Mennonite Nazi War Crim Dies in bed In Canada

[Jeff Altweg]

Just a last observation on this ....I know of a builder who once worked with, or somewhat close to ,Oberlander ,in Waterloo, Ont....His take was that Oberlander always treated everyone fairly in his day to day building business.....Balance that out with what the German war crimes people ,concluded in the 1970's when they first interviewed him in Toronto,Ont.....Almost everything he told them ,they concluded, it was all a lie,they had independent proof of that, that's why Canada marked him for special attention and a special file over the next 40 years....
I once knew a kindly old Medical Doctor , in the 1980's who just happened to have been a USAF bomber pilot,In WWii , who took part in reducing many German cities to ruble, late in the war .....It troubled him so much,he dedicated the rest of his life to helping people , (Think $5 or so office visits) ........or for free ,now that kind of remorse we can relate to,much easier....
Oberlander, on the other hand , continued to lie until the very last, about everything,which makes one wonder if he wasn't involved much worse , or in more really vile episodes , then one could imagine ?.......

[Soloist]

Some men’s sin goes before them, some men after. Let God judge the dead, there is no value in it for us as we can do nothing to change his eternal outcome.

[barnhart]

Maybe we all could re-think our relationships with power and suffering. How many here would turn down the opportunity to escape suffering and "right a few wrongs" just by supporting a movement, maybe avoiding blood entirely, and give little thought for those who might be trampled.

[Neto]

Maybe we all could re-think our relationships with power and suffering. How many here would turn down the opportunity to escape suffering and "right a few wrongs" just by supporting a movement, maybe avoiding blood entirely, and give little thought for those who might be trampled.

Along these same lines, during the height of the Stalinist persecution of Ukrainians and other minorities living there (not that the same thing didn't happen in other parts of the USSR - very probably so - I just do not know about them), people were arrested, and the only hope they had of being freed was to implicate someone else - give names. (Sometimes they were executed in the end anyway.) There are records of these interrogations that have been released by the Ukrainian government in recent years: the interrogator's questions, what measures were taken to achieve results, everything. The Soviets apparently had no fear of any future "publications" of these events. Men of Mennonite descent implicated other Mennonite men, to save themselves, or their families. I'm not trying to excuse any of this, but I also know that none of us have ever faced anything of this sort.

An article appeared in the Plautdietsch hisotry & geneology FB group yesterday about Why the N@zis took such interest in the Mennonite people remaining in the Soviet Union during WWII. They took an especially kindly position in relating to them, and many of the Mennonites (actually predominantly Dutch) there "conveniently forgot" that they weren't actually "German", but just "German speaking", and accepted the favored treatment. From unwanted, despised "foreigners" to "ideal examples of the industriousness Aryan Race".
(Anyone want to see this article?)

[appleman2006]

I would love to see that article. This fits entirely with what I have read elsewhere about that era. Considering many of us barely are willing to go against anything modern culture throws at us today I doubt many of us would be able to stand against something we barely understood especially as a 17 year old and especially if you had been hated all your life and now someone was actually treating you with respect.

[Soloist]

I would love to see that article. This fits entirely with what I have read elsewhere about that era. Considering many of us barely are willing to go against anything modern culture throws at us today I doubt many of us would be able to stand against something we barely understood especially as a 17 year old and especially if you had been hated all your life and now someone was actually treating you with respect.

Many conscientious objectors capitulated over boredom… I would expect this to be right.

[Ken]

I would love to see that article. This fits entirely with what I have read elsewhere about that era. Considering many of us barely are willing to go against anything modern culture throws at us today I doubt many of us would be able to stand against something we barely understood especially as a 17 year old and especially if you had been hated all your life and now someone was actually treating you with respect.

Many conscientious objectors capitulated over boredom… I would expect this to be right.

In the US which is a nominally Christian nation. And for which there was an institutional structure in place during WW2 for conscientious objectors to do alternative service, there were only about 12,000 draftees who performed alternative service compared to over 12 million who joined the military. That worked out to about one out of 1,000, or 0.1% of draftees.

But even so, one does have choices in the type of military service one chooses to do. It is one thing to simply get yourself conscripted into the military. It is another thing entirely to then volunteer for the most extreme and vile type of service in the Nazi SS death squad companies, which were only a very tiny percentage of the total German military machine. Far less than 1%.

