Mennonite Nazis

[Pelerin]

I’ve got a few threads I’m trying to untangle:

The Dean Taylor “Mennonite Nazis” article referenced above relates the story of the Bruderhof, who were chased out of Germany by the Nazis to Paraguay—only to encounter support for the Nazis among the Russian Mennonites there.

As I heard this story (this is not in the Dean Taylor article), the Mennonites in Paraguay were fond of Hitler because the Nazis had helped them, as ethnic Germans, escape the Soviet Union. The Bruderhof moved to Paraguay in 1941 (after a stay in England). Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June that same year (Operation Barbarossa), so it seems that the aid Russian Mennonites were getting from the Nazis predates and goes beyond any kind of wartime liberation.

Another thing: the Tablet article suggests the MCC involvement in resettling Russian Mennonites started postwar. My understanding was that MCC was founded in the 1930s specifically to help Russian Mennonite refugees, including, per the Dean Taylor article, the Paraguayan colony.

Does anyone know more about Nazi efforts to resettle Mennonites out of the Soviet Union pre-invasion? Does anyone know a rough timeline of the Paraguay colony? What about other kinds of pre-invasion aid from the Nazis to Russian Mennonites?

[barnhart]

Ken, I imagine that Nazis were not that threatening to the west in general because anti semitism and white supremacy were generally acceptable by a majority. That is why useful Nazis were incorporated into society but a few at the top were publicly executed to maintain the gravity of the cause.

Its easy for me to see how bible believing, hymn singing church people would feel defended by the Nazis, especially early on as a refuge against soviet communism. In 80 years since the west has cranked out an endless stream of literature and movies to justify their own violence in the war by clarifying the evils of their opponents, but I don't see clear moral case. There was enough sin to go around on all sides.

[Ken]

Ken, I imagine that Nazis were not that threatening to the west in general because anti semitism and white supremacy were generally acceptable by a majority. That is why useful Nazis were incorporated into society but a few at the top were publicly executed to maintain the gravity of the cause.

Its easy for me to see how bible believing, hymn singing church people would feel defended by the Nazis, especially early on as a refuge against soviet communism. In 80 years since the west has cranked out an endless stream of literature and movies to justify their own violence in the war by clarifying the evils of their opponents, but I don't see clear moral case. There was enough sin to go around on all sides.

Of course. antisemitism and white supremacy has always been just under the surface in this country. It's not surprising that Nazi ideology was welcomed by a certain segment of society. And for that matter, still is.

But I don't think the west had to justify anything when it came to WW2. No other country voluntarily went to war with Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Not one. None of Germany's neighbors wanted war. To the contrary. Germany declared war on everyone else in offensive wars of conquest in the west and genocidal wars of annihilation to the east. Germany declared war on the US the day after Pearl Harbor and began attacking US shipping immediately. The allies were given no other alternative than war. One might make the argument that the origins of WW2 lie in the punitive end to WW1. But that's pretty weak. Italy was on the side of the allies in WW1 and it became fascist in the 1930s too.

Wars always have a way of spiraling out of control the longer they drag on. The Civil War started with picnickers going out in wagons to watch Napoleon-style set-piece battles, and ended with Sherman cutting a massive swath of total destruction across the south. World War 2 started out with blitzkrieg and ended with carpet bombing of civilian populations, death camps, and atomic bombs.

You can construct any alternative histories of WW2 that you want. But they are all going to end up with either permanent Nazi domination of Europe, and permanent Japanese domination of Asia. Or the complete annihilation of Germany and Japan. There never was going to be any middle ground.

[Josh]

Ken,

Do you think dropping atom bombs on Japanese civilians was somehow a good thing, or was it wrong to do?

[barnhart]

Ken, I'm not a Nazi sympathizer, but the moral high ground of the Allies looks pretty low and swampy. Their message seems to be, "don't colonize or build imperial empires over the backs of white people like we did to the south Americans and Africans." I'm not in favor of that behavior in the 18th, 19th or 20 the centuries.
The warning sign for me, with flashing red lights is be very cautious of xenophobic, nationalist populism even if it seems to be favoring you.

