neutral and to submit to the laws and statutes of the state. [00:10:33] Speaker E: Right. [00:10:34] Speaker B: So that was the Church's end. We'll get to this. We're kind of jumping the gun here, but we'll get to one of the big reasons why that was the approach that the Church took and why they made that decision. [00:10:43] Speaker A: Well, I mean, we can go right into it. How did the Nazi regime respond to that position? [00:10:48] Speaker C: Well, maybe before we do that, let's maybe just say, like, Stephen, you actually have, like, you're not just a German studies guy. You've actually done and published some directly relevant research. [00:10:59] Speaker B: Ta da. [00:11:00] Speaker C: See if I can pretty much off the press. [00:11:04] Speaker B: So, yeah. So let me give a little background to what we have here. I hope we can see it in camera. So a little while ago I was working for the B.H. roberts foundation and with my German studies background, I was put to work to study the history of. Of the Church and Nazi Germany. [00:11:21] Speaker E: Right. [00:11:22] Speaker B: One of the tweets mentioned this book that came out 10 years ago. That book is deeply flawed and problematic for a number of reasons. And there. These are new reasons why we can say that book is deeply flawed and problematic. So what? In the course of my studies, I came to find out that in the Bundesachiv in the Federal Archives in Berlin, Germany, there is a giant, thick, 500 page dossier on the Mormons. De Mormonen. [00:11:47] Speaker E: Right. [00:11:47] Speaker B: The Latter Day Saints compiled By the Zika Heightsteinst. That's the security service of the ss. [00:11:53] Speaker E: Right. [00:11:53] Speaker B: So the, the Nazi intelligence agency, basically. Okay, it goes from 1933, right, when Hitler takes power to 1939 when the war breaks out. Those are the range of documents. [00:12:02] Speaker A: See, that surprises me. If I can just interrupt for a second, because when I think of Nazi Germany, I don't think of the Mormons or Latter Day Saints. They're not in our history books, nothing like that. And so I've just always assumed, because I've been ignorant of this portion of our history that, like, oh, they were just there. The Nazis didn't care about church. [00:12:18] Speaker C: Wasn't really on there, they weren't on the radar. [00:12:20] Speaker A: So to hear that there was a huge report on them is fascinating to me. [00:12:24] Speaker B: Now, to be clear, right, The Latter Day Saints were not as much a priority for the Nazis as, say, the Jews or Eastern Europeans. Right. Slavs or other undesirables. Right, but, but certainly from this dossier from These documents, almost 500 pages, which, by the way, have been cited by precisely zero historians, including this guy from this book from 10 years ago, I have found one historian who cites it in a footnote, who just mentions its existence. [00:12:53] Speaker A: So the Nazis put together a massive report and no one's engaged. [00:12:56] Speaker C: No one's engaged in those documents in 80 years? [00:12:58] Speaker B: Basically, yes. Ever since the end of World War II. Nobody. Not there's a. There's a vast literature on the history of church in Germany. [00:13:05] Speaker A: Not accessible or what? [00:13:06] Speaker B: Well, I can't tell you exactly. It could have been that they weren't accessible. But I mean, this author in 2013, he's a German author, he cites it. So he knew about it, about them. But then this guy in 2015, his. His big book, I mean, he should have known about them, he should have utilized them. I mean, we don't have to subtweet here. It's David Connelly, Nelson Moroni in the Swastika. [00:13:27] Speaker E: Right? [00:13:28] Speaker B: This was based on his PhD dissertation, then got published as a book. He, by all rights, should have known about this. If he's going to purport to produce an academic work on the. On the definitive history of the Mormons in Nazi Germany, zero engagement with these documents. [00:13:40] Speaker A: So you're really doing just like groundbreaking work to crack open this report that the Nazis did in the Latter Day Saints that no one else has really thoroughly engaged, has looked at. Yeah, that's crazy. [00:13:50] Speaker B: So, okay, so what do we find from this dossier? A couple of things so you can check out this is Latter Day Saint historical studies, came out spring of 2025. But there's an online version of this on the mormoner.org website, there's an article on Latter Day Saints in Nazi Germany. And on the bhroberts.org website there's the actual documents with transcriptions, I've translated them, right? All this kind of stuff. So if you want to subscribe to the journal, you can get it from there or you can go to mormoner.org or bhroberts.org and get it there. So, okay, because they're, you know, 500 pages, we go through a lot. I'm going to try to pull out some of the major things, right, that, that come out of these documents. So actually, you know what, I'll, I'll actually indulge myself because in my introduction I actually go through like the main points, right, that comes out against this. [00:14:40] Speaker E: Right. [00:14:40] Speaker B: Okay, so what do we learn? I have a whole section. What do we learn from the documents? Okay, so one thing we learn surveillance of church members and meetings. So we come to find out, and we knew this from anecdotal sources and oral histories and other things, right? [00:14:53] Speaker A: So like they were being watched. [00:14:54] Speaker B: They're being watched. Okay, so the Nazis are planting literally like secret agents in church meetings and observing what's being said and done. And they are writing reports and sending them back to headquarters in Berlin saying, and it's all over. It's not one place. It's a systematic coordinated surveillance throughout Nazi Germany. Okay, so multiple cities, multiple reports from multiple years throughout this, observing and spying on us. And not just sacrament meetings, like conference meetings, baptisms, like you know, young men, young women's like auxiliary meetings. Just anytime there are a bunch of latter day hands getting together, plenty of