In the fall of 1919, just three months after the Versailles Treaty marked Germany’s defeat in World War I, Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to a fellow army soldier. It is considered the first printed expression of his antisemitism. Composed most likely on an army typewriter, the letter lays out Hitler’s belief that Jews are not just people of a different religion. Rather, they are an “alien race,” intent on destroying society.
To counter their influence, Hitler proposed a “rational antisemitism,” a political movement to systematically take away their “privileges,” culminating in their “irrevocable removal” from Germany.
In time, their “irrevocable removal” became the “final solution,” the murder of six million Jews throughout Europe.
It’s not difficult to see in the candidacy of Donald J. Trump a similar convergence of nationalism and racism. Substitute the word “immigrant” for “Jew,” and you see the same calculated dehumanization of a sector of the population.
Trump’s targeting of immigrants is built on racism. In 2018 he complained about “having all these people from shithole countries come here,” that is, from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa. Then he added, “We should have more people from Norway.”
In following years, Trump has ramped up his attacks. In 2023 he said “illegal immigrants are poisoning the blood of our nation,” echoing Hitler’s statement that “Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood.”
At the 2024 Republican Convention, Trump promised the deportation of 11 million illegal immigrants—a figure he put at 18 million. In September he said the mass roundup would be a “bloody story.”
Since then, Trump’s attacks have intensified, including the assertion, repeated by his running mate and other followers, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.
Targeting immigrants, legal or otherwise, is not new in America, nor is “white nationalism.” The nation that opened its doors to European immigrants also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, denying citizenship to Chinese workers who built our railroads.
During World War II we imprisoned 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. In the 1950s we deported a million Mexicans, legal and undocumented, who had harvested our crops. From 2017-21 under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, 3,900 children were taken from their parents.
We are also the nation that in 1939 prevented the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, from docking in Miami. Anchored offshore, the ship waited. On deck that night, children joined parents to gaze at the city lights sparkling in the distance.
When permission was denied, the St. Louis returned to Europe. For many it was a death sentence. Two-hundred-fifty-four perished in Nazi concentration camps.
As November 5 approaches, we again see an unholy convergence of racism and nationalism. A nation of immigrants, we are told to fear immigrants. We are urged to accept slander and misinformation as truth.
How we vote this year will affect the safety and well-being of millions. It will also determine our character.
Note: In 2012, the United States Department of State apologized to the survivors of the St. Louis. In 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did the same.
Post-election analysis has included a lot of finger-pointing about why Kamala Harris lost. Yet the simple truth is that Donald Trump won because white people, the demographic majority, voted for him. About 60 percent of whites went for Trump. And a huge portion of these came from Christians. People like me.
“White Christians made Donald Trump president—again,” headlined the Religion News Service.
“Trump’s Path to Victory Still Runs through the Church,” proclaimed Christianity Today.
CNN exit polls revealed that 72 percent of white Protestants and 61 percent of white Catholics voted for Trump. Among white Christians who identified as evangelical or “born again,” the percentage was 81.
Among Christians of all races, Trump still won a clear majority: 63 percent of Protestants and 53 of Catholics. A significant boost in the Catholic vote, especially in swing states, helped put Trump over the top. “Jesus is their savior, Trump is their candidate,” ran an Associated Press headline.
But not all Christians voted for Trump, and a sizable minority has reacted with shock that someone known for racist and misogynistic behavior, vulgar language and threats of violence could win the support of those claiming to be followers of Jesus?
An answer may be found in the release in theaters this month of the movie, “Bonhoeffer.” The film is based on the life of the German pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by the Nazis in 1945. While the film highlights the dissident’s role in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the real lessons for us can be found in the years leading up to World War II.
By 1933, when Hitler was elected chancellor, Germans were well aware of his hatred of Jews. As early as 1920 he had labeled them an “alien race” and called for their “irrevocable removal.” Once in control, Hitler began the progressive persecution of Jews and other undesirables. Soon after his inauguration, he released the Aryan Paragraph, barring Jews from civil service and multiple professions. In 1935 the Nuremburg Laws stripped them of citizenship.
In November of 1938 state-sanctioned mobs brutally attacked Jews throughout Germany and its territories, destroying businesses, homes and synagogues. Ten thousand Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. By the time World War II started, the “final solution” of six million Jews throughout Europe was well underway.
From the German population, 95 percent Christian, the Nazis drew wide support, playing on anti-Semitic and nationalistic themes, heightened by propaganda and misinformation. Following Hitler’s election, one church leader wrote: ‘A fresh, enlivening and renewing reformation spirit is blowing through our German lands….The word of God and Christianity shall be restored to a place of honor.”
In 1933 Hitler appointed Ludwig Müller, an openly anti-Semitic Lutheran cleric, as Reichbishof. In this role, he was to proclaim “positive Christianity.” Mueller presided over the consolidation of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Churches of Germany, representing a majority of German Christians.
In a revision of history, the bishop claimed that Jesus was not a Jew, but an Aryan. In a statement clarifying church policy, he wrote that Jews posed a threat by bringing “foreign blood into our nation.”
One of the Mueller’s early acts was to demand that churches fire any pastors of Jewish ancestry or those married to a Jew. He also ordered all pastors to sign a loyalty oath to the Führer.
Not everyone, however, submitted to the nazification of the German Church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other dissidents, refused to submit to church control. In 1933 they formed the Confessing Church.
Throughout Bonhoeffer’s years as pastor, teacher, author and seminary director, he struggled to find his role in the Third Reich. While his early protests centered on preserving church autonomy, he increasingly spoke out against the Reich’s treatment of Jews. He wrote: “Only the person who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”
In time Bonhoeffer understood his mission as going beyond protest to political action. In 1939 he returned from the United States, where a position had been created at Union Theological Seminary expressly for his safety. Back in Germany, he joined the Abwehr, the German Intelligence agency. He was hired by his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, on the pretense that the cleric’s many ecumenical contacts would make him an asset. Unknown to the Nazis was his brother-in-law’s role in the Resistance.
In 1943, after the Gestapo found incriminating papers, Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned. On April 9, 1945, just days before American troops liberated the prison camp, he was hanged.
Bonhoeffer was not the only Christian leader to stand against Hitler. The number, however, was small. Most church leaders, including those of smaller denominations, found it expedient to accommodate Nazi ideology. Years later, Harold Alomia, a Protestant pastor and historian, would write: “God’s bride danced with the Devil.”
As we begin life under a second Trump presidency, enabled largely by the votes of white Christians, Bonhoeffer’s story is a warning of what can happen when race hatred and Christian nationalism are joined. American voters, Christian voters, please pay attention.
