Mennonazis: the exterior problem

[PetrChelcicky]

Why is it that Mennonazis - which were well-known for insiders and historians - became a matter of public interest nowadays?
My personal impression: This is a consequence of the neo-conservative movement.

When WW2 was first called "the good war" in the 1960s, this was mostly a generational affair: elder people treasuring positive memories about the time of their youth.
But the neocon movement was the first movement which again used WW2 as a model for future "good wars".
This is why "America First" - the movement against WW2 - became a public problem again. (It hadn't been a problem when Gerald Ford - an America Firster of 1940 - became president.)

Now all broad peace movements are a mixture of different subgroups. There are general pacifists, there are "qualified" pacifists (allowing for a war of defence), and there are opponents of this special war, either because they sympathize with the enemy people or with the enemy government or both. This was the case in the Anti-Vietnam movement and as well in the case of "America First".
In those cases it is common for warmongers to paint the peace movement with a broad brush and to emphasize the role of that part which sympathizes with the enemy government.

There are indeed points to be made in this. Firstly, any peace movement has inevitably to defend the opposite government against accusations which are blatantly wrong or at least questionable. (As is nowadays the case with the Putin government.) Secondly, any peace movement stands under suspicion that it does not enough to defend the victims of the opposite government. If we want to stay a peace church we have to dabble with those reproaches. But if we want to stay a peace church we also have to stand our ground here.

Standing our ground would mean to write a history of the intertwining between Mennonites and German- (or Italian-)descending people in the United States between 1930 and 1948 (when most "unreliable" persons of this group were released).You find a lot information about internments at https://gaic.info, but this would not include Bundists or special cases like poet George Viereck (a recognized representant of the German State even in the Weimar era, who was imprisoned under a technical pretext). There is some silence about the whole matter - for a part because the people concerned were not proud about their own activities, for a part because they simply were too intimated to speak about their experiences (at the end of the internment they seemingly had to underwrite that they would not tell about what had happened to them, just as in other countries). We ought to know the facts much better and only thereafter we can draw lines between appropriate and unappropriate behaviour.

The actual Mennonazi hype is not such a history. It is characterized by its preference of "colourful" details in combination with completely vague hints, implications and overtones against an indefinite broader circle of Mennonites - too vague to allow for a clear debate. Of course, this may be simply a generational problem - the younger generation of Mennonites signalling, as most younger generations do, that they are better than their elders. But signalling to whom? To the neocons? For me, this apes too much the propaganda against America First and against WW2-pacifism. This is not "standing our ground".

[barnhart]

Petr, I agree with much of what you say, the part that interests me the most is practical approaches to "standing our ground" as peace churches. Part of this is avoiding entanglement in historic justification structures. What other ideas do you recommend?

To the specific topic of mennonite Nazi sympathizers, I see them and their legacy as opportunities to learn and hopefully chart a wiser course in the future. Ignoring or covering up cuts off the potential of learning from the past.

[Ken]

I think you are making it more complicated than it was.

After the trauma of WW2 the whole country and whole world tried to move on. The entire country basically went silent with respect to their experiences during WW2. There was a whole lot of stuff that was "best not talked about". Not to mention the cold war emerged almost immediately to provide new enemies and new allies. I expect that was even more the case in Germany than the US.

As for "Mennonazis" not being talked about? You know what else was not talked about? Menno-soldiers. I had a couple of great uncles from Mennonite families who served in the American armed forces during the war. That was MOST CERTAINLY not talked about within my family when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s. It was all very hush hush and kind of an embarrassing black sheep sort of thing that we just didn't ever talk about within Menno family circles. Or at least the older generation never talked about it to the younger generations.

Historians have always been exploring the war. But a very large number of actual participants, from combatants on all sides, to opponents, have only recently began to explore their own personal experiences.

Today we have whole generations who did not experience the war first hand and are now exceedingly curious about the experiences of their elders. We went through the same exact thing a generation or two ago with the Civil War with intense curiosity and personal histories being investigated. There was a huge movement in the 1970s to examine genealogies and family histories to find ancestors who fought in the war on both sides. Re-enactments and histories were extremely popular starting with the centennial celebrations of the early 1960s and continued in the 1970s and 1980s but those are largely fading as that war drifts further away in memory. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/styl ... ments.html The Civil War era is now being examined more in the context of slavery than as blue vs gray. The last big Civil War battle movies were Cold Mountain and Glory which are now 20 and 30 years old. By contrast we have many newer movies from that era examining slavery (Lincoln, Harriet, Free State of Jones, Django Unchained, 12 years a slave, etc.)

I expect we will have a whole new wave of Vietnam War interest from younger generations about the time that war starts fading from living memory.