times there was Nazis spying on us. [00:15:30] Speaker A: Oh my gosh. [00:15:31] Speaker B: So, and again, we knew this from, from like anecdotal and oral histories. But now we have the documents from the Nazis indicating, yes, they were all over surveilling and spying on us. [00:15:40] Speaker C: We, we have the documents so we know they were spying on us and we know what they were reporting, what they reported, what they were actually saying. [00:15:47] Speaker B: And it was not positive for. It's specifically looking for any political speech happening in the church. Right, okay, so they specifically say there was no, no political speech or action being taken in the church at this meeting. Okay, so we know what they're looking for. They're looking for, can we nail these guys on anti state political activity? We'll get to that in a second. What else Would the Nazis doing? They were banning church literature. So they banned James E. Talmadge, the Articles of Faith. [00:16:11] Speaker E: Right. [00:16:11] Speaker B: And the ban came from one of the highest church. Sorry, one of the highest Nazi authorities. It came from the Reich Chamber of Literature or, sorry, the Reich Chamber of Culture and Literature under Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. [00:16:27] Speaker A: Wow. [00:16:27] Speaker B: So from the highest echelons of the government, we have edict saying we're banning these Mormon publications. James E. Talmadge was up there. In the dossier are confiscated tracts and like pamphlets. So they say we encountered Mormon missionaries on the street and wherever or we encountered a local Mormon in their congregation. And we took these tracts from them and they have photocopies reproduced in the dossier. [00:16:47] Speaker A: Wow. Okay, what did the church do? Do we know? Did they just like hide their copies of James Town's article? [00:16:52] Speaker B: Yeah, they stopped circulating it. And in the, the manuscript History of the German Austrian Mission, they say on this day, it was July of 1936, I think on this day the book was banned. And so we pulled circulation, we pulled publication of it. [00:17:07] Speaker E: Right. [00:17:07] Speaker B: In Germany. Okay, so they're spying on church members. They are banning church literature. They are arresting church members for anti state activities. And the example I use, and this guy is a hero. His name does not appear in any of the books or literature on the history of the church in Germany. He deserves to be remembered. His name is Paul Herbert Scheeck. [00:17:27] Speaker D: Okay, I've never heard of him. [00:17:28] Speaker B: Yeah, no, everybody's heard of Helmut Huebner, right? He's like the big hero for Mormon history in Germany. But Paul Herbert Schick, he is a factory worker out of, I think it's Dresden. No, Freiburg. Sorry. So he's out of Freiburg. He is arrested at work in 1936 because after a work meeting, they got the work, the factory together. They listened to Hitler give a speech and as was customary, you would sing the German national anthem and the Horst Wesselied. The Horst Wessel song. It's this Nazi anthem, right? You'd give the German salute. I won't do it here for cameras. So we don't get banned. You do. We all know the salute. You give the salute, you sing the song. He refused to do it. He gets arrested and they ask him why. And he specifically says, because of my religion, because I believe in the cause of Zion and a greater kingdom. He even says, as a German, I recognize I'm subject to the Fuhrer, but I hold Zion as the more higher ideal. Okay, so they're arresting church members who are refusing to comply and let me. [00:18:23] Speaker C: Ask you this question. Was this guy excommunicated? [00:18:26] Speaker B: No. Okay. Because. [00:18:28] Speaker C: And that. That's important. That's important because people. We read one of those tweets where people like dissidents were being excommunicated. That happened once. [00:18:35] Speaker B: That happened once. And some very specific circumstances. [00:18:38] Speaker C: Under some very specific circumstances. But others who were getting arrested. [00:18:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And. [00:18:42] Speaker C: And who were. Who were doing, you know, participating in activities to. To push back against the Nazi regime. Who were Latter Day Saints, they would get arrested, but they were not being excommunicated. [00:18:53] Speaker B: Okay. This is a big one. Threats against church leaders by the Nazis. [00:18:57] Speaker A: Really? [00:18:57] Speaker B: So David Conley Nelson, in his book and others, they will point to statements being made in some church publications or by some church leaders that are admittedly uncomfortable in terms of like, trying to buddy buddy with the Nazis or say positive things about the Nazis. Hey, we have so much in common. We both do genealogy, and we both have, like a word of wisdom thing. We're all about healthy living. [00:19:18] Speaker D: Okay. [00:19:19] Speaker B: And the accommodations that the church made, again, to the regime. David Connolly Nelson's basic thesis and what you see from these people on Twitter is this is because Mormon leaders are a bunch of feckless, spineless cowards. [00:19:31] Speaker E: Right. [00:19:32] Speaker B: And they. Or even worse, they actually agreed with the Nazis and they were super down with it. No, I will contend from these new documents, we now have a very clear picture why the church took an accommodationist approach to the regiment. And one of the documents, it's from May 5, 1936. I'm going to read it here. This is a Gestapo memorandum from the Prussian Gestapo. They met with Roy Welker, the mission president of the German Austrian Mission. And after their meeting, this is what they say, okay. Due to the increased advertising activities within the aforementioned sect by foreign, particularly American missionaries, a meeting with the senior representatives of the Mormons was held at the secret state police office on April 30, 1936. During this meeting, it was conveyed to the representatives that in the event of anti state propaganda activities, the strictest state police measures would