The Constructed Mennonite - History, Memory, and the Second World War

by Hans Werner

  The reduced travel costs if a potential immigrant, or PI as they came to be labelled in the documents, was given IRO status meant that it became the preferred method of processing. If that was unsuccessful, the MCC and other religious organizations such as Lutheran World Relief and Baptist World Alliance used the CCCRR, an organization they had created specifically for the purpose of bringing to Canada ethnic Germans who were outside the IRO’s mandate.

  The form that the MCC required Johann to fill out when he applied to emigrate reveals a lot about who he considered himself to be. Under the section on religion and church affiliation, he indicated that he was not baptized but belonged to the Kirchengemeinde rather than the Mennonite Brethren Church. He indicated that he did not regularly attend a Mennonite church but believed himself to be Mennonite because his parents had been Mennonite. He thought, however, that it would be possible for him to attend a Mennonite church regularly. He indicated that he had a job and earned a salary of 180 DM per month but was unhappy with his housing arrangements. A curiously worded question asked if he was prepared to emigrate at all costs, to which he replied he was because “of fear of the Communists” and gave as a second reason the fact that he had a sister in Canada. He indicated that he had been accepted by the IRO at Nellingen. The questionnaire again hinted at untold stories about his relationships. He reported his marital status as single, not divorced, and with no children born out of wedlock. He indicated, however, that he was engaged but prepared to emigrate even if his fiancée could not.

  Surprisingly Johann denied having become a German citizen.14 In difficult cases, the MCC asked potential emigrants to make a statement that included a biography and specifically addressed concerns that had arisen in their processing. The “story” that Johann told after being rejected by the Combined Travel Board was a version of the events of his stay in the Warthegau during the interlude between his service in the armies of Stalin and Hitler.

  I, Johann Werner, was born on January 6, 1917, in Markow, Siberia. I attended elementary school for seven years and did farm work until 1939.

  In 1939, I was drafted into the Russian Army. In June 1941, I was taken a prisoner of war by the Germans in Grodnau [sic], Poland.

  The German officers frequently came into our camp to persuade the POWs to volunteer for the German Army. However, I was sick of war and did not volunteer. I was kept a prisoner of war by the Germans until October 1944, when I was released to be drafted against my will into the German Army, at Angerab [sic], East Prussia.

  I was drafted into the 401st motorized artillery division. When the Russians overtook our division near Berlin, I fled and was taken a prisoner of war by the Americans on April 11, 1945, near Dortmund, Germany. I was imprisoned in France until my release in August 1946.

  I have been recently informed that I was naturalized as a German citizen in October 1942. This was news to me! At that time, I was being held as a prisoner of war by the Germans. I never made a request to be naturalized. Neither do I recall ever having completed any documents that might have been the request for naturalization—as such things were sometimes [done] by the Germans without our knowledge. Other POWs received naturalization certificates, but I never received such a document.

  Signed Johann Werner15

  Stories are told for different purposes and for different audiences. There are significant elements of this version of my father’s biography that are clearly fabrications to try to gain permission to emigrate, not uncommon for men with “spoilt” biographies in the disrupted world of war-torn Europe. As historian Ted Regehr concludes, the cherished Mennonite values of truth and honesty “may appear differently to people in complex, difficult and morally ambiguous situations.”16 The MCC struggled constantly with the problem of people whom it considered co-religionists who had not been entirely honest and whom, for humanitarian reasons, it was trying to help escape from the grip of Stalin. In one memo, the director of the Gronau MCC office, Siegfried Janzen, detailed a number of difficult cases to his counterpart in Fallingbostel. Janzen noted that one prospective emigrant was asked three times if he had been in the army. The candidate lied each time until the official examined him for the telltale tattoo of SS members. When the blood mark tattoo was found, he confessed to having been not only in the army but also in the Waffen SS. In his concluding remarks, Janzen noted that, before sending this particular group of candidates to Fallingbostel, he had touched on “the matter of truthfulness” in his conversations with them.17

  The CCCRR was also unable to get Johann’s application to emigrate approved, and on 5 July 1949 Johann was transferred to the MCC’s main camp at Gronau near the Dutch border in northern Germany. Things continued to go wrong. On 23 July, the IRO suspended processing of all Mennonite applicants because it had determined that many of them were German citizens and had served in the German Army. The IRO had discovered that many Mennonites, certainly Johann was a prime example, had become citizens as early as 1942 and in that sense failed one of the IRO’s tests: namely, that no one who had “voluntarily assisted the enemy forces since the outbreak of the second world war in their operations against the United Nations” was eligible for IRO assistance.18 In September, the IRO formally advised Johann that he had been rejected. 19 He continued to languish in the Gronau MCC camp while the MCC marshalled all its diplomatic and political resources to try to lift the IRO ban. According to one of my father’s stories, his position became further complicated when Johann appeared at an interview just after three of his friends had appeared before officials. All three had been in the SS and had lied to the examining official. When Johann arrived, he was asked if he had also been in the SS. When he denied any involvement with it, the official accused him of lying like the others, even though he did not find the blood mark tattoo under his arm. His application was rejected.20

  The prospect of emigrating to Canada faded away. Wading through the many documents of his attempted emigration leads one to conclude that the main obstacle preventing entry into Canada was that Johann had become a German citizen in 1942. Although the IRO ultimately considered the naturalization of Mennonites who had arrived in occupied Poland as refugees in 1943 as having come under duress, Johann’s naturalization and subsequent service in the Wehrmacht were viewed as voluntary and Johann as an enemy German.