As we celebrate our newest national holiday, the day enslaved folk in Texas finally learned of their freedom, we recall our own history of slavery and abolition:
1754—A census of enslaved people in Massachusetts that year shows there were eight slaves above the age of 16 in Stoneham. They were among at least three dozen slaves in our town during the Colonial period—men like Cato, belonging to Deacon Green, and women like Dinah, a slave of the teacher James Toler, “who waited upon him to the end of his days” (Silas Dean). And they were children, like the unnamed 8-year-old mulatto purchased by Captain Peter Hay in 1744, the same year the Rev. James Osgood paid £75 for a woman named Phebe.
1775—Six Black men from Stoneham, three enslaved and three free, fight in the Battle of Bunker Hill, joining white colonists in the struggle for freedom from Great Britain.
1780—Four years after the Declaration of Independence, Massachusetts voters ratify the Massachusetts Constitution, authored mainly by John Adams.
1781—A slave called Mumbet (Elizabeth Freeman) and another named Brom sue their Sheffield owner for their freedom and win. This and other court cases bring about the eventual freedom of all slaves in Massachusetts based on the Massachusetts Constitution.
1790—The first federal census lists no enslaved people living in Stoneham.
1823—A former slave from Virginia named Randolph is seized in New Bedford. The state Supreme Judicial Court upholds the property rights of his owner, and he is returned to slavery.
1837—After an abolitionist meeting in Stoneham, a fight breaks out in the street, and a Stoneham man, Timothy Wheeler, is knifed and killed. He leaves a wife and four children.
1838-9—Sarah Richardson Gerry leads 27 women in founding the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Stoneham. The men also create a chapter.
1839—Church deacons pass a resolution calling on all ministers of the Gospel to “bear faithful witness against the sin of slavery.”
1850—A thirty-year-old minister of First Congregational Church, the Rev. William Whitcomb, preaches a fiery sermon against the federal Fugitive Slave Act, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850. He calls on his parishioners to aid all fugitives, even at the expense of their property and lives.
1850—Deacon Abijah Bryant’s home on Main Street becomes a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering fugitive slaves and enabling their safe passage to Canada.
1854—Anthony Burns, a 20-year-old former slave from Virginia is arrested in Boston and brought to trial. Thousands of abolitionists attempt to free Burns from the courthouse, but fail. In a widely reported trial, Burns is convicted and ordered sent back to his owner. Thousands line the streets as Burns is led in shackles to the docks and shipped back to his owner.
1861—Hundreds of Stoneham men join Massachusetts regiments responding to President Lincoln’s call for a voluntary army to defend the Union.
1864—54 Stoneham men die in the War of Rebellion: 11 killed in battle, 9 from wounds, 9 while in Confederate prisons, 25 from disease. These include Col J. Parker Gould, with others buried in Lindenwood Cemetery.
1862—Rev. William Whitcomb, is commissioned as a chaplain in the Union Army. He serves in hospitals in North Carolina until his death from malaria.
Over time we have learned to extend the human rights we hold so dear, those spelled out so eloquently in the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or gender. From our Constitution we read:
“All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”
Soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry
By Ben Jacques
When President Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1861, called for a voluntary army to protect the nation’s capital, the first to arrive in Washington were the Massachusetts Sixth Voluntary Infantry. Although the men came from all walks of life, most were mill workers and farmers.
One of them, Luther Crawford Ladd, was a 17-year-old worker in the Lowell Machine Shop. Another from Lowell, Addison Otis Whitney, 22, worked in the Number Three Spinning Room of the Middlesex Corporation.
Down river in Lawrence, Sumner Henry Needham, a 33-year-old lather, was also quick to enlist. Others came from Acton, Groton, Worcester, Boston and Stoneham. Of the 67 volunteers from Stoneham, 51 were shoemakers. One of them, 19-year-old Victor Lorendo, played in the regimental band.
Summoned to Boston by Governor John Andrews, the Sixth was a regiment of “patriot yeomen,” wrote Chaplain John W. Hanson, who chronicled the Sixth Massachusetts through three wartime campaigns.
What a sight they must have made as they mustered on the Common, each company in its own uniform. Privates Ladd and Whitney from Lowell wore grey dress coats, caps and pantaloons with buff epaulettes and trim, while Corporal Addison from Lawrence wore a dark blue frock and red pantaloons, “in the French style.” Company A volunteers sported blue frocks and black pantaloons with tall round hats and white pompoms.
Addison Whitney of Lowell
Unifying their appearance somewhat were the grey woolen greatcoats issued to all. Standard blue uniforms would come later, including the signature forage caps. The men were also issued Springfield rifles and pistols for the officers.
At the State House on April 17, Governor John Andrews addressed the recruits:
“Soldiers,” he said, “summoned suddenly, with but a moment for preparation…. We shall follow you with our benedictions, our benefactions, and prayers.” He then presented the regimental colors to Colonel Edward F. Jones, the regimental commander from Pepperell.
The next morning, April 17, to the ringing of bells, band music, gun salutes and the cheering of thousands, the 700-plus men of the Sixth Massachusetts boarded a train bound for the nation’s capital.
At each stop, Worcester, Springfield and Hartford, crowds cheered them on their way. Reaching New York that night, the men were feted with dinner and speeches. The next day they crossed by ferry to Jersey City, then by train to Trenton. Arriving that evening in Philadelphia, the troops received their most enthusiastic reception. Wrote Chaplain Hanson: “So dense were the crowds that the regiment could only move through the streets by the flank.”
That night in Philadelphia the officers “were entertained sumptuously” at the Continental Hotel, while the soldiers were quartered at the Girard House. Weary from travel and excitement, they were grateful for the chance to sleep. Their rest, however, was cut short when roll was called and they were ordered back to the train station. At 2 a.m, the Sixth Massachusetts left for Baltimore. It was Saturday, April 19, 1861, four score and six years to the day after Minutemen marched to Lexington and Concord to fight British Red Coats.
While the soldiers were sleeping, Colonel Jones had met with Brig. General P. S. Davis, sent ahead to arrange transport. Davis told him that pro-slavery agitators in Baltimore planned action against the Massachusetts infantry. Jones also met with the president of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Railroad, who sent a pilot engine ahead to scout for obstructions on the tracks. Insisting that they must push on to Washington, Davis hoped to arrive in Baltimore before a crowd could assemble.
In the spring of 1861, Maryland was still a slave state, although it had not joined the Confederacy. While the mayor of Baltimore had promised safe passage of the Sixth Massachusetts, many Maryland citizens viewed their passage as an intrusion, if not an invasion.