[mike]

You can construct any alternative histories of WW2 that you want. But they are all going to end up with either permanent Nazi domination of Europe, and permanent Japanese domination of Asia. Or the complete annihilation of Germany and Japan. There never was going to be any middle ground.

Check out Pat Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. This is a good argument, in my opinion, for how the war could have been prevented by diplomacy. For example he is extremely critical of Churchill's failure to maintain the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which alone could have prevented Germany from having the power to take on the Western powers.

[Ken]

Ken,

Do you think dropping atom bombs on Japanese civilians was somehow a good thing, or was it wrong to do?

Of course it was a horrific war crime. As was the fire-bombing of Japanese cities by conventional weapons, which actually killed more Japanese civilians than the atomic bombs. That's my point. War spirals out of control and takes on its own logic. "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind" (Hosea 8:7)

My point was not that WW2 was in any way a "good" war. It was that Nazi Germany and Hitler were such an evil and malignant force that we don't need revisionist history in the US to make them "look bad" as Barnhart implies. They were plenty bad on their own. And, if anything, a lot of western histories actually downplay the extent of evil because they focus on the western front where the Germans acted with more restraint and not the eastern front where they were far more savage.

[Ken]

Ken, I'm not a Nazi sympathizer, but the moral high ground of the Allies looks pretty low and swampy. Their message seems to be, "don't colonize or build imperial empires over the backs of white people like we did to the south Americans and Africans." I'm not in favor of that behavior in the 18th, 19th or 20 the centuries.
The warning sign for me, with flashing red lights is be very cautious of xenophobic, nationalist populism even if it seems to be favoring you.

You have no argument from me on that point. I was only making a very narrow point that Hitler and the Nazis did not need the help of revisionist western historians to make them look bad. They were plenty evil. And, if anything, the true horrors of the Nazi regime have been downplayed in the west, both before and after the war.

The US and other western powers like Britain have their own blind spots and immoral histories of colonialism, slavery, genocide, and so forth. But starting World War 2 was not one of them. Germany and Japan pretty much did that on their own.

[Ken]

You can construct any alternative histories of WW2 that you want. But they are all going to end up with either permanent Nazi domination of Europe, and permanent Japanese domination of Asia. Or the complete annihilation of Germany and Japan. There never was going to be any middle ground.

Check out Pat Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. This is a good argument, in my opinion, for how the war could have been prevented by diplomacy. For example he is extremely critical of Churchill's failure to maintain the Anglo-Japanese alliance, which alone could have prevented Germany from having the power to take on the Western powers.

Buchanan's argument is essentially that the Nazis were the lesser of two evils, and that a Nazi-controlled capitalist Europe would have been preferable to the communist-controlled eastern Europe that resulted from the war. He more or less makes the same argument in Asia. That a Japanese-occupied China and Southeast Asia would have been preferable to the Chinese communist regime that followed.

Essentially he is arguing in so many words that the wrong side won in both Europe and the Pacific. It's not a view shared by very many serious historians. Buchanan has a long history of Holocaust denial and defending Nazi war criminals. Not the source I would use for an unbiased history of Nazi Germany and WW2.

[PetrChelcicky]

Ken said:
"There never was going to be any middle ground."

I think that he is wrong. There is always a middle ground, but one has to look for it.
After the war the United States actually DID look for a middle ground, i.e. they accepted the popular German conviction that Communism was dangerous and promised (West) Germany to protect it from attacks by Eastern enemies. They might have done so before the war. This would have divided the National Socialist Party and its supporters, with consequences we don't know.

When "Mennonite Nazis" - a colourful, but unimportant subgroup - became a matter of historical interest, I have written that this is in a way a digression. The real thorn in the Antifascists' side were and are "Mennonite pacifists", first in WW2 and then in all future wars which are to be modeled on "the good war". I.e. the neocon publicists use history in order to prove that pacifism was (and is) wrong. And I think that Ken's position is a good illustration (even if he perhaps hasn't thought about the implications).