Despite my bad experiences in the Hitler Youth and my father's fine antifascist example, I doubt that I would have become an active member of a resistance movement if I had not known Helmuth Huebener. Not that I would have despised the Nazis less—but I may not have hit upon a particular plan of action like the one Helmuth had in mind. On the other hand, it may have been partially due to my intense dislike of the Nazis that Helmuth was himself moved further toward antifascism; I don't know. I think we influenced each other. I know that I told Helmuth about an experience I had in 1938 which left me totally shocked and horrified.

I was an apprentice by that time, painting and decorating homes in the rich sections of Hamburg, where many Jewish people lived. They were very kind to me, and I occasionally got into political discussions with them. I remember one Jewish lady in particular, Frau Doktor Frank, who told me that she thought the Jews were in no real danger. They were German citizens, after all, and some were veterans of World War I, and they were important people with friends in high places, and so forth.

But one day, on the way home from work, I saw some SS and SA officers loading a group of Jewish people onto a truck. They must have been some of the relatively few Orthodox Jews in Germany, for the men wore dark hats and coats and looked like rabbis. This was not long before the infamous "Crystal Night" in November, 1938, when synagogues were burned and Jewish places of business were vandalized (the broken glass on the streets gave the night its name). Here, too, a rather large crowd of curious citizens–perhaps a hundred or so–had gathered, some laughing and applauding the SS and SA.

. . .

We were, as I've said, friends from the St. Georg Branch. Because the Church kept us involved, almost all of my friends were other Latter-day Saints. My really close friends, however, were Helmuth Huebener and then Rudi Wobbe. They're the ones who often came to my house; and they're the ones with whom I went swimming or to the movies.

Helmuth was, simply stated, the smartest one in the group. He had tremendous talent. He could grab a pencil and whip out caricatures of Churchill and Hitler that were absolutely brilliant. And he was a natural leader—he got along well with people and everyone liked him.

. . .

He was very widely read and he loved to discuss things with me and Rudi and with adult members of the Church, as well as with people at his place of employment.

A few of the adult members at church remember him a being a bit arrogant, but I think it was because they resented—as any adult German at the time would have—the idea of a young person asking them difficult questions and pointing out flaws in their logic. Especially in political matters, where our Church members tended to be a bit naive, Helmuth enjoyed engaging adults in discussions, and picking their arguments apart if they were wrong. He enjoyed showing off his intellectual and debating abilities. But his intention was never to embarrass people. He only wanted to make them more careful about what they said to make them back up their opinions more rigorously with logic and evidence. In our Sunday School, priesthood and MIA classes, Helmuth was the one who knew the answers. He had studied the gospel and he knew it very well for a person of his age.

We talked about the Nazi party and about Communism and the revolution.

. . .

Naturally our increasingly sour attitude toward the Nazis and Helmuth's outspoken political discussions with Church members did not find favor with everyone. Some of the branch members came through as Nazi sympathizers. It was even suggested that we start our meetings with the Hitler salute and sing the national anthem. Also that someone bring a radio so that the branch members could listen to Hitler's Sunday radio broadcasts together, with the door locked so that no one could leave during the speech. All these things were opposed, however, by people like my dad and Otto Berndt, who was a counsellor in the branch presidency at the time and who would eventually be the district president. "Don't you start that," Berndt said in response to such suggestions. "This is a church of God, not a political meeting." For the most part his view prevailed, but some time before the war a sign went up on the meetinghouse reading Jews Not Allowed to Enter.

. . .

Even after the war started in 1939, and as late as 1941 I observed that many members of our branch supported the regime, albeit somewhat nervously. "Well, we are fighting against Communism," they would say, "and we have to support the powers that be, as the twelfth article of faith says. And besides, our boys are out there on the battlefield." But at the end of 1941, when the United States came into the war after Pearl Harbor, many of the German Saints began to predict the defeat of Germany because of the Book of Mormon prophecies concerning the fate of those "gentile nations" which fight against "Zion." And after Stalingrad an other major defeats, this pessimistic attitude among the Latter-day Saints became even more prevalent.

I do not wish to leave the impression that any of the Saints were evil people. They were not. Caught up in the dilemmas of the day, they perhaps became confused on the issues, but basically they were good people. And we had a fine branch.

. . .

And then there was Heinrich Worbs. He was a Latter-day Saint from St. Georg who'd been sent to the concentration camp at Neuengamme for making a disparaging remark about a statue in honor of "another Nazi butcher." We knew he had been arrested, even when we started our campaign in the summer of 1941, but sometime in December of 1941 or January of 1942, he returned, a ruined man.

. . .

There was also the case of Brother Salomon Schwarz, a Latter~day Saint, in Hamburg who looked Jewish and was generally held to be a Jew, even though he did not descend from known Jewish ancestors and had been raised a Protestant. He was partially to discourage his visits to the branch at St. Georg that the sign reading Jews Not Allowed to Enter went up. Salomon was welcomed at the Barmbek Branch. However, when he tried to get a certificate proving he was not Jewish, he was arrested by the Gestapo (for not wearing the yellow Star of David with the word 'Jude"written on it in black) and placed in the ghetto in the Grindel area of Hamburg. He eventually disappeared. He probably died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

. . .

As I have learned since, the Volksgerichtshwofa was not the only body sitting in judgment upon us. Ten days or so after Helmuth's arrest, by local leader action the word' Excommunicated was written on Helmuth's membership record. There is no evidence that a Church court was officially convened to consider the matter.

Perhaps it was felt that our arrests posed a danger to the Church that required the action taken, and maybe that was so. But I confess that that seemed unlikely to me as a exclusive motivation in view of the feelings I had seen exhibited favorable to Nazism.

For all that, I realize that by any stretch of imagination it must have been a tense time for the branch, and I certainly wish to extend to inexperienced local Church leaders working under such extreme circumstances all possible benefits of any doubt. We were the ones, after all, who had placed the other members in peril. If they can forgive us, we certainly can forgive them.

After the war, Otto Berndt. (who had had no part in the negative action) made sure that Helmuth's "excommunication" was corrected. He and the new mission president, Max Zimmer, wrote "excommunication done by mistake" on Helmuth's membership record, dated it November 11, 1946, and signed it. Later Max Zimmer's successor, Jean Wunderlich, notified the Brethren in Salt Lake of the affair, and a similar notation was placed on the Church's copy of Helmuth's record. One injustice, at least, had been corrected.

. . .

During the next eight hours he wrote three letters: one to his grandparents, one to his mother, and one to the Sommerfeldt family, in whose home he had been more of a son than a friend. After he was compelled to drink some wine in order to dull his senses, something which greatly offended his LDS sensibilities, he was accompanied by a Lutheran pastor the few steps to the room containing the guillotine. His sentence was again formally read; the ancient custom of breaking the staff and pronouncing the phrase, "Dein Leben ist verwirkt!" "Your life is null and void!" was duly carried out; and at 8:15 P.M. the guillotine snuffed out his young life and his brilliant mind. His body was given to the anatomical institute at the University of Berlin for use as a cadaver. His grave is unknown.