Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany

While Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government was persecuting Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses and driving forty-two small German religious sects underground, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to practice unhindered. How some fourteen thousand Mormons not only survived but thrived in Nazi Germany is a story little known, rarely told, and occasionally rewritten within the confines of the Church's history--for good reason, as we see in David Conley Nelson's Moroni and the Swastika. A page-turning historical narrative, this book is the first full account of how Mormons avoided Nazi persecution through skilled collaboration with Hitler's regime, and then eschewed postwar shame by constructing an alternative history of wartime suffering and resistance.

The Twelfth Article of Faith and parts of the 134th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants function as Mormonism's equivalent of the biblical admonition to "render unto Caesar," a charge to cooperate with civil government, no matter how onerous doing so may be. Resurrecting this often-violated doctrinal edict, ecclesiastical leaders at the time developed a strategy that protected Mormons within Nazi Germany. Furthermore, as Nelson shows, many Mormon officials strove to fit into the Third Reich by exploiting commonalities with the Nazi state. German Mormons emphasized a mutual interest in genealogy and a passion for sports. They sent husbands into the Wehrmacht and sons into the Hitler Youth, and they prayed for a German victory when the war began. They also purged Jewish references from hymnals, lesson plans, and liturgical practices. One American mission president even wrote an article for the official Nazi Party newspaper, extolling parallels between Utah Mormon and German Nazi society. Nelson documents this collaboration, as well as subsequent efforts to suppress it by fashioning a new collective memory of ordinary German Mormons' courage and travails during the war.

Recovering this inconvenient past, Moroni and the Swastika restores a complex and difficult chapter to the history of Nazi Germany and the Mormon Church in the twentieth century--and offers new insight into the construction of historical truth.

Author: David C. Nelson
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 10/31/2019
Pages: 434
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.50lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780806146683


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/16/2015
New York Review of Books 05/07/2015 pg. 29
Choice 08/01/2015

About the Author
Nelson, David Conley: - David Conley Nelson holds a Ph.D. in history from Texas A&M University. He served six years as an officer in the United States Marine Corps and is now an independent researcher and commercial airline captain. He is the author of Moroni and the Swastika: Mormons in Nazi Germany.