be carried out against the sect. The representatives promised to issue general directives to individual sects to prevent any intrusion and anti state propaganda activities by foreign preachers. [00:20:36] Speaker A: Wow. [00:20:36] Speaker B: In other words, the mission leaders being told, if you guys do anything that is anti state propaganda activity, you can expect the strictest state police measures. What do you think that means with the Nazis when they say strict state police measures will be taken against you? [00:20:51] Speaker C: So actually, I think I remember because when I was reading your introduction, you later Talk about. I can't remember who it was, but someone else was interrogated by Nazi officials and there was a veiled threat in there, or maybe not so veiled that, like, once we're done with the Jews, Mormons are next. [00:21:07] Speaker B: That's. Yeah, that's Otto Berndt, who is Helmut Huebner's district president. When he's interrogated by the Gestapo, they say, to effect. And this is from his own account, he says, well, you know, all this doesn't matter anyways, because once we have the war won, once we've won the war and we've taken care of the Jewish question. [00:21:23] Speaker E: Right. [00:21:23] Speaker B: Basically, you Mormons are next. [00:21:25] Speaker C: Yeah. Now it's a counterfactual. We'll never know if they were gonna follow through with that threat. But these are the kinds of things that church leaders are facing, are facing when they're making this decision. [00:21:36] Speaker B: And by the way, Roy Welker, a month later writes a letter to the mission circular saying, guys, seriously, don't talk about politics with your proselyting activities. Right. [00:21:44] Speaker C: I do want to maybe interject here because you have some people who would still say, like, they're being spineless cowards. They should still stand up to the regime or whatever, and people who compared it to, like, Catholic activities in helping Jews get out of Germany or whatever. But I think it needs to be understood, like, the different power dynamic that exists with a small foreign sect. Right. And look, this would probably be true even today, despite the fact that the Church has grown and the Church's wealth has grown. People like to talk about how the Church is so powerful now, but, like, we do not carry the level of cultural cachet or power or power that, like, a Catholic Church carries and that being a member of the Catholic Church carries, especially in Europe. Right. And especially 90, 80, 90 years ago when this was going on. And. And so it's really like the diet, like, to compare it to that. Like, survival is, like, hard under these circumstances. [00:22:41] Speaker B: Yes. [00:22:42] Speaker C: And you really, like. You have to be like, you're already under suspicion just for being, like, this small foreign sect. You really have to carry, like, toe the line very, very carefully to avoid repercussions. [00:22:56] Speaker B: Right. So we have these explicit threats, which I think is super duper important context for explaining why Church leaders adopted this approach. It was for survival. It was a survival mechanism to ensure that they do not get the Church banned. In Germany, which it almost was, by the way. In the documents, there's discussions where they say, why don't we just ban these people? They're clearly, we'll get to this in a second. They're clearly not compatible with us. They're not compatible with our ideology. We don't like their foreign missionaries. We should ban them. [00:23:25] Speaker C: Basically, they see through the PR attempts to make it sound like, hey, we'll get to that. They saw through it better than certain historians have. [00:23:33] Speaker B: Historians or people on Twitter. Okay, moving on. Surveillance of Heber J. Grant. So Hebra J. Grant comes out. We'll talk about that picture in a second, because I was annoyed by that. He comes out in the summer of 1937. He gives talks in Germany. They're spying on him. They have agents planted, of course. One of them, she's a Froin Pika who's there in Berlin when he's speaking, and she gives a report on what he said. [00:23:53] Speaker E: Right. [00:23:54] Speaker B: She's not impressed by Heber J. Grant, by the way. And she even says that, you know, his preaching is very simple. And what the Mormons are saying is very simple and primitive. And also, I'm worried that, like, the Jews and the Freemasons might exploit the Mormons for their nefarious ends. So we've got to be careful about this. So that's. That's Froila and Paika. Okay, so those are. Some of these we get. What else do we get from this document? Well, for the first time now, we have unfiltered, unedited access to what the Nazis thought of Latter Day Saints. [00:24:23] Speaker D: Okay. [00:24:24] Speaker A: Okay. [00:24:24] Speaker B: So we have. We have individual attitudes among Latter Day Saints. Some were pro Nazi, like Helmut Huebner's branch president. Some were anti Nazis, like Otto Barent and Max Reschka. By the way, Max Reschka helped Jews at Kristallnacht. So there were Latter Day Saints that helped Jews during the Holocaust. [00:24:40] Speaker C: And if I remember correctly from your thing there, like, while there were some pro Nazis, based on demographic information we have, there was a lower percentage of Latter Day Saints who were, like, who were actually members of the Nazi Party and were really supportive than the population, something like 2.5%. So you were less likely to be sympathetic to Nazis if you were a Latter Day Saints. [00:25:04] Speaker A: You were saying, like 8,000 Latter Day Saints in Germany at the time. If I'm remembering the statistic, it's something like about 10% of Germans were Nazis. And you're saying that maybe like 2.5% of latter day Saints were Nazis. So it's not that there were no Latter Day Saint Nazis, but it was a much lower percentage than that would. [00:25:22] Speaker B: Only we also don't have indication of Latter Day Saints occupying high positions in Nazi, in the Nazi party. So. So for a lot of these people, they're going to become Nazis because they have to for their work or something. [00:25:33] Speaker E: Right. [00:25:33] Speaker B: Like it's a requirement for, for their employment. Now there were like full throated Nazi Latter Day Saints, I'm not denying that. [00:25:40] Speaker E: Right. [00:25:40] Speaker B: But, but many of them. And probably your typical Latter Day Saint is going to join the party because his employment demands it or something. [00:25:48] Speaker C: And I mean, just doing some back of the napkin math here. If there's 8,000 Latter Day Saints in Germany and only 2.5% are Nazis, that's only like 200 people. [00:25:57] Speaker B: Yeah, it's not many. [00:25:59] Speaker A: Still 200 more Nazis than there should be. [00:26:02] Speaker B: Okay, so let's go to the Nazi attitude. So we have reports from the Nazis saying, here's what we think about the Latter Day Saints. [00:26:10] Speaker D: Okay? [00:26:11] Speaker B: Drumroll. They are not fans. They do not like us. They do not like our teachings. They do not like our church. They do not like our ideology. They are mad at us because we are politically neutral and we're not jumping on board, you know, with the party and its goals. They don't like us for our foreign influence. [00:26:27] Speaker E: Right. [00:26:27] Speaker B: Especially American influence. They don't like us for things like tithing, which I think is a Jewish thing. They keep saying this, right? They keep talking about Jewish influence. [00:26:35] Speaker C: They talk about how we like the Old Testament and that's this Jewish influence. [00:26:39] Speaker B: And tithing and Sabbath and Zion. They don't like that. They don't like our missionaries. [00:26:44] Speaker A: So not liking the Latter Day Saint approach to tithing is a Nazi talking point. [00:26:48] Speaker B: Yes, it literally is in the documents. They literally use our tithing system as a way to criticize us. Their sort of theory is that again, this is like this like weird Jewish thing with money. [00:26:58] Speaker E: Right. [00:26:59] Speaker B: And well, this is a Jewish influence on how they do things because money is being extracted from the state coffers and being sent to the church, which they don't like. [00:27:05] Speaker D: Okay. [00:27:06] Speaker B: They don't like the fact that we're friendly with Jews. So missionaries are living in buildings rented by Jews. Mission headquarters in Berlin is in a building owned by a Jew. They know that in the reports and they're not happy with that. [00:27:18] Speaker D: Okay. [00:27:19] Speaker B: In terms of our doctrine, they think it's bizarre. They think it's deviant. They think it's like kind of stupid and hackneyed. I'll read a part here. All of this kind of culminates. Oh, by the way, of course they're wondering. We think they're still practicing polygamy, right? Like there's secret polygamy happening in 1930s, 1930s. Okay, so let me read one example of this. So in 1938, there is a memorandum that is written up for Alfred Rosenberg. He's a Reichsleiter. That's like one step below Hitler, right? There's like there were like 12 or 16 of them in the history of, of Nazi Germany. Rosenberg is a bad guy. He, like, is one of the architects of the Holocaust, basically, ideologically speaking. And he oversees Eastern European conquered territories. Not a good guy. There's a report that strapped for him on May 5, 1938. It's like, basically like this is the culmination of what do the Nazis think of us? Because this is deliberately to him to say, here's what the Mormons are, here's what we think of them. [00:28:13] Speaker D: Okay? [00:28:14] Speaker B: He gives a definition of who we are, a history of us, what we believe. Most of it's kind of garbled and very negatively slanted and biased. But let me read the. The assessment the he has at the end of it. Okay, ready? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is an international Judeo Christian sect. Oh, you don't want that language being used, you Judeo Christian. The doctrine of the Mormons is composed of elements from other religious groups such as Buddhism, the doctrine of various gods and worlds, Islam, polygamy and Judaism. Organization, hierarchy, and the use of predominantly Jewish names and terms. It represents a glorification of Judaism. The pro Jewish stance is inevitably rooted in the doctrine, which is largely based on the Old Testament. Characteristic of this attitude is also the fact that the governor of Utah, the governors of Utah were often Jews. I mean, there was one of them. [00:29:05] Speaker E: Right? [00:29:06] Speaker B: American missionaries in Germany today still often reside with Jews. He goes on and on. [00:29:10] Speaker E: Right. [00:29:11] Speaker B: The sect is internationally oriented and advocates pacifist tendencies, as shown by large part by their use of tracts and frequently performed plays in Germany called Freedom or Slavery. So again, they don't like the fact that we're politically pacifist and neutral here. [00:29:24] Speaker E: Right? [00:29:25] Speaker B: The German, he goes on to talk about the congregations. He then talks more about sort of the missionary activity. And then here we go. Here's the kicker. The German leader of the Mormons probably talking about the mission president. The German leader of the Mormons constantly claims that the sect recognizes the National Socialist state and also advocates for it abroad. He states that the doctrine of the Mormons and National Socialism are two worldviews that are very similar. And you stop right there and you say, oh, here's Here we go. Here's the Mormons being compatible with the Nazis. Ready? Next paragraph. This is a deliberate distortion of the facts. As is already evident from the previous points. The doctrine of the Mormons is incompatible with the National Socialist worldview. Print it and put it on your fridge. This is a report to a high level Nazi. The doctrine of the Mormons is incompatible with the National Socialist worldview. So I don't want to hear anybody on Twitter trying to pull this crap about how, you know, the Mormons and the Nazis, they believed all the same things and they were on the wrong side and they were neutral. No, the Nazis saw through it. So all the PR that the church did in the newspapers and with the