[Neto]

Here's the article I mentioned earlier. This author is a very knowledgeable historian.
By Arnold Neufeldt-Fast on FB Mennonite Genealogy & History group, 03-30-2023

N@zi German Reich's love for Mennonites in Ukraine. Why?
For Mennonites the dramatic and massive invasion of USSR by German forces in Summer/Fall 1941 meant liberation from Soviet state terror and answer to prayer.
N@zi Germany spared neither money nor personnel to free, feed, cloth, protect, heal and educate the Soviet Union’s ethnic Germans—and Mennonites in particular.
Mennonite memoirs, village reports and EWZ (naturalization applications) autobiographies are consistent with praise for the German Reich and its leader.
From the highest levels, goodwill, care and patience towards ethnic Germans was policy. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was also named by Hit!er as "Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood." This authorized Himmler and his para-military SS to oversee and coordinate the Germanization, resettlements and population transfers which came with the invasion and partial annexation of Poland (Warthegau), and later occupation plans for parts of Ukraine and Russia.
The VoMi (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle) or SS- "Ethnic German Liaison Office" oversaw the support for ethnic Germans in its regions. SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Roßner, for example, was the VoMi official responsible for the supplies, schools, hospitals, clothing etc. for Molotschna (“Halbstadt”). Over the war years Roßner met several times with the representative of Russian Mennonites in Germany, Benjamin Unruh—in Litzmannstadt, in the home of Unruh’s daughter and son-in-law in Berlin, as well as in Unruh’s home in Karlsruhe.
VoMi officials arranged for Himmler to visit Mennonites in Molotschna, and then later with Benjamin Unruh in a secret location in Germany. “I have been in Ukraine [October 1942] and I have observed the people there for myself. Your Mennonites are the best,” Himmler—the second most powerful leader in N@zi Germany told Unruh. Unruh “sat immediately to the right of Himmler and dined with him” (note 1).
Based on his Molotschna visit, Himmler “approved of the behaviour and attitude of the Mennonites” (note 2). The two spoke about a return and settlement of Russian Mennonites—from South and North America--to Ukraine, the election of an elders for Chortitza and Molotschna, and a possible compensation on the basis of their property in 1914 (note 3).
When 35,000 Mennonites were evacuated from Ukraine, Benjamin Unruh—who Himmler called the Moses of the Mennonites--travelled, called and telegraphed on a VoMi stipend to gather and provide pastoral, logistical and political support for the Mennonites refugees, for example (note 4).
The VoMi was responsible for the safe and orderly evacuation of tens of thousands of ethnic Germans from the Soviet Union in 1943-44 and their “homecoming” and naturalization in larger Germany.
After the war, Unruh testified at the war crimes tribunal in support of SS-Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz, the head of the Ethnic German Liaison Office (VoMi)—who claimed his only role was to enhance the welfare of ethnic Germans (note 5).
Amidst the told and untold horrors of the N@zi German regime, why did they show this unfailing kindness to the Mennonites of Ukraine?
Eric Steinhart writes that the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was
“... singularly important to the Third Reich’s plan to transform Europe and ultimately, perhaps the globe. … N@zi planners believed that this territory would become an asset to Germany only if the region’s millions of Slavs and Jews disappeared.”
“Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, … the VoMi took charge of the country’s remaining Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans] … Himmler dispatched Sonderkommando R (Special Comand R[ussia]), a special VoMi unit to mobilize ethnic Germans in conquered Soviet territory as the demographic seeds of future ‘Germanization’ … in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.” (Note 6)
In another post later this week I’ll try to show these two sides more concretely with correspondence and writing in support of Mennonites by VoMi’s SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Hermann Wolfrum.
---Notes---
For more on pic, school at Lutbrandau and SS Storm Unit Leader Karl Götz, see previous post, https://www.facebook.com/groups/647734078593966/search/....
Note 1: Diether Götz Lichdi, Mennoniten im Dritten Reich. Dokumentation und Deutung (Weierhof/Pfalz: Mennonitischer Geschichtsverein, 1977), 140f., https://archive.org/details/mennonitenimdrit0000lich/. For more on Unruh, see my essay: “Benjamin Unruh, MCC [Mennonite Central Committee] and National Socialism,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 96, no. 2 (April 2022), 157–205, https://digitalcollections.tyndale.ca/. ... 12730/1571.
Note 2: Karl Götz, Das Schwarzmeerdeutschtum: Die Mennoniten (Posen: NS-Druck Wartheland, 1944), 11, https://ml,a.bethelks.edu/gmsources/books/1944; also Horst Gerlach, “Mennonites, the Molotschna, and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle in the Second World War,” translated by John D. Thiesen, Mennonite Life 41, no. 3 (1986), 8, https://mla.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/ ... 986sep.pdf.
Note 3: Benjamin Unruh to S.S. Obergruppenführer Werner Lorenz, July 29, 1943, letter, from Mennonitsche Forschungsstelle Weierhof, Vereinigung Collection, folder 1943.
Note 4: Gerhard Wolfrum (VoMi) to B. H. Unruh, 29 September 1943, 159/343, from Technische Universitätsarchiv Karlsruhe.
Note 5: Defense testimony by B. H. von Unruh for Werner Lorenz and Heinz Brueckner, December 17, 1947. The RuSHA Case. U.S. National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, Case VIII, Record Group 238, mimeographed testimony, 2714–2730; SA 1, file 184, from Mennonite Library and Archives --Bethel College, https://mla.bethelks.edu/archives/sa_1_184/.
Note 6: Eric C. Steinhart, The Holocaust and the Germanization of Ukraine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 4; see his doctoral thesis “Creating Killers: The Nazification of the Black Sea Germans and the Holocaust in Southern Ukraine, 1941–1944,” PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010, https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/.../uuid:cbc90a ... -497a-b823....