Because steam engines could not pass through Baltimore, trains from Philadelphia had to stop at the north depot and the cars uncoupled. They would then be pulled by horse teams along tracks to Camden Station, the south depot, where they would be hooked to another engine headed south.
Arriving in Baltimore about 10 a.m., the Sixth Massachusetts at first faced little trouble. Wrote Hanson: “As soon as the cars reached the station, the engine was unshackled, horses were hitched to the cars, and they were drawn rapidly away.” So far, they had caught protesters unaware.
By the time the seventh rail car began its course, however, a mob had gathered and begun hurling insults, bricks and stones. It got worse the further they went, and three times was car was knocked off the tracks, then set back.
Fearing violence, officers had earlier issued 20 cartridge balls to each soldier and ordered their rifles loaded and capped. But they were not to fire unless fired upon.
After the seventh company reached Camden Station, Mayor George Brown signaled that “it is not possible for more soldiers to pass through Baltimore unless they fight their way at every step.” Yet there were still four more companies, two from Lowell, one from Lawrence and one from Stoneham, waiting to cross. Included was the regimental band.
Thousands now blocked the streets, tore up paving stones, and dragged debris onto the tracks. Unable to move the last two cars, the four companies disembarked and began to march. Lt. Leander Lynde from Stoneham would later write:
Companies from Lowell, Lawrence and Stoneham are attached by a pro-slavery mob in Baltimore.
“What impressed me most at the time was the terrible fury of the mob…. Not content with hurling flagstones, bricks, hot water, flatirons and every conceivable thing, the mob hissed us, called us names and taunted us with monstrous vocabulary. Even the women hurled things at us from windows.”
Lynde himself was struck in the head by a brick. “I fell stunned for a moment. The boys picked me up, thinking that I was dead, but I soon recovered and marched on with them.”
Leading the four companies was Captain A. S. Follensbee of Lowell: “Before we had started, the mob was upon us, with a secession flag, attached to a pole, and told us we could never march through that city. They would kill every ‘white nigger’ of us, before we could reach the other depot.”
As he stepped down from the train, Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence told a fellow soldier: “We shall have trouble to-day, and I shall never get out of it alive. Promise me, if I fall, that my body shall be sent home.”
Falling in, the companies pressed forward through a sea of rioters. Showered with missiles, the men doubled their pace. “We had not gone more than 10 rods further before I saw a man discharge a revolver at us from the second story of a building, and at the same time a great many were fired from the street,” wrote Lynde.
One of the first to fall was Lynde’s company captain, John H. Dyke, shot in the thigh. Wrote Lynde, “I decided it was about time for me to take the responsibility and ordered my men to fire upon the mob. The men in the other companies at once joined in with us.”
Especially vulnerable was the color guard—Color Sergeant Timothy A. Crowley of Lowell—who carried the flag, and his aides, Ira Stickney and W. Marland. Another company chaplain, Charles Babbidge, remembered: “Paving stones flew thick and fast, some just grazing their heads and some hitting the standard itself. One stone, as large as a hat, struck Marland just between the shoulders, a terrible blow, and then rested on his knapsack. And yet he did not budge. With a firm step, he went on, carrying the rock on his knapsack for several yards, until one of the sergeants stepped up and knocked it off.”
When they reached the Pratt Street Bridge, they found a crowd had pulled up the planking, so “we were forced to creep over as best we could on the stringers,” wrote Lynde.
Arriving finally at Camden Station, the last four companies found the doors of the waiting cars locked, but used their rifle butts to gain access. Now in charge of Company L, Lieutenant Lynde saw his company and the color guard safely aboard. They were surrounded, however, by another huge crowd brandishing guns, knives and clubs. Running ahead, the mob placed telegraph poles, anchors and stones on the tracks.
Slowly, with rifle muzzles sticking out the windows, the train began to move. The engine stopped and men jumped out to clear the obstacles. The train started again and stopped. A rail had been removed. It was replaced, and again the train was in motion.
“The crowd went on for some miles out,” Chaplain Hanson wrote, “as far as Jackson Bridge, and the police followed removing obstructions; and at several places shots were exchanged.” At the Relay House, the train was held up until a train coming north had passed. Then it continued, unobstructed, to Washington.
On the train, the officers counted their casualties and the missing. Dozens had been wounded, and dozens more missing, including the regimental band.
Unarmed, the musicians had refused to march through the city. However, this did not stop the attackers. One musician, A. S. Young of Lowell, recalled: “We fought them off as long as we could; but coming thicker and faster . . . they forced their way in.” Fleeing the cars, one band member was urged by a policeman to “run like the Devil.”
Seventeen-year-old Victor Lorendo of Stoneham escaped by diving under the rail car, then racing off. Tearing the stripes off his pants so he wouldn’t be recognized, he somehow made it back to Philadelphia and eventually Boston. He then walked the last ten miles to his home town. He had been reported dead.
Not all citizens of Maryland were hostile. In several cases, shop owners and housewives sheltered and cared for wounded soldiers. Fleeing the mob, a number of the band members were rescued by “a party of women, partly Irish, partly German, and some American, who took us into their houses, removed the stripes from our pants and we were furnished with old clothes of every description for disguise,” wrote Young. Sheltered and fed, the musicians returned two days later to Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, the soldiers on the train wondered what kind of reception they would have in Washington. It was dark when, just four days after the President’s call, the locomotive steamed into the capital. To their relief, they found a crowd cheering their arrival. Among them was a Massachusetts woman who worked in the Patent Office. Her name was Clara Barton and she had come to the capital to organize nursing and relief services. As the injured left the train, she and her assistants dressed their wounds and arranged transport to area homes.
The rest of the regiment marched to the Capitol, where they bedded down in the Senate Chamber. It was a strange scene. “The colonel was accustomed to sleep in the Vice President’s chair, with sword and equipments on,” wrote Hanson. “The rest of the officers and men were prostrate all over the floor around him, each with sword or musket within reach ; the gas-lights turned down to sparks, and no sound but the heavy breathing of sleepers and the hollow tramp of sentinels on the lobby floors.”
On Sunday morning, April 20, the Sixth Massachusetts marched “in open order” up Pennsylvania Avenue, giving the appearance of a full brigade, so as to “intimidate the secessionists.” At the White House they were welcomed by a grateful President Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward.
Over the next few days the Sixth Massachusetts cheered the arrival of the Seventh and Eighth Massachusetts as well as regiments from New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Setting up defenses around Washington, they prepared for a Confederate attack.
