Helmuth Hübener was born in Hamburg on January 8, 1925, the illegitimate son of Anna Emma Guddat Kunkel and a man named Vater, her co-worker at the Hamburg Mint. Hübener’s mother had two sons, Hans and Gerhard, from a previous marriage to Johann Kunkel. Hübener also bore the Kunkel surname during his early life, although a few members of the Church in Hamburg preferred to call him Helmuth Guddat, from his mother’s maiden name. In 1940 Emma married a non-Mormon construction worker named Hugo Hübener. Hugo Hübener legally adopted Helmuth, thus giving him the name by which he is remembered today.

But Hübener did not live with his new stepfather for long. Gerhard, the younger of the two Kunkel boys, was strongly opposed to Nazism and detested his new stepfather, a Party member and a Rottenführer (file leader) in the local Storm Trooper battalion. This friction, and the fact that his mother worked long hours away from home, led Gerhard to move in with his maternal grandmother at 137 Louisenweg, a few blocks from the Hübener apartment at 42 Sachsenstrasse. When Gerhard left Hamburg early in 1941 to join the para-military Reichsarbeitdienst (National Work Corps), Helmuth moved to his grandmother’s house shortly thereafter and settled into Gerhard’s old room there.

All sources agree that Hübener was a gifted, intelligent student, who was promoted to the most accelerated course of studies soon after he entered school. His teachers reported that he especially loved history and geography, and that he showed an early interest in politics.

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Although Hübener apparently got along well with most people he met, his two closest friends were two young Latter-day Saints, Rudolf Gustav Wobbe and Karl-Heinz Schnibbe. The three had grown up together, taking the same Sunday School classes, the same Primary classes before Primary was banned, and joining the same Scout troop before Scouting, too, was banned in 1934. It was through his activities with Rudi and Karl in the St. Georg Branch that Hübener first began to notice the dark side of German life under Hitler. Like many Germans, Hübener initially welcomed the Nazis’ rise to power as a sign that Germany had recovered a sense of national purpose after the political chaos and economic collapse of the Weimar years. But this early enthusiasm faded as Hübener and his friends began to see the racism and brutality of National Socialism. All three of them, for instance, were disturbed when in 1938 a sign went up on the door of their branch meeting-house reading "JUDEN IST DER EINTRITT VERBOTEN!" (Jews not allowed to enter.) The boys realized that the sign had been put up by Branch President Arnold Zollner, known by members to be sympathetic to Nazism. Zollner apparently wanted to discourage visits by a Jewish convert, Salomon Schwartz, a member of the Barmbeck Branch, to the combined monthly priesthood meetings held at St. Georg. Hübener also had heard that Zollner had warned Schwartz--who eventually died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp--and his half-sister Marie to stay away from his branch.

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Hübener’s own title for "Leaflet w" was "The Voice of the Homeland." The Gestapo regarded this pamphlet as an "attempt to involve theological issues in behalf of the enemy’s seditious efforts." The pamphlet does indeed seem to show that Hübener saw his opposition to Nazism as a necessary consequence of his religious beliefs (see sidebar).

Hübener drew the inspiration for his pamphlet campaign from his own perception of the meaning of Mormonism, combined with a precocious interest in politics and a child-like faith in the eventual triumph of good over evil. All the evidence indicates that the boys were acting entirely on their own, with no guidance or assistance from any adult.

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Back in Hamburg Hübener’s arrest set off another chain of events. On the Sunday after the arrest, Karl, Rudi, Hübener’s mother, and grandmother all attended the St. Georg branch, where they heard Brother Friedrich Jakobi say: "I’m glad they caught him. If I’d known what he was doing, I’d have shot him myself.’’ The next Sunday, February 15th, President Zollner wrote "Excommunicated" on Hübener’s membership record. He did this with the apparent consent of Interim West German Mission President, Anton Huck, although there is no evidence that a Church court was convened. Nor is it clear that external threats to the survival of the Church necessitated the excommunication (At least one other branch president felt that Hübener’s actions created no immediate danger to the Church’s well-being.)

These events, however, can only be understood in the context of a tense, suspicion-filled situation. Gestapomen had been attending branch meetings, contributing to the long-standing fears of some members for the continued existence of the Church as well as for their very lives. Additionally, there were no American Church authorities available to whom the local German leaders could turn for counsel in this time of near-panic. Having had little previous experience in Church government, some now tended to see Hübener’s actions, not as the religious and patriotic idealism he claimed, but as an almost criminal disregard for Mormon doctrine.

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It wasn’t until well after the war when, on 11 November 1946, he and the new mission president, Max Zimmer, wrote "excommunication done by mistake" on Hübener’s membership record. Later, Zimmer’s successor, Jean Wunderlich, notified the Salt Lake leadership of the affair, and on 24 January, 1948, the First Presidency ordered a similar notation placed on the membership record. (Neither Schnibbe nor Wobbe suffered similar excommunications, although Schnibbe assumed during his more than six years of Nazi and then Russian imprisonment that he too had been cut off when he heard of Hübener’s fate.)

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Berndt was picked up for questioning and held for four days at Gestapo headquarters. As president of the Hamburg District, Berndt knew that the Gestapo’s judgment of him could affect every Church member in Germany. He prayed earnestly for guidance and, as he reports, the Lord supplied the right words throughout his four days of detention. Finally, at the end of that time, the Gestapo apparently satisfied, he was released. Although Berndt remembers nothing he said or did during those four days, he does vividly recall his release, when a Gestapo officer accompanied him from his cell to the exit. "Make no mistake about it, Berndt," the man told him. "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!" The statement brought home to Berndt an idea often forgotten or misunderstood: the jealously religious nature of National Socialism, and its ultimate intentions toward competing religious systems. Thereafter, when Church members hoped for victory in the war, Berndt would reply: "You be grateful to God that we will not win it."

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But the German Saints had other reasons for viewing Hübener as a traitor. For decades they had been stigmatized as members of an "American sect," the implication being that someone who did not belong to the established churches was not a real German. This ostracism on the part of the major churches persisted through the Weimar period. Indeed, when the Nazis came to power it may not be going too far to say that some Saints enjoyed a certain amount of thoughtless Schadenfreude (malicious enjoyment of others’ misfortune) at the treatment they meted out to the established churches. Now the Protestants and Catholics were receiving the same treatment they had given the "sects."

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This sympathy was apparently shared by some members of the Church leadership. The Church’s German magazine, Der Stern, reminded its readers in 1935 that Senator Reed Smoot had long been a friend of Germany, and this attitude seemed to receive official sanction during President Grant’s 1937 visit. The message to the German Saints was clear: Stay here. Keep the Commandments. Try to get along the best you can, even under some limitations. We want to keep the Church intact and the missionaries working.

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This policy of appeasing the Nazis worked well until the war broke out. Despite the classification of Mormonism as a sect "dangerous to the state..." according to Gestapo reports, the Church was not summarily dissolved as many others were. The missionaries remained; the Church continued. Even during the war, Mormon life was disrupted more by bombing raids, supply shortages, and travel restrictions than by official harrassment. By and large, the German Saints lived through the Thousand-Year Reich much like the rest of their countrymen.

But among those Germans who recognized the true nature of Nazism were a few Latter-day Saints. Many were simply tired of the war (Germany’s second in twenty-five years); others, like Hübener, began to see through the pervasive Nazi propaganda. Rosa Böhringer, Johannes Kindt, Walter Krause, and President Willy Deters of Bremen were among the Saints who either overtly opposed the regime or else dragged their feet while praying for German defeat in the war and the regime’s early demise, basing their position in part on Mormon scripture.