mission presidents and yes, after 1945, after the Holocaust and all that bad stuff, it's uncomfortable to read mission presidents and other church leaders saying nice things about the Nazis. The Nazis saw through it. They saw through that this was a deliberate attempt to curry favor and they weren't buying it. Okay, I'll just keep saying here. Furthermore, it is a fact that the Mormons in Germany show no interest in political events or current affairs. It is generally known that members of the sect categorically refused to do the to use the German salute. The Hitler salute. It is further proven that the American sect leadership, so that's Heber J. Grant and J. Reuben Clark, is still shamelessly agitating against National Socialist Germany today. Thus there can be no talk of a pro German attitude. [00:31:17] Speaker A: Boom. [00:31:18] Speaker B: So that's what the Nazis think of us. Does that sound like the kind of thing that you'd get from Twitter if you didn't know about this? [00:31:22] Speaker A: Okay, so but I do want to clarify something because clearly I think that's indisputable. The Nazis did not like the Latter Day Saints or at least held them in deep suspicion. But was the inverse necessarily true? You did mention that there were some full throated Latter Day Saints who were Nazi or full throated Nazis who were Latter Day Saints. And you mentioned that there are church leaders who made comparisons like we like family history, we like the word of wisdom and a healthy lifestyle. So how do we make sense of that? And wherever are these local leaders saying positive things about the Nazis or are these the top church leaders saying these positive things about the Nazis? [00:31:59] Speaker B: So some local leaders are pro Nazis. So again, Helmut Huebner's branch president, Arthur Sander, Arthur Zander in Hamburg, he is a ardent pro Nazi to the point that he clashes with others like Otto Berndt, the district president. [00:32:13] Speaker E: Right. [00:32:13] Speaker B: Who is an anti Nazi or Who does not is not friends with the Nazis. [00:32:16] Speaker D: Okay. [00:32:17] Speaker B: So in Germany, yes, you get local leaders and some members who are saying positive things. The most infamous example of this would be Alfred Reiss. He's the mission president of the East German mission. In 1939, right before the war breaks out, he publishes an article in a Nazi newspaper and he tries to make a favorable comparison with the Church and the Nazis. [00:32:36] Speaker E: Right. [00:32:36] Speaker B: That's probably the one that's again, the most infamous. Right. Where he tries to do this. So locally you have some members and some leaders, including mission leaders, who are trying to curry positive favor with the Nazis. As we see, the Nazis aren't buying it, but on their part, they're trying to do this. My fundamental question is why? Okay, in the case of some, it's because they're actual Nazis. [00:32:57] Speaker D: Okay. [00:32:58] Speaker B: After the war, Max Zimmer, he goes through, he's in Switzerland, he goes through and he kind of reestablishes contact with the church. And he says, unfortunately there were some members and leaders that were trying to make connections between the church and the regime. [00:33:10] Speaker E: Right. [00:33:10] Speaker B: So we can't deny that was happening in some places. How about Heber J. Grant, J. Reuben Clark, David O. McKay, they are not pro Nazis. J. Reuben Clark does have German sympathies and he is personally has anti Semitic bias. [00:33:23] Speaker E: Right. [00:33:24] Speaker B: That comes out. To call him a Nazi is a distortion and basically a lie. [00:33:28] Speaker D: Okay? [00:33:29] Speaker B: The first presidency, when the war breaks out, they officially condemn the war. They officially condemn by name Nazism and communism as ideologies incompatible with the gospel. [00:33:38] Speaker D: Okay. [00:33:39] Speaker B: Both before and after the war and during the war, this is happening. [00:33:42] Speaker C: And J. Reuben Clark is directly behind the statements, crafting the statement that's made against these things. [00:33:48] Speaker B: 1943 against these things, yeah. So his personal. So you may have differences personally amongst, like, what do you do with the war? Should America be involved? Right. And J. Rubin Clark does have German sympathies, but to call him some kind of a Nazi who supports Nazis, no, that's just not accurate. Now can we take a second here and go back to that picture of Heber J. Grant with the flag real quick. [00:34:10] Speaker A: Let's go back to this picture. Why on earth would a prophet of the Lord, Heber J. Grant, be posed in front of a Nazi swastika flag? [00:34:18] Speaker B: So here's Heber J. Grant. What's the. And I've seen ex Mormons on Twitter and Reddit use this all the time. It's. It's a totally unfair, cheap shot, right? When they use this, it's for shock value. There's no context. So what's happening in this picture? So this picture is taken in July of 1937. It's when Heber J. Grant is doing a tour of Europe, not just Germany. He goes to Switzerland. He goes to Czechoslovakia. He goes to England. He's doing a tour of Europe, talking with church members. [00:34:46] Speaker D: Okay. [00:34:46] Speaker B: This picture is taken in Frankfurt, Germany, where he is speaking at a local community center that was being rented because they had a crowd of about a thousand people, and they didn't have any local. I mean, for most of this time, most of their branch meetings were being had in rented spaces. Right. They don't have their own church building most of the time. So in Frankfurt, they're renting out this local place to speak to people. [00:35:08] Speaker E: Right. [00:35:09] Speaker B: Who owned that local community center? Do you guys want to guess? [00:35:12] Speaker A: Not the Church of Jesus Christ. [00:35:13] Speaker B: Not. [00:35:14] Speaker C: I'm just gonna throw it out there. Maybe it was the Nazis. [00:35:17] Speaker B: Yes, this was owned by. It was like the National Socialist Teachers League or something like that. [00:35:21] Speaker D: Okay. [00:35:22] Speaker B: So it's. It's a venue owned by local Nazis. So of