Back at the Capitol, the soldiers had time to write letters, and the officers to submit reports. Describing the ambush in Baltimore and casualties to his company, Lieutenant Lynde wrote:
“Captain Dyke was shot in the thigh…. James Keenan was shot in the leg, and Andrew Robbins was shot and hit with a stone, hurt very bad. Horace Danforth was hit with a stone and injured very severely, but all were in good hands and well cared for.”
What happened to Capt. John Dyke after he was shot was told later by Chaplain Hanson. Hobbling into a tavern, he was met by a Union sympathizer, who carried him to a back room. “He had scarcely left the barroom . . . when it was filled with the ruffians, who, had they known his whereabouts, would have murdered him.” Nursed and cared for, Dyke remained there for a week before being sent, disabled, back home.
Of the 67 in the Stoneham company, 18 had been wounded by gunshot, bricks or paving stones. The volunteers “had been worked very hard for green soldiers,” Lynde wrote, “but the men have done well and have stood by each other like brothers.”
Also attacked were the companies from Lowell and Lawrence, which, like Stoneham, had been forced to cross Baltimore on foot. Lowell’s Company D, marching on the exposed left side of the column, was especially hard hit. Nine men were injured, including Sgt. William H. Lamson, wounded in the head and eye from paving stones, and Sergeant John E Eames. From Lawrence, Alonzo Joy had his fingers shot off, and George Durrell was injured in the head by a brick. Three others were wounded.
From the two mill cities, four were killed. The first was the 17-year-old mechanic from Lowell. Having grown up on a farm, Luther Ladd had followed three older sisters to work in the textile industry. “He was full of patriotic ardor,” Hanson wrote. “When the call was made for the first volunteers, the earnest solicitations of his friends could not induce him to remain behind.” Marching along Pratt Street, Ladd was struck in the head and shot, the bullet severing an artery in his thigh. He is considered the first Union soldier killed in the Civil War.
Also in Company D, Addison Otis Whitney, the Lowell spinner, was shot and killed. Born in Waldo, Maine, he was 22. Before enlisting in the Sixth Massachusetts, he had joined the City Guards.
The third soldier in Company D to perish was Charles A. Taylor, of whom little is known. Taylor enlisted at the last minute, wrote Chaplain Hanson, “and represented himself as a fancy painter by profession, about 25 years old, and was of light complexion and blue eyes.” A bystander later reported that Taylor, having fallen, was beaten to death by ruffians and his body thrown in a sewer. As Taylor wore no uniform but the regimental coat, his death was not confirmed until a bystander later returned the coat to a Union officer.
After the war, Col. Edward Jones made several trips to Baltimore to find Taylor’s body and return it to Massachusetts, but the burial site was never found.
Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence
The fourth fatality was Corporal Sumner Needham of Lawrence’s Company F, who had voiced a presentiment of his death in Baltimore. Struck by a paving stone, Needham fell to the ground, his skull fractured. A surgeon tried to drill a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure, but in vain. The 33-year-old corporal died a few days later. In December, eight months later to the day, his wife, Hannah, gave birth to a son.
On May 2, Needham’s body, along with Ladd and Whitney, were returned to Massachusetts, where they were viewed by thousands at King’s Chapel and eulogized at the State House. They were then conveyed by train to Lowell and Lawrence. Needham lay in state in Lawrence City Hall before burial in Lawrence’s Bellevue Cemetery. The inscription on the granite memorial reads, in part, “[Needham] fell victim to the passions of a Secessionist Mob, during the passage of the Regiment through the streets of Baltimore marching in Defense of the Nation’s Capital.”
Meanwhile in Lowell, throngs turned out to receive the bodies of Ladd and Whitney, who, like the others, were mourned as martyrs in the cause of freedom. For the funeral, residents crowded into City Hall to hear clergy from seven churches officiate.
On June 17, four years later, Governor John Andrew dedicated a 27-foot-high obelisk memorial, honoring “the first soldiers of the Union Army to die in the great rebellion.” On it are the names of Ladd and Whitney. Later a brass plate with the name of the Charles Taylor was added.
Although the Sixth Massachusetts volunteers were the first to arrive at the nation’s capital, they did not participate in the humiliation of Bull Run, which took place on July 12. By this time, they had been ordered back to Maryland, as the state was now put under martial law. Taking control of its forts, ports and rail lines, the Sixth would in three months complete its first campaign and return home. Most of the men would re-enlist, either in the Sixth or other Massachusetts regiments, engaging in conflicts through the end of the war.
In the April 19 ambush in Baltimore, sometimes called the Pratt Street Riot, the yeoman soldiers of the Sixth Massachusetts faced bullets, stones, and the hate of a pro-slavery mob. It was not Manassas, Antietam or Gettysburg, but it was the beginning. The volunteers from New England were attacked not by Confederate soldiers, but by fellow American citizens whose lust for insurrection would fuel a long and bloody war. The ambush was vicious and it took the lives of four Union soldiers and twelve civilians. It wounded, many severely, thirty-eight soldiers and dozens of rioters.
The battle in the streets was the “first blood” of the War of the Rebellion, a cataclysm that raged across our nation for four more years and took the lives of three quarters of a million. The scars are with us today.
Sources include:
Hanson, John W., Chaplain. A Historical Sketch of the old Sixth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers during its Three Campaigns. Lee and Shepherd, Boston, 1866.
Hurd, D. Hamilton, History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts. J.W. Lewis & Co, Philadelphia, 1890.
Stevens, William B., History of Stoneham, Mass., F. L. & W. E. Whittier, Stoneham, Mass., 1891.
Stormtroopers holding German Christian propaganda during the Church Council elections on July 23, 1933, at St. Mary’s Church, Berlin.
By Ben Jacques
On a warm day in August, 1934, thousands of Baptists from around the world filed into the vast Tagungshalle in Berlin. From 70 countries, they were there for a week-long Congress of the Baptist World Alliance. Behind the podium was a portrait of three Baptist founders below a cross. To the right hung a red banner with a swastika.
At the conference the delegates were welcomed by the deputy mayor of Berlin, who stressed the good work the government was doing for children and the unemployed (Brown). They also received a greeting from Reichsbishof Ludwig Mueller, whom Hitler had appointed to head the consolidated Evangelical (Lutheran) Churches of Germany. An ardent supporter of Hitler’s “positive Christianity,” Mueller made no secret of his anti-Semitic stance.
The delegates also heard Paul Schmidt, director of the German Baptist Union, praise the good work of the new government, declaring that God had chosen Hitler to rescue the German nation (Norris).
