Dear Mormons, our history of worrying about 'impure blood' doesn't end well

Update 11/13/24: After this was published, the B. H. Roberts Foundation contacted me to say that it is in the process of translating and publishing a trove of documents related to Latter-day Saints in Nazi Germany, and that some of these documents challenge the idea that most LDS church members were accommodationists to the Nazi regime.

That archive can be accessed here and contains official reports regarding Nazi government surveillance of foreign religious groups, including Mormons. One report, for example, concerns a Latter-day Saint who was fired from his job and questioned by the police for refusing to offer a Nazi salute. I would recommend reading these primary sources as well as David Conley Nelson’s book referenced below for a fuller picture of the complexity of that era. The primary sources certainly demonstrate the pressures the church was under in Germany in the 1930s, with the government threatening to expel missionaries or disband the church throughout the country. — JKR

(RNS) — Last month, the Public Religion Research Institute released its annual American Values Survey, just in time for the presidential election. One finding in particular jumped out at me: Nearly a third of U.S. Latter-day Saints agree that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

PRRI likely added this question because President-elect Donald Trump used the phrase in his political campaign speeches at least once. “They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said in December 2023 at a rally in New Hampshire. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

This idea of undesirable people “poisoning” the blood of a nation dates back nearly a century to another populist leader, a guy by the name of Adolf Hitler, as President Biden pointed out in response to Trump’s comment.

The comparison is worth examining now that we are awaiting a second Trump administration. Many ordinary Germans who viewed themselves as good people — people who took casseroles to sick neighbors and attended church regularly — supported Hitler. Their votes weren’t enough for him to legitimately win an election; Hindenburg beat Hitler by nearly six million votes in 1932. [See note below] But the Nazi Party’s showing in that election led to Hitler being appointed as chancellor under Hindenburg, a position Hitler exploited to the point of illegally taking over Hindenburg’s presidency, dispensing with future elections and quashing political dissent. The Germans who supported Hitler early on did so because he promised an end to their economic woes and vowed to make their nation one the world would have to respect again.

Not coincidentally, he also gave them convenient scapegoats for all the things that were wrong with their country — Jews, Roma people, sexual minorities, people of color. Anyone with “impure” blood. Anyone who did not belong in his vision, anyone with “poison” in their veins.

The “selection” of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at the death camp Auschwitz-II (Birkenau), in Nazi-occupied Poland, in May/June 1944. Jewish arrivals were sent either to work or to the gas chamber. Photo from the Auschwitz Album/Creative Commons

Last winter, when I was in Germany, I visited the vast site of the Nazi Party Rally grounds outside the city of Nuremberg, where Nazi Party leaders were tried in the years after the war ended and sentenced for war crimes.

What I did not realize is that Nuremberg was strategically selected to be the site of those trials because the city had been such a stronghold of Nazism in the 1930s. The sprawling grounds and enormous stadia attest to that. This was where thousands of Nazis convened each summer for party rallies, Hitler Youth competitions and events, family camps and military parades.

It’s a chilling place to see, and remember.

It’s likely that there were eager Latter-day Saints at those rallies. According to historian David Conley Nelson, most German Mormons were accommodationists of the Hitler regime, to varying degrees. The one German Mormon we have chosen to remember is one who resisted: teenage martyr Helmuth Hübener, the youngest resistance fighter to be executed for opposing the Nazi regime. We love his story, the fact that he sacrificed everything to be on the right side of justice, living out the gospel with everything he had.

But the LDS Church in Germany did not support him; in fact, his Nazi branch president excommunicated him for standing up to Hitler.

Again: Most church members in Germany were accommodationists. In fact, two of the saddest episodes that emerge in Nelson’s historical research relate to how obsequiously German Latter-day Saints sought to make themselves useful to the Nazi regime by helping Nazis with two things Mormons were very good at: basketball and genealogy.

In 1935 and 1936, Mormon missionaries helped teach the German national team how to play basketball so they could compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the first to include basketball as a medal competition. They were apparently delighted to share their knowledge.

Throughout the 1930s, German church members employed their talents at genealogical research to assist fellow Germans in finding their ancestors — not for the usual reason of linking families together forever in the eternities, but for the much darker purpose of proving their Aryan ancestry. Germans living under Hitler’s regime had to demonstrate their “biological purity, free of ‘racial pollution’ or the ‘corrupting blood’ of Jews or others Hitler considered to be inferior,” Nelson writes. And Latter-day Saints, with their expertise in family history, were only too happy to help Germans verify their racial superiority.

Which brings us back to blood poisoning. I don’t think a majority of U.S. Latter-day Saints who voted for Trump this week did so because they were hoping to rid the nation of impure blood. Most likely did it because they believed Trump’s rhetoric about the economy.

But in doing so, they have nonetheless accommodated the other elements of Trump’s platform. That includes the scapegoating of immigrants, comparing them to animals (with animal and insect comparisons being step one in the dehumanization process necessary for their removal).

Our people are once again on the wrong side of justice, the wrong side of the gospel and the wrong side of history.

Note 11/27/24: This paragraph has been updated with additional context about the 1932 election, since the original column gave the impression that Hitler had won that election. He did not.

Related:

German Mormons: New book uncovers LDS support for the Third Reich