Description

From publisher:

While Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government was persecuting Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses and driving forty-two small German religious sects underground, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to practice unhindered. How some fourteen thousand Mormons not only survived but thrived in Nazi Germany is a story little known, rarely told, and occasionally rewritten within the confines of the Church's history—for good reason, as we see in David Conley Nelson's Moroni and the Swastika. A page-turning historical narrative, this book is the first full account of how Mormons avoided Nazi persecution through skilled collaboration with Hitler's regime, and then eschewed postwar shame by constructing an alternative history of wartime suffering and resistance.

The Twelfth Article of Faith and parts of the 134th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants function as Mormonism's equivalent of the biblical admonition to "render unto Caesar," a charge to cooperate with civil government, no matter how onerous doing so may be. Resurrecting this often-violated doctrinal edict, ecclesiastical leaders at the time developed a strategy that protected Mormons within Nazi Germany. Furthermore, as Nelson shows, many Mormon officials strove to fit into the Third Reich by exploiting commonalities with the Nazi state. German Mormons emphasized a mutual interest in genealogy and a passion for sports. They sent husbands into the Wehrmacht and sons into the Hitler Youth, and they prayed for a German victory when the war began. They also purged Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans, and liturgical practices. One American mission president even wrote an article for the official Nazi Party newspaper, extolling parallels between Utah Mormon and German Nazi society. Nelson documents this collaboration, as well as subsequent efforts to suppress it by fashioning a new collective memory of ordinary German Mormons' courage and travails during the war.

Recovering this inconvenient past, Moroni and the Swastika restores a complex and difficult chapter to the history of Nazi Germany and the Mormon Church in the twentieth century—and offers new insight into the construction of historical truth.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface

Introduction: Deliverance on the Night of Broken Glass

Part I. The Mormon Sonderweg: The Road to Nazi Germany

1. Mormonism's Long Nineteenth Century in Germany: From Pariahs to Skilled Survivors
2. German Mormons in the Great War: Lessons Learned in the Crucible of Combat
3. Mormons in the Weimar Republic: Honing Survival Skills in a Fledgling Democracy

Part II. The Prewar Nazi Years, 1933–1939: A Forgotten History

4. The Mormon Battle Plan in the Third Reich
5. Genealogy: Promoting a Common Worldview on Earth and in the Afterlife
6. Mormon Basketball Diplomacy in Hitler's Reich
7. Boy Scouting: The Mormons' Only Unconditional Surrender to the Nazis
8. The Führer's Chosen People? The Mormons' Hitler Myth
9. A Countervailing Myth: Nazi Persecution of the Mormons
10. God's Oberführer: The Mormon Mission President
11. J. Reuben Clark: Mormon Ambassador Plenipotentiary and His Entourage

Part III. Beacons of Mormon Memory in Nazi Germany

12. The Second World War and Its Aftermath
13. Forgotten Heroes and Rediscovered Villains
14. Mormons and Jews: An Inconvenient Association
15. Helmuth Hübener: A Memory Beacon with a Dimmer Switch
16. A Premature Curtain Call

Conclusion: To Save the Church?

Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index