On Tuesday the morning session was suspended so delegates could tune in to the funeral of German President von Hindenburg, whose death two days earlier had left Hitler in full control of the government. A wreathed portrait of von Hindenburg was placed on the stage. Wrote British delegate Eva Brown, “We listened to the chaplain of the German Army, to Hitler, to guns firing, and to a verse of ‘Ein feste Berg,’” Martin Luther’s famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress.”
In days to follow the international body debated and passed resolutions calling for separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Another resolution deplored “all racial animosity, and every form of oppression or unfair discrimination toward the Jews, toward colored people, or toward subject races in any part of the world” (Resolution 1934.7).
Despite these sentiments, however, a number of delegates sympathized with the Germans’ anti-Semitic policies. M. E. Dodd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote that Jews, while only one percent of the population, were using their disproportionate influence in professions for “self-aggrandizement to the injury of the German people.”
Others expressed approval of the crackdown on immorality. John W. Bradbury, a Baptist pastor from Boston, wrote: “It was a great relief to be in a country where salacious sex literature cannot be sold; where putrid motion pictures and gangster films cannot be shown” Bradbury continued: “The new Germany has burned great masses of corrupting books and magazines along with its bonfires of Jewish and communistic libraries” (Allen, “How Baptists Assessed Hitler”).
Baptists weren’t the only ones to equate Nazi policies with Christian reforms. A year earlier, the president of the German Seventh-day Adventist Church, Adolph Minck, wrote: ‘A fresh, enlivening and renewing reformation spirit is blowing through our German lands…. The word of God and Christianity shall be restored to a place of honor” (Alomia).
Methodist Bishop Dr. Otto Melle, speaking at the Oxford World Conference in London in 1937, claimed that “God in his providence has sent a leader who was able to banish the danger of Bolshevism in Germany and rescue a nation of 67 million from the abyss of despair” (Manchester Guardian Weekly, July 30, 1937).
Although they comprised only a fraction of Germany’s Protestant population, Baptists, Methodists and Adventists came under enormous pressure to conform. Like the Lutherans and Catholics, they struggled with threats to their beliefs. With notable exceptions, however, most found it expedient to accommodate Nazi ideology. As Adventist minister and historian Harold Alomía would later write, “God’s bride danced with the Devil.”
What they got in return was the survival of their organizations, a chance to evangelize, and an opportunity to play a stronger role in society.
What they should have foreseen, however, was the moral stranglehold they would encounter. While allowed to operate, the churches were counted on to support Nazi ideology. They were also asked to become ambassadors abroad.
In March of 1933, within days after Hitler took control, Nazi Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurth and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels met with Bishop John L. Nuelsen, president of the Europe Central Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Because he had ties with the large Methodist population in America, he and fellow clergy could be of great help in influencing public opinion abroad at a time when Hitler needed international good will (Blaich, “A Tale of Two Leaders”).
In response, writes historian Roland Blaich, Bishop Nuelsen “joined General Superintendent Hans Dibelius of the Evangelical Church in a short-wave broadcast assuring the outside world that all was well in Germany.” Methodist leaders also sent telegrams to the press in England and the United States “protesting reports of alleged atrocities” (Blaich, “A Tale of Two Leaders”).
The Nazis also reached out to the Baptists and Adventists. What followed were numerous trips by church leaders to the United States. Speaking at church, academic and cultural associations, they praised the achievements of the Nazi government and countered criticism of its treatment of Jews.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Germany sent the director of its reputable social service agency, Hulda Jost. Although the Adventist Church had been declared illegal in 1933, it had appealed, stressing its support for the government and its upholding of family values and healthy living. Within weeks, it was reinstated (Blaich, “Selling Nazi Germany Abroad”).
In 1936, on her way to a church world conference in San Francisco, Jost spoke to organizations across the country. Quoted in a Chicago Daily News article, she claimed that “Hitler does not want war.” When asked about persecution of the Jews, she said “Hitler has merely wanted to take leadership away from the Jews, but he doesn’t want to hurt them.” (Schroder, “Seventh Day Adventists”).
Meanwhile, Christians in Germany were being tested. In April 1933, the Nazis introduced the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases Act. This law mandated forcible sterilization for nine disabilities and disorders. As a result, 400,000 Germans were sterilized in Nazi Germany.
In 1935 came the Nuremburg Laws, stripping Jews of citizenship and prohibiting racial intermarriage. Later came euthanasia, or “mercy killing,” which accounted for an estimated 250,000 deaths. “A curious path led from caritas, the caring for the less fortunate and weak, to elimination of the weak, as the work of God,” Blaich writes.
Churches were also told to purge their members of Jews. This spelled particular trouble for the Seventh-day Adventists. Because Adventists kept Saturday as Sabbath, and had similar dietary practices, they were sometimes associated with Judaism. Eager to show they were Christian, Adventists started calling Saturday “Rest Day,” rather than the Sabbath. Across Germany and occupied countries, signs appeared on church doors prohibiting Jews from entering.
There are several accounts of Christians with Jewish heritage being expelled and shunned. Some disappeared. Others died in concentration camps (Heinz, “Painful Rememberance”).
Not all churches in Germany made peace with the Third Reich. Some, like the Confessing Church, were outlawed, and many of their members persecuted or killed. Others fared even worse. Approximately 1,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses died or were killed in concentration camps.
While a majority of German Christians found a way to accommodate the Nazi agenda, there were also individuals, Protestants and Catholics, who risked or gave their lives to protect Jews and others. Their stories are a precious testament to the capacity of the human heart for courage and compassion.
From Christians who went along with the Nazis, however, we see how treacherous is the mix of religion and nationalism and how lethal when race hatred is added. From their tragic experience, we have much to learn.
Brown, Eva. “The Baptist World Conference in Berlin.” Baptist Quarterly, October 1934.
Brumley, Jeff. “What Happens When Church and State Merge? Look to Nazi Germany for Answers.” Baptist Press, Jan. 30, 2023.
“Church’s Relations with the State: The Oxford Conference and the German Delegates,” The Manchester Guardian Weekly, 30 July 1937. The official report on the Oxford Conference is found in J. H. Oldham, The Oxford Conference (New York: Clark, 1937.)
Dodd, M. E. “My Impressions of the Baptist World Congress.” Baptist and Reflector, Sept. 13, 1934.
Heinz, Daniel. “Painful Remembrance: Adventists and Jews in The Third Reich.” Shabbat Shalom Magazine, Viewpoint 28 December 2017. This article appeared originally in German in Adventecho, May 2001, pp. 12-14. Translation by Martin Pröbstle.
King, Christian Elizabeth. The Nazi State and the New Religions. E Mellon Press, London: 1982.
