A Mennonite built & Run Nazi Concentration Camp ?
The small town of Stutthof Poland (West Prussia), was mostly known as a fertile farming region until 1939 . It was also the largest German speaking Mennonite conclave in the World up to that time .It was from here that they had spread into Russia well over a century before. By 1935 the colonies in Russia had all been dissipated by Stalin’s purges ,while the Polish Mennonite colonies were in their zenith.
Names like Loewen, Peters ,Shraader , Riemer , Wiebe , Klassen,Wall, and Fehr proliferated in the region in the 1930′s . Not Polish names at all , but Mennonite ones.
In 1939 the Nazi Regime in Germany was looking around the newly overrun area to establish a ”Resettlement” camp. They chose Stutthof , in a rural secluded setting, on the edge of this oldest of Mennonite settings . The Mennonites mostly were opposed to it , but were promised lots of jobs , building it .
Today, The somewhat little-known Stutthof Extermination Camp site , is a memorial , to the at least 70 thousand peoples exterminated there that were registered ,and perhaps that many more that were not registered , but died there , many in the most brutal fashion imaginable . Until recently , the Memorial was not even written up in English . The gas chamber and the crematorium are still displayed there .
Only in the past 20+ years has the story evolved , from records lost in the ”cold war” . The meticulously kept German records are still there , in microfilm now , all the expenses paid out to local people , and all.
Mennonite contractors built almost all the buildings there ,with the supplied slave labor , Mennonite sawmills supplied much of the Lumber , And as the War continued to drain the German manpower pool , Several dozens of Mennonite Men , and a few Mennonite women appear to have joined the SS, as ethnic Germans, to be guards in the Stutthof region concentration camps. Some of them were as brutal as they come , and in the SS corps that was quite bad .
Stutthof is also known as a Nazi concentration camp where some bodies were rendered to make ”Pure Jewish soap” in neatly packaged and labled bars.(This is controversial among historians)
Local farmers , including Mennonites , hired squads of inmates to help with the harvests , paying the SS for that . Most , though not all Mennonites were kind to them , giving them food , and not working them too harshly. (As in making them work 12 hours a day , instead of just 8 hours).
Jews were the main target of the Camp Interments , also Gypsies ,captured English servicemen , and about anyone with a physical handicap. It is hard to imagine that kind of brutality taking place , especially that normally peaceful Mennonites sometimes joined in it .
When the Red Army liberated Stutthof Concentration camp in Jan. 1945 , it was the last one to be liberated . They found it almost empty , except for a hundred or so poor souls who had hid when the camp was evacuated by the SS. The last 4000 internees had been marched to the nearby sea , 2 miles away ,the week before , into the water, and all machine-gunned to death . There are allegations today that the local population helped herd this last ”March into the water”.
The Red Army had a rather unique method to deal with any SS solders they found in these situations anywhere close to the concentration camps . They were always executed on the spot . If anyone was found in the vicinity with any German Army connection , they were executed too . so it would not have been a good idea to even wear military shoes or overcoats , even if they were salvaged . They did immediately hang a number of guards they caught there in the vicinity , including several women SS guards.
The free Polish came in and conducted 3 sets of trials among which there were a number of local Mennonite men that had been involved as guards at that particular camp. One Fritz Peters , a Mennonite man , was tried and duly hung . The rest of the Mennonites on trail at that time got prison sentences , mostly in the 5 year range for their war crimes against humanity .It is believed that between 25-30 stood trial .
The MCC (Mennonite Central Committee) sent Plattdeutsch speaking representatives into that area to help displaced Mennonites the next year . They were able to help a number of them immigrate to Canada and to the USA , through their Menno-pass program , which sometimes bypassed regular channels .
In The Mid 1990′s Some of the World’s Nazi-hunting Organisations approached the MCC about accountability on who all they gave Menno-passes to in the late 1940′s . It is unfortunate that it appears that several War-Crime monsters posing as peaceful displaced Mennonites escaped through their perhaps inadvertent help .
They were especially irked that MCC had helped a Jacob Riemer , born 1918,to escape Europe with a Menno-pass . For 45 years he proclaimed his total and complete innocence , while living in New York State . In the early 90′s , after The Russians released all the records , enough evidence was found for the US government to strip him of US citizenship and to deport him back to Russia . In 2005 he had exhausted all his appeals , and was days away from being deported , when he died a natural death in the USA.
The very worst example of the ”Mennonite turns into a monster war criminal ” in the Stutthof area ,was of a rather meek natured farmer Named Heinrich Wiens. Born in 1906 , he signed up to be a member of the SS in the mid 30′s . In his application to join up with the special program to join the SS Guards , He noted that he was a ”Lover of God”.A rather risky thing to put down , one would think.
Perhaps he had a few reservations about the whole thing . Within a short while all reservations must have been swept away . Perhaps Wiens discovered he just loved brutalising and murdering helpless peoples. Over the next several years he graduated from being a guard to joining a mobile killing squad , the kind where a buses’ exhaust killed the occupants . He was promoted up the ranks until he commanded his own personal killing squad . He was directly responsible for many , many thousands of murders ,in the area and to the East .
He faded away and disappeared sometime in late 1944 , and was never heard of again ,anywhere . Not even by his family. The Russians and Americans kept a close look-out for him for several decades . It was not believed he had that much money that he could have escaped that way , he was more interested in killing helpless people then in money.
The conclusion most investigators have come to ,over the years ,is that he probably died in some muddy ditch in 1945 , rolled over by a Russian tank perhaps , and left to rot like the animal he had become . No one knows . Being born in 1906 , surely he has met his maker now.
Most Mennonite men, in Poland and Russia that joined the SS were never brought to justice , in this life. They were not military men , but almost always solely recruited to kill ”undesirables”. This is not the story that has been put forward by most writers since then , that seek to show the peaceful, blameless side of the Russian and Polish Mennonites during the war.
to be continued…
.
January 3rd, 2012 at 11:28 am
Wow, this is incredible history. Stutthof is only a few hours from where we’re teaching English close to Warsaw. Just curious, can you give me your documentation for this because this is amazing stuff!
January 3rd, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Hello , dear Nephew . Now why would one need documentation If we write it here ? Ha. Check The writings of professor Dr.( Gerhard Rempel,Mennonite quarterly review) .Well foot-noted, On Mennonites & the Holocaust , And others
We did not write nearly all of it , as there is even worse that was alleged to have been done , by Mennonites , including ”going along” by the Mennonite leaders. The local Poles and Mennonites possibly felt superior in many ways to the camp inmates , who were mostly from other places.
The Red Army’s quick and permanent justice included stringing up several women SS guards there. We wonder if there were any Mennonite women in that episode.
There is a ”Polish-Mennonite Friendship” crowd with an upbeat website,based in California , who are trying hard to influence history , showing only the purported peaceful side of things then and now,in that region, at that time. There are a lot of maps & information on their site , but no mention is made of atrocities by Mennonites there ,some of whom eventually paid the price , some didn’t …. But they know.They are from that area.