  Even while his emigration attempt was failing, there were other new beginnings. While Johann was in Gronau, he met Margarethe Vogt, a Mennonite refugee from Ukraine. As she said later, she had heard Johann Werner being called over the public address system in the Gronau refugee camp and commented to others that the name seemed unusual and could not be Mennonite. My father recalled that they had agreed to go on a date, but because she had not wanted to start rumours they had agreed to meet away from prying eyes. He did not recognize her at the appointed spot because she was now dressed up, while she recalled thinking that he had stood her up.21 Johann also formally joined the Mennonite church. Although my father never told any stories about this aspect of his re-entry into Mennonite life after the war, it seems he felt the need for a faith and an ethnic community. A distinctive feature of Mennonite faith practice is adult baptism, usually preceded by a period of study and instruction and, in the postwar context, a personal interview to determine whether the intent to join the faith was genuine or merely an attempt to be affiliated with a group that might help a person desperate to emigrate. A photo of the group that my father was baptized with and a certificate that he kept were the only evidence of this part of his story.

  While in Gronau, Johann also began to work outside the camp as a welder at the Empf van Delden textile factories. However, when the MCC was preparing to close the Gronau camp in 1950, and with seemingly no prospect of emigration, Johann moved out of the camp to the town of Neuwied along the Rhine River. On 22 September 1950, he began work as a rolling mill worker at the Eisen und Hüttenwerke, a metal-working concern in Neuwied.22 There he and some friends, most of them also former Mennonite soldiers, shared accommodation
s in a building on Kirchstrasse. Some were the SS friends who had caused him trouble during their processing.

  Meanwhile the relationship between Johann and Margarethe Vogt blossomed. She and her parents, who also could not emigrate, had moved to Walgenbach, a small village about fifty kilometres from Neuwied. On weekends, Johann travelled to visit her, at first by bicycle and then on a BMW motorcycle he had bought. Together they made trips into the countryside on motorcycle, visited parks, and went on outings with friends.

  Although emigrating was becoming less of a priority, Johann’s budding relationship with Margarethe complicated that question considerably. Her half-sister had left for Canada in 1949, while her elderly parents, who also wanted to emigrate, were experiencing considerable difficulty acquiring permission to join her. But there were also developments in Canadian immigration regulations that offered new potential for Johann to emigrate. In March 1950, the Canadian government allowed the entry of German nationals if they were prepared to work on farms, and in September 1950 the restriction on admission for those who had served in the German military was lifted. By the fall of 1950, the impediments to Johann’s emigration had been removed, and the MCC contacted Johann about whether he still wanted to emigrate to Canada. In a November 1950 letter, the MCC noted that it had now been a year since he had been refused admission to Canada because of his German citizenship and advised him that “naturalization is now no longer a hindrance for going to Canada.” He never responded, apparently because his desire to emigrate was now hopelessly intertwined with Margarethe’s family and their prospects for emigration.23 By August 1951, the relationship had evolved into a marriage commitment. They married on 24 September 1951 in a simple ceremony in Backnang. Gerhard Fast, a Mennonite pastor who had known Margarethe since the end of the war, officiated.

  Johann Werner (centre, third row) together with other candidates on the occasion of his baptism in postwar Germany.

  My father’s recovery from the war was reflected in the nature of his stories. The dramatic events that had been so prominent in his earlier stories were now limited to being in the gallery at the Nuremberg trials. Most of his stories lacked the kind of detail that my father remembered so vividly in his war stories. Re-entry into the everyday must have involved considerable emotional and psychological reorientation, but emotions were not typically expressed in his stories and did not appear here either. Most details of the complicated process of obtaining permission to emigrate could only be gleaned from a careful reading of documentary records. For both emigration and courting purposes, his stories had to be narrated in new ways. As his short biography for the MCC indicates, some of his past did not fit with these requirements, and a new narrative emerged, if only temporarily.

  11

  Margarethe (Sara) Vogt (Letkeman)

  Margarethe Vogt, who would become my mother, had her own stories to tell. They offer another perspective on many of the events that my father lived through: famine, collectivization, war, and the loss of home and family. Her experience was that of a refugee, not an initiator of military actions but the recipient of the trauma they inflicted. She told her stories from the point of view of a daughter, young woman, and mother. They were more emotional, never neutral in tone, and frequently imbued with a sharper sense of the contest of values into which circumstances thrust her. At about the same time as I interviewed my father, I also interviewed her. He was present for these interviews, which necessarily coloured how she told her stories.