course it's going to become equipped with. And the Nazi flag. Here is the national flag of Germany. [00:35:30] Speaker C: In 1937, I was about to add. It's also at this time, this is actually the. [00:35:34] Speaker E: The. [00:35:34] Speaker C: The state flag of Germany. [00:35:35] Speaker B: Flag of Germany. [00:35:36] Speaker C: Right. And so it's like speaking in front of, like, the American flag today, or. [00:35:41] Speaker B: When you see a president, United States, Barack Obama, Trump, you know, Biden, whatever. When they meet foreign dignitaries, they'll have the flags behind them. And that even includes bad guys like dictators or whatever. [00:35:51] Speaker E: Right. [00:35:52] Speaker B: Bad countries. This is part of the optics of when you go to the country, you have to kind of do this. You put the flag up or whatever. Okay, so it's. It is. And who are the people up there? These are not Nazis. These are local church leaders. [00:36:02] Speaker D: Okay. [00:36:03] Speaker B: One of them is his interpreter, Max Zimmer. The mission president, Roy Welker is up there. [00:36:07] Speaker E: Right. [00:36:07] Speaker B: Like, so. So these are local and mission leaders. These aren't Nazis. That's not a church building. It's being rented from a local Nazi community center because that's who's in charge. Now, the reason why it's. It's a cheap shot is so this is him in front of the Nazi flag. This is when people get mad at Spencer. Scroll down a little bit. Would you look at that? There he is in front of the flag of Switzerland. No one gets mad at the Switzerland flag. [00:36:31] Speaker A: It's very incriminating what I'm saying here. [00:36:34] Speaker B: This is just what you're doing. So, anyways, I just wanted to point that out because that person on that tweet had this. It's an absolute cheap shot at Heber J. Grant to do this. He does the same thing in Berlin, if I can say. It's kind of funny, because these people don't actually have the worst of it. When he's in Berlin speaking at this big, again, rented community center, there's a picture of Hitler above him. [00:36:54] Speaker E: Right. [00:36:55] Speaker B: But, like. But Xmos don't know about that one. [00:36:58] Speaker E: Right? [00:36:58] Speaker B: This is just the one that went viral. They do now. No, but you get the point. Point. [00:37:02] Speaker E: Right. [00:37:02] Speaker B: Like, this is outside of Heber J. Grant's control with these venues they've picked. This is not him endorsing Nazis. He's not giving a Nazi rally speech like at Nuremberg. We have reports both from the Church and from the Gestapo agents spying on Heber J. Grant. What he was talking about and basically what he did is he went through the Articles of Faith and he expounded on them on what the Church believes. [00:37:21] Speaker A: Including Article 12 of How we, you know, obey the law. [00:37:24] Speaker B: Obey and sustain the law. So, anyways, I know I've kind of been ranting a little bit here. You can tell this is a subject I'm a little bit interested and passionate about. [00:37:32] Speaker C: So there's. There's a quote I want to. I want to get your take specifically on this and how you think your research impacts this take from. From the book. The earlier book. David Conley, Nelson Moroni and the Swastika. You quoted it in your introduction. I. Honestly, even without the context of your research, it feels like such a. Such a cheap shot, Like a hindsight, you know, easy, easy thing to say from the comfort of your lounge chair or wherever he writes his books. But the overt efforts to exploit commonalities between Mormonism and Nazism were not needed in order to endure life under the Third Reich. There was no need to ramp up the pace of genealogical research, allow missionaries to train German Olympians, dispatch a mission president's wife to ride with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi women's leader, or employ a bombastic mission president to seek an alliance with the Nazi propaganda ministry. Without these excesses, the Mormons would have probably survived unscathed under Hitler. [00:38:33] Speaker B: I mean, probably. But how could we know this is. This is a counterfactual. Well, hypothetical. [00:38:38] Speaker C: Exactly. But based on, like, your research in the archives, how. How confident would you be to say something like that? Like. Or put your like, if you were in Nazi Germany at the time, like, how confident would you be that, like, hey, if we don't toe the line and make overt efforts to be friends, like, because I came away going through this, I thought there's no way, like, when you're in the heat of the moment like, that, there's no way you could have been confident that, hey, if we don't try to curry favor, we're gonna be fine. [00:39:10] Speaker B: So again, in the documents, there are explicit discussions about possibly banning the church, outlawing the church in Germany. [00:39:17] Speaker E: Right. [00:39:19] Speaker B: It comes up in multiple documents. And so. And I don't think that David Connelly else knew about these because he doesn't discuss them in his book. [00:39:25] Speaker E: Right. [00:39:26] Speaker B: So what I would say to that is, with this. So. So Nelson's. His whole book, basically, it's like the most cynical bad faith interpretation and uncharitable interpretation of these people and their actions you could possibly get. And it's consistent. I've noticed that. Other reviewers have noticed that, right? That, like, at every turn, when Nelson or other people like him who approach it from this, direct from this angle, when they can give a little bit of, you know, benefit of the doubt to some of these people, they. He doesn't. He takes the most uncharitable interpretation of it. I think these new documents now give a very important context for understanding that the Nazis are breathing down our necks. We've been told if we do anything to step out of line, we are going to have the strictest state police measures taken against us. They are discussing banning us. Some of our members have been arrested. Our missionaries are being arrested. [00:40:14] Speaker E: Right. [00:40:14] Speaker B: That is not the kind of