There is often a tendency of the Church to excuse appeasement of tyrants and acceptance of injustice on the grounds that it was the prevailing culture at the time ("lots of people hated Jews back then" or "slavery was widely accepted") or that it was necessary in order to survive. The author, Mr. Nelson, effectively rebuts those notions by showing how many other faiths were able to navigate these treacherous waters in a way that allowed them to remain true to their Christian beliefs without endangering their existence.
I was shocked to learn that some faithful Mormons engineered and installed the gas chambers. Some faithful Mormons were directly responsible for running the extermination camps. Some faithful Mormons were brown shirts who bashed Jewish heads and vandalized Jewish businesses. Some faithful Mormons even made it into Hitler's inner circle.
When a Mormon decided to stand up to the evil of Hitler, just like Helmuth Hübener did, they were almost immediately excommunicated.Assured by their church leaders that there was no conflict in being a good Mormon and a good citizen of the Nazi State, German Mormons
dutifully served in the Nazi Labor Corps and the German military. Other Latter-day Saints enthusiastically donned the brown shirts of Hitler's Sturmabteilung (SA), an organization that bashed heads in the streets and vandalized Jewish businesses. Some joined for more benign reasons, such as the Hamburg congregants who enjoyed playing in the local SA band. Other Mormons obtained membership in Hitler's elite group of personal guards, the black-shirted Schutzstaffel (SS), an organization that expanded to play a leading role in the Holocaust. One Hamburg member, infamous among his fellow congregants for having killed one of Hitler’s political opponents in a street fight, enlisted in the Totenkopfverbande, the Death’s Head SS brigades that ran the extermination camps. Another Mormon appeared in an early scholarly article as an “expert mechanic” who “install[ed] specialized machinery” at Auschwitz.“ In the parlance of Nazi Germany, that is a euphemism for someone who set up gas chambers and crematoria.
To paraphrase a Holocaust survivor, "My eyes have witnessed things no man should ever see. I've seen Priesthood holders shoot unarmed Jewish children, men and women. I've seen Relief Society members lead children into gas chambers. I've seen Deacons and Priests burn down businesses and homes. I will always remain skeptical of the benefits of religion, when its members can do, and did such monstrous and hideously evil acts."The most prominent memory beacon in this narrative is an intelligent, idealistic, faithful young Mormon named Helmuth Hiibener, sixteen years old when he began listening to the forbidden wartime broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Convinced that the Nazi propaganda machine did not truthfully account for German wartime losses, he used his congregation’s typewriter to produce anti-Hitler tracts that he and three friends—two of whom were Latter-day Saints—scattered around Hamburg. Convinced, as early as 1942, that Germany was losing the war, Hiibener wanted to incite a popular rebellion against the Nazis. Betrayed by a colleague at work, Helmuth Hiibener was tried by a Nazi tribunal and guillotined. Before his execution at age seventeen, his LDS congregational leader excommunicated the boy from the Mormon Church.