Norris, Kristopher. “Baptists under Nazism and Baptists amid America’s current political crisis: a call to ‘disruption’” Baptist News, Nov. 21, 2019.
Roach, David. “Baptists ‘humbled’ by failure to oppose Nazis.” Baptist Press, Sept. 18, 2014.
Schroder, Corrie. “Seventh Day Adventists,” Oral History Project, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2002.
Driving south of Atlanta on I-75, he was on his way to Jackson. Not Jackson, Mississippi, but Jackson, Georgia, home of the state’s maximum-security prison.
Passing through farm land, he thought about his upcoming appointment, and he remembered how his grandmother would hug him tight and say, “If you want to understand things, you got to get close to them.”
A 23-year-old intern from Harvard Law School, Bryan Stevenson would soon be getting very close to a man on death row. Although he had done his homework on the prisoner, he felt totally unprepared.
This is the beginning of one of the most remarkable books I’ve read. It’s called Just Mercy, and it’s the story of how a young lawyer fought injustice in America’s criminal system. How he brought freedom to the wrongly convicted and fair sentencing to young perpetrators, who, because of their age and circumstances, had made terrible mistakes.
Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative based in Montgomery, Alabama, Stevenson tells the stories of prisoners he got to know. There’s Walter McMillan, arrested, convicted and put on death row for the murder of a white woman. When Stevenson met McMillan, he was one of a hundred on death row in a Alabama, a state with no public defender system.
Even though McMillan lived in Monroeville, he had, ironically, never heard of To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s novel set in the same county.Son of sharecroppers, he had carved out a business harvesting pine trees for paper mills. Now on death row, within steps of the room where prisoners were executed, he steadily maintained his innocence. He told the young lawyer what it was like. “When they turned on the electric chair, you could smell the flesh burning,” he said.
As Stevenson researched his case, he found glaring flaws in the case against McMillan. The prisoner had been convicted on false testimony with no corroborating evidence. But it would take six years of painstaking investigation, hearings and appeals before his conviction was vacated and McMillan was released.
Then there was Anthony Roy Hinton, exonerated after 30 years on death row. On Good Friday in April 2015 Vinton walked out of the courthouse a free man. He has since written a best-selling book: The Sun Does Shine.
About Hinton, Stevenson writes: “Race, poverty, inadequate legal assistance, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence conspired to create a textbook example of injustice. I can’t think of a case that more urgently dramatizes the need for reform.”
Just Mercy is not only a call for justice, but for mercy, especially for those disabled by poverty, abuse and mental illness. “Each of us,” he writes, “is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”
And again: “The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
The book is a powerful read. It’s available in text, e-book and audio formats at the Stoneham Public Library, or you can order it at the Book Oasis and online. Also compelling is the 2019 movie, starring, Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx and Rob Morgan. You can find it on most cable subscriptions, as well as on Prime.
Bryan Stevenson’s story will long stay with you. It may even affect how you see the world.
I have often wondered why religious people vote the way they do. What is behind their decision to support a certain candidate or proposal? How do individuals form their political identities and affiliations?
The family I grew up in was not overtly political. We were Seventh-day Adventists, a Protestant denomination that believes the end of the world is near, and that the Second Coming of Christ will establish, for a righteous remnant, a home for all eternity. We also believed that keeping the seventh day of the week–that is, Saturday–as the true Sabbath marked us as God’s remnant people.
As a child, the only time I remember Adventists getting involved in politics was to oppose so-called Blue Laws, which had to do with closing stores on Sunday. The fear was that if the government could tell people not to shop on Sunday, the next step would be to tell Adventists they couldn’t worship on Saturday. I’m not sure I understood the logic.
Despite a general reluctance to engage in politics, my father was a Republican. I remember him telling us this story. When we were small children, he had us three boys march into the living room to perform. This was in the election year of 1948, when Thomas Dewey ran against Harry Truman. Tommy, 5, the oldest brother would call out: “Vote for Dewey for president!” Bobby, 3, would shout: “Dewey for president!” and I, at two, would come behind with, “Dewey! Dewey!”
In 1960 my parents were for Richard Nixon. When he came through Battle Creek, Michigan, Dad took us down to the railroad station to see him. Beyond that, there was little talk about either of the candidates. We did hear that Kennedy, the Democrat, was a Catholic.
There was also, in our church, little discussion of civil rights or efforts to integrate schools and public facilities. In Battle Creek we attended the Tabernacle, the large Adventist church not far from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, made famous by John Harvey Kellogg. My brothers, sister and I enrolled in Battle Creek Academy, the Adventist K-12 school. I never saw a black person at school or church, and only learned that there were black Adventists after hearing an exchange between two members of our church. One member, who had been in Florida, was greeted by another, who, teasing her, told her that with her vacation tan she was in the wrong place. She should go to the Berean Church across town. When I questioned my father about this, he confirmed that black Adventists had their own church, and conference. In short, the church was segregated. They, meaning the black Adventists, preferred it that way, he said.
Later, as the Civil Rights movement made its way onto the evening news, I watched, both shocked and intrigued, as demonstrators were beaten and fire-hosed in the South. When I asked my father about Martin Luther King, Jr., he was dismissive. “He’s causing a lot of trouble,” he said.
It was only when I left home, first to spend a year in Europe, then to attend college in Massachusetts, that I came into regular contact with African Americans. At Atlantic Union College black students were a minority–we heard there was a quota–as the college took applicants from both white and black conferences. My association with students of color there, and in two summers as a lifeguard in Washington, D. C. public pools, where I was one of only a few whites, were important times of awakening for me.
The son of a minister and former missionary, I was born in East Africa, coming to the United States at age three. My parents had served the native people of Tanzania (my birth certificate says Tanganyika), yet we had no knowledge or understanding of black life in America. Until I went to college, I knew nothing about segregation, voting suppression, housing, discrimination and violence that plagued and terrorized African Americans.
In 1961, the summer before my tenth grade, our family moved to Loma Linda, where my father became director of public relations for Loma Linda University, the church’s medical school. My brother and I were enrolled at Loma Linda Union Academy, the Adventist high school. I don’t remember any African-American students. There were a two or three Mexican-American students. One of them was named Jesus, and I remember a teacher stumbling over his name. “It’s Heysus,” the student said.
My father’s boss, now a vice president of Loma Linda University, had political ambitions. His name was Jerry Pettis, a former minister, educator and entrepreneur, and in 1964 he ran for Congress as a Republican. This was a big deal in the Adventist community, as no church member had ever won national office. Adventists, although eager to be seen as patriotic, had always kept a low profile in the political arena. Glad to help, my father wrote press releases and arranged speaking engagements.