Comments (Neto):
It has come up in discussions here (or perhaps on the old forum) that we Russian Mennonites are more keenly shamed by things done by "our people" than are individuals of the Swiss Brethren background. (That is, this is an observation or opinion that has been expressed here by non-Plautdietsch forum participants.) I know that "God has no grandchildren", and that a surname doesn't a Mennonite make. But it still hits me every time I see a Plautdietsch name attached to some horrible crime. So I am embarrassed - shamed - by what some of my people did back in this era, and it hurts me to admit these things by posting this. But it can be a warning, and a teaching moment for us all, so hopefully some benefit will come by "airing our dirty laundry".
One further comment: I do not think it is valid to equate conscription practices of the USA to those of N@zi Germany, nor do I think it is valid to compare options available to German citizens in Germany at that time to the way in which it operated in German occupied Ukraine. German citizens had not experienced the things that these German speaking Soviet citizens had gone through in the previous two decades. The law was against teaching your own children anything of Biblical truth for those 20 some years. Can anyone here really imagine what that would mean to the young people of that time and place? There's lots of political talk about the "lost freedoms" here in North America. Make use of what you have - it is a considerable amount.
(If you wonder why certain words are purposely misspelled in this article, it is because its author has repeatedly been blocked or banned on FB, sometimes for extended periods of time.)

[Josh]

In the US which is a nominally Christian nation. And for which there was an institutional structure in place during WW2 for conscientious objectors to do alternative service, there were only about 12,000 draftees who performed alternative service compared to over 12 million who joined the military. That worked out to about one out of 1,000, or 0.1% of draftees.

But even so, one does have choices in the type of military service one chooses to do. It is one thing to simply get yourself conscripted into the military. It is another thing entirely to then volunteer for the most extreme and vile type of service in the Nazi SS death squad companies, which were only a very tiny percentage of the total German military machine. Far less than 1%.

Ah, yes, we have another believer in American exceptionalism here.

[appleman2006]

Ken imagine you were 17. You had never really had the opportunity to go to Sunday School. Many of your older relatives that were still around and had not been deported to Siberia were too traumatized from the rape and murder they had witnessed in their own families to really give you anything of a stable home life. And then some people came along and treated you like a human being. They told you that the people who had hurt you were scum and you were actually not a bad person. I bet you anything that you would have been susceptible to their lies.
I doubt very much that in 1941 when he supposedly joined the SS as an interpreter that he had any idea what they actually did. Keep in mind that there were people even in your country with names like Kennedy that still thought they were not that bad at that time. And by the time he found out, to leave the SS would have been a death wish.
What he did was wrong. Just as wrong as the millions of people who choose not to speak out against the baby killers in America today.
Something tells me that many of those people may have a harder time explaining their actions when they face God than this man did but I leave all that to a merciful God who really knows the hearts and minds of all people.