Nelson’s contrast of Mormon collaborationism over and against other sects’ doing “only what was necessary to survive” (98) represents a gross distortion of King’s research (who nevertheless provides a back-cover blurb for Moroni and the Swastika). In reading King, one discovers not Mormon uniqueness but rather a broad similarity in attempts at compromise and accommodation among all sects, with the important exception of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who chose the path of resistance and suffered mightily for it. After Hitler came to power in 1933, “All sought to explain and justify themselves to the Nazis, even the Witnesses, and all hoped that their expressions of good will could save them from trouble.” The four sects that avoided conflict with the government all emphasized that their members were law-abiding citizens and sought to point out areas of shared belief. While Nelson is indignant over the removal of Jewish terminology from Mormon devotional material, all the sects did so in accordance with Nazi policy; King finds that the Mormons were no better or worse than the others in their treatment of Jews. All the sects refrained from criticizing Nazi policies, and members of each sect made positive statements about the Nazi government to their co-religionists abroad. All the sects, but particularly the Mormons and Christian Scientists, benefitted from international visitors who demonstrated the sect’s political influence. The survival strategies of each sect took particular forms: “Mormons continued to forge cultural links with the government, Adventists offered increased co-operation in the state charity and welfare schemes, and the New Apostolic Church organized church parades to incorporate the S.S. and S.A. uniforms and flags.” Nelson’s silence regarding the New Apostolic Church is telling; in King’s view, the New Apostolic Church was the most emphatic supporter of Nazism among the sects, but Nelson avoids any mention of it. In her conclusions about the five sects, King writes, “For all of them, the survival of their movement was of paramount importance. For all of them there were costs attached to their choice.”

. . .

The substance of Nelson’s first argument in Moroni and the Swastika, namely that comparison with other sects shows that Mormon attempts to secure good relations with the Nazi state went beyond the needs of survival, therefore rests on a dramatic misrepresentation of its only source of comparative evidence. Not only did the other sects undertake similar steps, but the personal and irrational nature of the outcome made it impossible to know when the efforts had been sufficient. Like King before him, Nelson is unable to document the reasoning behind the Nazi regime’s indifference toward the Church. From the perspective of the present, many of the steps taken between 1933 and 1939 by various mission presidents and Church leaders to secure the good graces of Nazi leaders seem clumsy or even appalling, but one of them, or some set of them, or all of them combined made it possible for the Church to avoid most Nazi interference. Nelson is able to claim that Mormons in Nazi Germany did not live in a climate of fear, only by minimizing the several incidents of friction with the government that did occur, downplaying the effectiveness of the Gestapo, and entirely ignoring the statement made by a Gestapo officer to Hamburg district president Otto Berndt following his three-day interrogation: “When we have this war behind us, when we have the time to devote to it and after we have eliminated the Jews, you Mormons are next!” Nelson asserts that Mormon accommodation of the Nazi government rested on ideological similarities between the two, but a broader and more balanced study would very likely find that the Church consistently pursued a strategy of political neutrality and good relations with governments of all kinds throughout the twentieth century as the modern Church stepped onto an international stage.

. . .

Speculation, invented motives, and confident interpretations of silence appear in Moroni and the Swastika with disconcerting regularity. . . . What finally pushes Moroni and the Swastika out of the scholarly mainstream and into the realm of polemic, however, is its willingness to indulge in sensationalistic language, up to and including the equation of Mormonism with Nazism.

. . .

In the Mormon response to National Socialism, there is a great deal that deserves careful consideration and due analysis, as the issues raised at the time are still highly relevant to a church that aspires to political neutrality even as its teachings and policies have political implications that play out differently in every country in the world. While the case of Nazi Germany is unique, it will not be the only time that the Church will have to determine the correct strategy for engaging with a totalitarian or persecuting regime. Moroni and the Swastika is not the book upon which to base a reconsideration of Mormon dealings with government powers, however. Its treatment of its sources is too unreliable, its attribution of motives is too fanciful, and its aim is too firmly directed toward condemnation without understanding.