My brother and I also got involved. In the months before the election, we drove an old station wagon all over the 33rd District, which included much of San Bernardino County, installing roadside signs. Our tools were a post-hole digger, nails and hammer. The six-by-four-foot signs in blue and red said, simply, “Pettis for Congress.”
This was the year Barry Goldwater faced off against Lyndon Johnson, and among family and friends, conservative sentiment was strong. I remember finding a thin paperback among campaign materials: None Dare Call It Treason, by John A. Stormer. A protestant minister and strident anti-communist, Stormer warned of a conspiracy to overcome America, aided by leftists embedded throughout American institutions. Along with Phyllis Shafley’s A Choice, Not an Echo, Stormer’s treatise helped swing the Republican Party further to the right.
In November, however, Goldwater was easily defeated, due in part to Johnson’s success in painting him as an extremist. Jerry Pettis, aware in the weeks before the election that the tide was changing, distributed a flier to district households showing a photo of him standing beside Lyndon Johnson. The photo came from a previous visit to the university by the then vice-president, and its reprint now conveyed the obvious message. Pettis would work well with the new Democratic president. Still, Pettis lost.
But two years later, Pettis ran again for Congress and won. The Adventists I knew were thrilled that one of them would now be their representative in Washington, and they welcomed the notoriety this would bring the denomination. I was in college that fall, and not long after, my parents called to tell me they would be moving to the nation’s capital as well. Pettis had asked my father to be his administrative assistant. That summer, instead of going home to Loma Linda, I joined my parents in a Maryland suburb.
Jerry Pettis served four and a half terms in the House of Representatives. In the early years of his tenure, he positioned himself as a conservative Republican, but by 1974 was considered a moderate. A Congressional ideology graph that year placed him pretty much in the middle.
His record on civil rights, however, drew harsh criticism. In a 1968 interview at nearby California State College, San Bernardino, Pettis defended his vote against the 1968 Civil Rights Bill, also called the Fair Housing Act, calling it a “garbage pail law.” Pettis said that he supported open housing in principle. The editor of the student newspaper pointed out, however, that Pettis had also opposed the 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Law in California. Pettis replied by stating he was no racist. He said he lived in one of the most integrated areas of the county, Loma Linda, and that one of his neighbors, a neurosurgeon, “was a Negro.”
On national security issues, including the Vietnam War, Pettis was a hardliner. Although he had arrived in Congress too late to vote on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which gave President Johnson authority to expand military action in Vietnam, Pettis on several occasions voiced support for the Vietnam War. This was a problem for me.
At age 18 I had registered for the draft as 1-A-O. My father had explained that it was a deal the church had worked out with the Selective Service to serve in the Army, but in a non-combatant role. In World War II some Adventists had been medics. Others had become “white coats,” volunteering for medical experiments with new drugs.
The most famous Seventh-day Adventist in World War II was Desmond Doss, a combat medic from Virginia who was later awarded the Bronze Medal and the Congressional Medal of Honor. They made a movie about him. In Guam, Doss scaled cliffs to rescue scores of wounded soldiers. Doss believed he should help his country, but he refused to carry a gun.
Not all Adventists who were drafted, or those who enlisted, followed the church position, including a high school friend who had joined the Marines after being expelled from Loma Linda Academy. In Vietnam he contracted malaria. The summer before college I was a pallbearer at his funeral.
Increasingly, I had difficulty reconciling conscientious objection with most Adventists’ support of the Vietnam War. How could you be for the war and against the taking of life? Was it OK to shoot Vietnamese as long as you weren’t pulling the trigger? Could you support the torching of villages and bombing of cities as long as you didn’t have to do it?
In college in Massachusetts I started investigating various pacifist organizations. I read about the Quakers, and visited the American Friends Service Committee. I learned about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, and read the poetry and prose of the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Phillip, Catholic priests and anti-war activists. I found out that my ancestors in Russia, before they became Adventists, had been Mennonites. I learned about their stance as pacifists and their migration from Germany to Russia to escape forced military service.
In September of 1968 Becky and I married, and transferred from Atlantic Union College to Cal State, San Bernardino. There I found myself marching in anti-war protests. Working on the student newspaper, I wrote editorials against the war.
That fall Richard Nixon won the election. “Thank God, we have a Christian in the White House,” a family friend said. Although Nixon had promised to bring an end to the war, it continued for four more years. On December 18, 1972, Nixon ordered the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam. Twenty thousand tons of bombs were dropped on Hanoi and Haiphong.
Long after the Vietnam War, I continued to explore why people of faith vote the way they do, and how they arrive at their political positions. What role does denominational doctrine and culture play? How does national identity affect our thinking? What makes some Christians more or less likely to stand up for the rights of others, or to keep silent about, or even to participate in, their oppression?
For me, the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement were crucibles, testing all I had been taught. As I struggled with how I should respond, I saw that some Christians, including Adventists, found ways to justify their support for violent and oppressive actions. On the other hand, I saw a few members of my church speaking out against the inhumanity of racism, participating in civil rights marches and advocating for racial reconciliation, both in and outside the church. I had friends who also opposed the Vietnam War. One burned his draft card in the Park Street Church in Boston. Another served in the Army as a medic, and another worked for two years as an orderly in a hospital.
In recent years I’ve taken a look at how Christians and especially Seventh-day Adventists in other countries have responded to human rights crises. In Germany in the 1930s, I was dismayed to find that the Adventist Church not only went along with, but in several ways facilitated the Nazi takeover and domination of society. Several recent studies document this.
In “Fatal Flirting: The Nazi State and the Seventh-day Adventist Church,” Harold Alomia writes that the German Adventist Church “became infatuated with Hitler. Hitler stood for conservative family values, was against pornography and prostitution, did not drink or smoke, and was even a vegetarian. He was an Adventist dream come true”(Journal of Adventist Mission Studies, Vol. 6 [2010], No. 1, Art. 2)).
The German church early approved of Hitler’s regime. Alomia continues::
Echoing the praises for the rise of Hitler to power, Adolf Minck, President of the Adventist German Church, penned his satisfaction with the election of Adolf Hitler in the August edition of Adventbote (the official periodical of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Germany at that time): “A fresh enlivening, and renewing reformation spirit is blowing through our German lands . . . this is a time of decision, a time of such opportunities for a believing youth ashas not been for a long time. . . . The word of God and Christianity shall be restored to a place of honor.”
Alomia quotes another Adventist leader, Wilhelm Mueller, who wrote that Hitler was “chosen by God” and praised his similarity with Adventists as a health reformer: “As an anti-alcoholic, non-smoker, [and] a vegetarian he is closer to our own view of health reform than anybody else.”
