White supremacy in genealogy: Mormons, Jews, Nazis, Hitler, and Hübener: part 7

Mormons, Jews, and Nazis

Collage featuring the Mesa AZ baptismal room (a Lamanite temple). In the baptismal font stand a group of Jews inside of a concentration camp, Hitler with his head bowed, and Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist. Helmuth Hübener looks in through both entrances.

Mormons vicariously baptized about 650,000 Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

They’ve also baptized Hitler and other famous Nazis. 

“Holocaust victims (were killed because) they were Jews. Now [this church] is basically killing them again by eliminating their Jewishness.”
- director of the Anti-Defamation League.

For some Jews it's a reminder of when their People were given the choice to be baptized or be killed. 

In 1995, this church agreed to remove 380,000 names of Jews murdered in the Holocaust from their baptismal records and stop this practice. They got caught baptizing Jews killed in the holocaust again in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2012, & 2017.

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Unfortunately the worst part of this story isn't that Mormons wouldn't stop baptizing dead Jews after repeatedly being asked to, but how Mormons end up with the genealogy records of Holocaust victims in the first place. 

In Pre-Nazi Germany, Germans kept their records closed from Mormons so that their ancestors didn't get converted in their deaths. But when Nazis began forcing folks to prove their “Aryan blood” the records were opened. And Mormons took "advantage of the... unusual opportunity.”

Through their genealogy work in Nazi Germany this church helped Hitler identify Jews. Then Mormons did posthumous temple work for these same people against their living-relatives’ wishes.

A 1933 Deseret News article published in the church section praised this "unusual opportunity" as well as many of the programs and practices of Hitler and his Nazi party. Most of the praised programs were things this church shared with the Nazis, like "Fast Sundays", the abstinence guidelines of the Word of Wisdom, and a general focus on making “capable bodies and clear brains … trained like athletes.”

Heber J. Grant visiting Nazi Mormons in Nazi Germany in 1937

In 1937, under a Nazi flag, Prophet Grant instructed German Mormons to ““Stay here. Keep the Commandments…We want to keep the Church intact and the missionaries working.”

President J. Reuben Clark as a missionary in Nazi Germany handed out the antisemitic hoax pamphlet, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." He continued to do so well after WWII in Germany and the U.S. 

​Clark, as a member of the First Presidency and former Under Secretary of State & ambassador to Mexico, worked with this church and the U.S. government to block ethnically Jewish persons from migrating to the US, even Jewish Mormons.

​Clark is a xenophobe and US nationalist, as is evident in his 1898 University of Utah valedictorian speech which was “filled with anti-immigrant sentiment.”

Read David Conley Nelson's book Moroni and the Swastika 
or his dissertation The Mormons in Nazi Germany 
​for more.

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Hitler and Hübener

Collage featuring a Mormon temple sealing room with Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, kneeling at the alter. Helmuth Hübener glares in through the window and a mirror.

In 1993 in the Jordan River Utah temple (named after the Jordan river in Palestine) Adolf Hilter and Eva Braun were sealed together for time and all eternity. But this church doesn’t want you to know that. 

In 1998, Don McAreavy asked FamilySearch (this church genealogy arm) if any temple work had been done for Hilter. Seven months and several emails later FamilySearch finally lied and said no. 
They also attempted to scrub these records from their index.

But Mormon Baptism researcher Helen Radkey found these records anyway and wrote about it: “The Mormon Church Attempts to Conceal Temple Records for Adolf Hitler”.

This church hid their relationships with Hitler and continued/s to baptize Jews Hitler massacred against the wishes of their living relatives. 

And even though Mormon helped train the 1936 Nazi Olympics basketball team, there is one Mormon famous for resisting the Nazi party: Helmuth Hübener.

Helmuth Hübener mug shots from the day he was executed by Nazis. Helmuth was youngest resistance fighter executed by Nazi Germany. He'd just turned 17 when he was beheaded at Plötzensee Prison.

"German boys! Do you know the country without freedom, the country of terror and tyranny? … Yes you are right; it is Germany – Hitler Germany! Through their unscrupulous terror tactics against young and old, men and women, they have succeeded in making you spineless puppets to do their bidding."
- anti-Nazi pamphelt written & distrubed by Helmuth Hübener

Helmuth Hübener was a Mormon German boy who was beheaded in 1942 for his opposition to the Nazi regime.

When President Grant visited the Nazi Mormons in 1937, he encouraged members to fall in line with the Nazis in order "to keep the church intact." Because of this Prophet's words, Helmuth was seen as a troublemaker by most in his congregation. His Nazi Mormon Branch President even excommunicated Helmuth after his arrest, though he did so without the consent of the First Presidency.
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About 30 years after his execution Brigham Young University's theater department put on play about Helmuth. Apostle and furture Prophet Thomas S. Monson went to see it, but according to witnesses, he didn’t seem to like it . Two days later BYU President Dallin H. Oaks canceled the play. At this same time, (1970s) President Oaks was also spying on and torturing gay BYU students, mostly within the theater department. 

Helmuth Hübener, flanked by his friends and accomplices Rudolf "Rudi" Wobbe (left) and Karl-Heinz Schnibbe (right)

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White supremacy in genealogy

Part 1 is about how Mormonism foundationally used genealogy to reify its white-supremacist doctrines which teach that Euro-Mormons—as the keepers of the keys of THE “One True Church,” and descendants of Ephraim’s tribe of Israel—are God’s Chosen Race and People.

Part 2 is about how this shows up in Mormon temple work, eternal families, & genealogy.

Part 3 is on the classist, femicidal violences of Mormon doctrine on Eternal Families, Polygyny, and Godhood.

Part 4 shares my personal experience with using genealogy in an anti-racist way.

Part 5 is on the ways antisemitism and anti-Indigeneity overlap in Mormonism 

Part 6  builds on part 5 through a critical analysis of the art and history in the Manti temple and it's grounds.

Part 7 addresses the Baptisms for the Dead that Mormons did for Jews killed in the Holocaust  along with Hitler and other Nazis.

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