  Little Sara Letkeman, who eventually became Margarethe and Johann’s wife, was born on 13 August 1921 at the height of a famine brought on by the revolution and civil war that created the Soviet state and at the time the Werner family was almost wiped out by a cholera epidemic in Siberia. She was born in Osterwick in the heart of the Mennonite Chortitza colony beside the Dnieper River, near the present-day Ukrainian city of Zaporozhye. Her parents were Jacob and Katharina Letkeman. Her father’s marriage to Katharina was his first, but for her mother it was a second marriage after the death of her first husband, a man with the surname Dyck. It meant that Sara had a half-sister, Katharina Dyck, who was seven years her senior, and when she was three and a half years old a brother, Jacob, was born. Her father was fifty when she was born; her mother was thirty-seven. The small farm they had was a shared enterprise between Jacob Letkeman and his brother Peter, and, while not the poorest in the village, they were hardly wealthy by pre-revolution Mennonite standards.

  The family survived the 1921 famine because they took dishes that Sara’s mother had inherited to the city to sell them to buy grain. Against all odds, the baby Sara survived. In contrast to my father, my mother grew up in a home that secretly but steadfastly maintained its Mennonite faith despite the constant pressure of the communist state. Sara was eight when collectivization came to Osterwick. She remembered how hard it was for her father to give up everything he had worked for. In contrast to my father’s stories, my mother dwelt more on how she felt. She recalled, for instance, the intense tension that came with the communist-inspired “Pioneer” movement for younger children:

  It was difficult. In school, you were told that you had to become a “Pioneer,” the others were all going to be “Pioneers.” Our parents said that this was not according to the teachings of the Bible and that we shouldn’t do it: “We believe, and we pray, but don’t say this, don’t tell them this.” It was—it was so [hard] not being able to say that your parents didn’t let you. Well, I didn’t want to either, but always putting yourself in that position: “I don’t want to.” At home, every day they said, “Don’t become a Pioneer”; in school, “Yes, become a Pioneer!”1

  Sara was called into the office and promised that she would get to wear new clothes if she joined the Pioneers and wear the characteristic red scarf, but the influence of her family kept her from joining.

  Her aunt Greta, who lived with them, was a powerful influence on young Sara. Greta continued to read Bible stories to her and her brother Jacob even though it was expressly forbidden by the state. My mother attributed her being able to remain true to the faith to her aunt. As she told the story, “It had a big influence on you if, day after day, they try to prove to you [that there is no God], not only tell you, but prove it to you. Then I would go home, and a big dog would come, and I would pray, or the boys in school would want to hit me, and then they would let me go, and I would think, ‘Oh, yes, there is a God.’” 2

  Although Sara had been born during a famine, the 1933 Ukrainian famine was seared into her memory. She was twelve, and there was no food. The family sat around the kitchen table sorting through spilled and cracked grain that had been saved for the pigeons in order to find a few kernels of grain or beans to make soup. Even those few kernels were taken away when the authorities swept the attic of the barn. Sara was sick. There was hardly any food, and she seemingly could not eat what little there was. In school, the children were given a kind of porridge soup, but when she caught a whiff of it she became nauseous and had to leave the room to avoid retching. At home, she could not eat, and all day she sat “hunched up somewhere in a corner, the entire summer.” As soon as she awoke in the morning, she sat down in the corner with her knees pulled up against her stomach; it was the only way she felt comfortable. She salivated constantly, “pails full, wherever I sat, such a pool, just saliva.”3

  Sara survived the famine, which abated in 1934. Gradually the kolkhoz began to take hold; the state relented somewhat in its grain procurements, and the Mennonite farmers resigned themselves to making the farm work. Sara began to work on the collective farm even before she finished school, and in 1935 or 1936 she became a full-time collective farm worker. About the same time, her half-sister Tina married Julius Vogt, and her leaving the household to establish a separate household meant one kolkhoz worker’s earnings were lost to the family. Sara was working full time by then, and 1936 proved to be the best year ever; the amount per trudanye paid out to the workers never reached the same level again. There were
further disruptions during the purges of the 1930s, and, while they affected some in the village who had been considered kulaks, the Letkeman family survived the late 1930s relatively unscathed. Sara’s mother’s family, the Woelkes, had been wealthy, and many relatives on that side of the family suffered exile.

  On the eve of the Second World War, Sara was an eighteen-year-old collective farm worker. The beginning of the war in September 1939 was not really that noticeable in the collective farm along the Dnieper River. The secret Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, which pledged non-aggression between Stalin and Hitler, meant that the war going on in Europe was not really noted by Sara. Her mother, however, was very interested in politics and a regular reader of the German newspaper Das Neue Dorf. As my mother said, she could read not only what was printed on the page but also what was not said between the lines of this communist newspaper. A few of their Russian neighbours were drafted into the army to serve in the Finnish Winter War in 1939–40, but no one from their village was called up. The rhythms of the collective farm remained, and summers meant long days and weeks without a day of rest. That was also the case in the summer of 1941, when Sara and other collective farm workers had worked for weeks without a break. Sunday, 22 June, was the first day in a long time they had a break. It was not really a day of rest since there were laundry and other chores to be done. Sometime during the day, Sara’s brother Jacob came to tell them that Germany had attacked the Soviet Union. The whole village was excited, and everyone worried about the implications of being a German-speaking minority in a country that had now been attacked by Germany.