Reading several other reports, I learned that a vast majority of the approximately 38,000 German Adventists, encouraged by church leadership, voted for Adolf Hitler and his policies. In a paper written for the University of California at Santa Barbara Oral History Project, Corrie Schroder presented a comprehensive review of German Adventists under the Third Reich. She wrote: “In the Adventist town of Friedensau, 99.9 percent voted for the Nazi parliamentary party.”
Nevertheless, in 1933 the Nazis banned the German Adventist Church, along with other small denominations. Church leaders quickly mounted an appeal, countering that they were indeed loyal citizens eager to join in the work of building a new Germany. To differentiate themselves from Jews, with whom they shared observance of Saturday as Sabbath, as well as some dietary rules, Adventists changed the name of their Sabbath School to Bible School, and the name of Sabbath to Rest Day. Much more sinister, following directives from church leaders, they expelled members with Jewish backgrounds or those with Jewish relatives. This led to the banishment, imprisonment and/or death of an unknown number of Jewish Adventists.
The German Adventist Church also expelled members of a “reformed” branch of the church, which maintained the traditional belief that Adventists should not work on the Sabbath or serve as combatants in the armed services. Traditionally known as pacifists, Adventists were later given permission by church leaders to serve as combatants in the armed forces, and to attend school or work on Saturday.
Within two weeks of their appeal, the German SDA Church was reinstated by the government. In following months and years, the church found new ways to cooperate with the Nazis. Early in 1933 the government had announced the first of its eugenics laws, designed to cleanse the German racial pool. Titled “The Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary Diseases,” this law mandated the forced sterilization of individuals with nine physical or mental disabilities. Most Adventists were initially opposed to the sterilization law, but following persuasive articles in church publications, the Church signaled its compliance.
Neither did the Adventist Church object when in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws were passed, stripping Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others of citizenship.
In 1939 when the Nazis implemented euthanasia programs for children with physical or mental disabilities, the Adventist church remained silent.
The most extensive form of cooperation between church and state came when the Adventist Welfare Services offered to join with the National Socialist Welfare Department. This brought the well-organized church welfare programs under state control, which meant services would be restricted to those the Nazis considered worthy.
The leader of the Adventist Welfare Service was Hulda Jost, also the president of the Adventist Nurses Association, which operated several nursing homes and supplied staff to hospitals. A vocal supporter of Hitler, Jost in 1936 began a speaking tour in the United States. Quoted in a Chicago Daily News story, Jost said, “Hitler doesn’t want war.” Asked about treatment of Jews, she said: “Hitler has merely wanted to take leadership away from the Jews but he doesn’t want to hurt them.”
Adventist support for the Third Reich continued into the war. In a 1941 letter to the provincial governor, church president Adolph Minck wrote, quoted by Alomia: “At this occasion I may once again assure you that the members of our denomination stand loyally by the Fuhrer and the Reich. They are continually encouraged and supported in their basic attitude. The leadership of the denomination considers this as one of its most noble duties.”
The full effects of Adventist cooperation with the Nazi state may never be known. For Adventists with questionable lineage, it was devastating. Daniel Heinz, in a Dec. 28, 2017, article in Shabbat Shalom Magazine, tells of Adventists in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, who because of their Jewish background, were ostracized by the church, and who disappeared or perished in concentration camps.
There were, however, a few Adventists who went against the grain, who refused to comply with church or state directives. Heinz tells of Adventists in Latvia, Hungary and Belgium who rescued and sheltered hundreds of Jews while under German occupation. Of the Adventists in Latvia, Heinz writes:
One of the most courageous Adventists who fought against the mass murder of Jews was the Hungarian pastor and union president László Michnay. A tree planted in his honor in 1981 on the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations of the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem reminds us of his uncompromising resistance.
Another Adventist rescuer of those endangered by the Nazis was Jean H. Weidner, son of a pastor in Brussels. Heinz writes that Weidner and his organization led 800 Jews and another 200-300 endangered persons to safety in Switzerland and Spain.
These examples, however, do not diminish the sobering conclusion that in Germany the majority of Adventists–as well as other Christians–were complicit in the persecution and death of millions of Jews and other undesirables. They were complicit by their silence, and in some cases by their participation. Unlike the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed for his anti-Nazi activities, too many were seduced by the notion that their values and beliefs could be merged with those of the Third Reich.
Certainly nationalistic fervor played a major role, as did anti-Semitism, which had deep roots in Germany. Hitler would make the Fatherland great again, end unemployment, institute reforms and cleanse the nation of undesirables. Citizens were silent, compliant, or cooperative to the degree that their personal viewpoints matched or contrasted with the national agenda.
German Adventists were also motivated, as were religious of other denominations, by a desire to preserve their church organization. If Adventists are the one true church, as I was taught, then all must be done to preserve its mission. This was an argument I also heard during the Vietnam War. To the natural inclination to protect the organization was added, as the horrors of Nazism became clear, fear. Fear for one’s self and one’s family. Survival meant acquiescence and compliance.
These motivations are common in times of crisis, as people of faith have been confronted with corruption, evil and terror. They were certainly true for my relatives in Russia under Stalin. They were present in South Africa under apartheid.
In the church I grew up in, there was a tendency to see ourselves as targets of future persecution. I was taught that in the Latter Days–meaning the period before the return of Christ–we would be persecuted for our beliefs, particularly our keeping of the Sabbath. Indeed, Satanic forces, combined with Apostate Christianity, would seek our destruction. This would be our Time of Trouble. Only through obedience to God’s law and the sanctification of our souls could we hope to be saved. The great irony during World War II was that while Adventists were fearing their own Time of Trouble, millions were being slaughtered in death camps, and millions more perishing from bullets, bombs disease and hunger.
This is not in any way to dismiss the fears of those who chose complicity rather than resistance to the Nazi state. To stand up against Hitler’s “positive Christianity, could mean banishment, imprisonment or death. We cannot overlook the fate of 1,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were shot or perished in concentration camps for refusing to give the Nazi salute or serve in the army.
Yet I cannot but wonder what would have happened if Adventists, along with Protestants and Catholics throughout Germany, had taken a stand early on against Nazi policies. In short, what if Christians had identified not with the forces of repressive power, but with the vulnerable–the Jews, the disabled, the undesirables–or in Christ’s words, “the least of these, my brethren”?
What can we learn from the past? What lessons can we apply to the challenges we face, including the 2024 elections in the United States? With whom will we choose to align? For whom will we vote?
Ben Jacques Stories 