thing you just sit back and say, hey, we're just going to do our thing. Please don't do it. Like, I think that some of the decisions, the fear was real. Maybe not all of them, but some of the decisions that were made that Nelson and others mentioned I think are totally understandable in this context, for they would want to do it, and I would challenge him and others to show. You cannot actually show native pro Nazi sentiment with these people. You don't get Roy Welker saying, yeah, the Jews suck. We want to massacre them all and, you know, and conquer Eastern Europe. And we're all about the Aryan race. They never take it that far. The farthest they take it is, well, you know, we have the word of wisdom, and they're all about healthy living. And we like to do genealogy, and you do genealogy. And to the sports ball thing or, you know, the basketball the, you know, hey, yeah, we'll send our missionaries to teach you guys basketball and things like that. [00:40:59] Speaker C: Mormon missionaries. Trained Olympians. [00:41:01] Speaker B: Trained Olympians. It's not because they're like, yeah, we love the Nazis. It's because, hey, we can get along. And please don't send us to concentration camps because we're kind of worried you might do that. [00:41:10] Speaker E: Right. [00:41:11] Speaker B: So that's, that's the punchline to why I think these documents significantly challenge that narrative that you get from David Connolly. [00:41:18] Speaker A: Nelson and others, because I brought it up earlier. Was Latter Day Saint church ball a tool of the Nazi regime? What was that all about? [00:41:25] Speaker B: Yeah, so the answer is no. What it was is. And we have the accounts from the people actually were involved with this. So 1936 Berlin Olympics, right? We have these basketballs in American sport. It's. It's kind of new in Germany. It's really just sort of American thing. And so as a proselyting tool, there were missionaries that helped train the German national team for the Olympics. And they say as much. You go read the accounts published in the Improvement era, they say, we thought this was a great opportunity to proselyte and to build bridges so that people stop thinking we're a weird cult, which is the predominant view in Germany at the time. And so we took this opportunity when we were asked to train the basketball team. There is never a sense of, well, we wanted to train the basketball team because we think that they're the master race who are the rightful owners and conquerors of Europe. You never get that. It's always like, we wanted to share the gospel. We thought this was a good way to do it. [00:42:19] Speaker E: Right. [00:42:19] Speaker B: Again, the most uncharitable interpretation you could. [00:42:22] Speaker A: Take, which shows that church ball has been a missionary tool from time. [00:42:28] Speaker C: One thing I wanted to add to that, because you mentioned, like, members were getting arrested and stuff. And I think part of that context is whenever a Latter Day Saint did something that was anti Nazi and got arrested, it had a propensity to. It got attributed to their religion, and they would paint with a broad brush. These are who they are, right? [00:42:47] Speaker B: This is. [00:42:48] Speaker C: This is how the people are. And, and to some extent, that even happens today. Still, Latter Day Saints make the news for some negative reason. And there's people who will get on X or get on Reddit and be like, it's. It's because of their religion. It's baked into it. [00:43:02] Speaker B: So in the instance of Helmut Huebner, for example, very quickly, he. [00:43:05] Speaker A: You've mentioned that name a lot. Who is the hero? Helmut Huebner. [00:43:09] Speaker B: So Helmut Huebner, he is a latter day saint in hamburg. He's like 17 years old when he gets arrested by the Nazis because he and his buddies, including branch members who are his friends, they were listening to BBC broadcasts and transcribing them and writing anti Nazi leaflets that they were then distributing. Okay, they get arrested and Huebner is executed. He's the youngest, sort of. He's credited as being the youngest victim of being executed by the Nazis as an anti Nazi resistance member. [00:43:38] Speaker E: Right. [00:43:39] Speaker B: His two friends, they're sent to prison terms and then the Nazis lose the war and they come over and live the rest of their lives in Utah. But the. And it was mentioned in the tweet here. So Huebner does this anti Nazi resistance activity for which he's a hero when we rightly praise him. [00:43:54] Speaker E: Right. [00:43:54] Speaker B: For his bravery. He's executed and he is posthumously excommunicated. [00:44:00] Speaker A: Oh, wow. [00:44:00] Speaker E: And then. [00:44:01] Speaker B: And people say that you say, oh, that sounds really bad. They're excommunicating dissidents. That's what this guy on Twitter said. Who excommunicated him? Who? His local branch president, Arthur Zander, the pro Nazi, and another church leader named Anton Huck. They were the ones who excommunicated him. It wasn't Heber J. Grant. It wasn't church leaders in Utah. His local leadership did it. They were met with resistance by Otto Berndt, the district president, who said, I don't think we should excommunicate him. But he went along with it. Why? In his unpublished, untranslated autobiography, which I was able to track down and read and have excerpts in here, he says, the Gestapo came to us and said, you have to do something to prove that you're not involved with this. Because that was the suspicion. The suspicion was this teenager kid couldn't have done this on his own. He must have had help from other members of the congregation. And so to sort of prove that no, no, no, he was acting on his own, Otto Bernd went along with the excommunication, even though he personally opposed it, to signify to the Nazis that he was acting on his own. And this wasn't so. Again, it was a measure to protect innocent people who otherwise might have been targeted in the branch in Hamburg had they not done this. Now, the follow up is after the war, by the way, I also need to mention, during World War II, right. United States goes toward Germany in December of 1941. All communication is cut off. So German church leaders in Germany are responsible for running the church in Germany. It's not completely in the dark on the ground. They're completely in the dark of what's happening in Germany. Until after the war, 1945, they re establish contact and when they find out what happened in 1948, the first presidency reinstates Huebner's membership and he's posthumously given his temple blessings. Okay, so again, the cynical and I think highly misinformed view. They were excommunicating dissidents. There was one guy, Helmut Huebner, in very extreme circumstances that was excommunicated by his local leaders, one of whom was a vocal pro Nazi, partly as a measure to protect the Church against further retribution from the Nazis in Hamburg. And once the First Presidency in Utah found out about it, they reversed the decision and his blessings were restored and he was given full temple blessings. [00:46:08] Speaker A: Got chills? It's really. Honestly, I know we've jested a little bit about the caricatures people make about Latter Day Saints, but I honestly found it very sobering and even inspiring to read and learn more about this period of history that was completely in my blind spot. [00:46:24] Speaker C: So if I could even add to that, because there was something you actually said in your introduction here on pages 16 and 17 that I think sums it up really nicely. And I wish we could do a better job communicating this to people on the Internet to understand, like when you're saying Latter Day Saints were Nazis and you're saying that they were pro. Not when you. But when other people are saying this stuff and claiming this stuff, let's be clear about the facts on the ground in Germany. Okay. You talk about, first of all, the German Latter Day Saint experience during the war has been extensively studied. I did not personally know that. [00:46:56] Speaker D: Oh yeah. [00:46:57] Speaker C: Honestly, like, it's a total blind spot for me. And I was surprised going through your thing, how many, how much literature you were citing that I was like, oh, wow. I had no idea how much research had been done on this. At least 1000 German saints lost their lives between 1939 and 1945 due to war related causes. Many others lost their homes. [00:47:16] Speaker A: 1/8. [00:47:17] Speaker C: 1/8, exactly this. [00:47:18] Speaker B: Look, I should say by 1939, that number is about 13,000. So 8,000 in 1933. By the time the war breaks out, it's about 13,000. [00:47:26] Speaker C: So we're still in the ballpark, but still. Okay, so. But a thousand lose their lives. And look, I don't want it. By no means am I saying this is comparable to like the Jewish experience or anything, but the point is this was, this was these people, they were under duress, they had difficult experiences, they lost their lives. Many others lost their homes or were displaced by bombing campaigns. Surviving accounts describe harrowing experiences of violence, scarcity, isolation, and the struggle to maintain religious practices. This is. This is what, these are the people we're talking about when we talk about Latter Day Saints in Nazi Germany. And it is a serious disservice to the challenges they faced and the sacrifices they made, the lives that were lost, to paint these people with this broad brush of like, just lump them in with the Nazis. [00:48:19] Speaker B: It's so unfair to humanize that point just for a minute here. I have friends who are Latter Day Saints in Germany and in Austria. One of them, he's a great man. He. He had his grandparents and great grandparents who were in the war, obviously, Right. And he's told me the story of one of his. His uncle or his great uncle who was conscripted. [00:48:39] Speaker E: Right. [00:48:39] Speaker B: Again, he's conscripted a fight on the Eastern Front. He doesn't have a say in it. So he goes off to war. He's killed on the Eastern Front. And the story in the family is his. So my friend, his mom remembers his grandma shrieking with horror when she got the telegram saying that her son had been killed. He was a faithful priesthood leader in their branch, Right. He'd been killed in the Eastern Front. She broke down shrieking and crying in their kitchen. [00:49:03] Speaker E: Right. [00:49:03] Speaker B: And like, that's been in their family, that trauma of losing their uncle. [00:49:06] Speaker E: Right. [00:49:07] Speaker B: To the war. So, like, yeah, these are real people. And we just paint with this broad brush when we talk about these historical figures. And there were some of them that did some bad things. There were some Latter Day Saint Nazis that did some bad things. Right. And they'll have to stand before their eternal judge for that. But, but many of them were just as much victimized by this horrible war as anybody else was. And to paint with that broad brush and dehumanize these people with that broad brush. I think you're exactly right, Neil. Does them great disservice. [00:49:32] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And like I said earlier in the conversation, and I think this is true of. In any time when there's a totalitarian regime like this, when there's a war, you've got villains, you've got heroes, but everybody else in between is just a victim, right? [00:49:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:49:49] Speaker C: People who are. Who don't have the courage to stand up and try to be a hero, like, let's not lump them in with the villains. They are victims of what's going on here. [00:49:57] Speaker E: Right. [00:49:58] Speaker A: Well, this has been a really great discussion if you want to learn more about this topic, because there is so much more. We didn't cover the Nazi secret police files on the Latter Day Saints. This is written by yours truly, Stephen Smooth. And also, you did it in coordination with others, right? Or. No, it's just Stephen. [00:50:17] Speaker B: Yeah, this is Stephen. [00:50:17] Speaker A: Okay. The Nazi secret police files in the Latter Day Saints, written by Steven Scope. [00:50:22] Speaker C: Also available on the Mormoner website. [00:50:25] Speaker B: Yep. [00:50:25] Speaker A: All right.