In researching and writing the story of Helmuth Hübener, the Latter-day Saint youth who was executed for distributing anti-Nazi literature in Germany during World War II, I learned of several other Hübener-like people in Nazi Germany. One such person, whom I shall call Bruno to preserve anonymity, was a young Latter-day Saint man who joined Hitler's infamous elite force, the SS, and then had a change of heart. I had the privilege, a number of years ago now, to interview this gentleman at his home in Germany.

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Bruno remembers the article by the president of the East German Mission in the official Nazi newspaper stating that Mormons and Nazis had some common experiences and values. But Bruno also recalls that most of the Latter-day Saints in the area were not pro-Nazi; on the contrary, when he later joined the SS, most of them looked at him suspiciously. He and his mother were both philosemites, he said, with many Jewish friends. When he performed his Landjahr (an obligatory year working in the countryside) near Elbing, East Prussia, he attended the branch there, an indication that he must have also been somewhat committed to the Church at that time.

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Now comes the ugly part: While Bruno was in Poland, the SS were assigned to details to eliminate Jews. The SS were given Schnapps and drugs to make them fearless, Bruno reports, and then they were driven into the countryside to round up Jewish villagers in the shtetls.9 Bruno was uncomfortable talking to me about this episode in his life. I did not feel like pressing him for details about his participation; nevertheless, I got the impression that he did not do the horrible things others did. He particularly recalled how shocked he was when an SS man threw a baby into the air and shot it with his carbine. Women were stripped and their body cavities searched, ostensibly for hidden jewels. Bruno said, "Lest anyone argue that there was no persecution of the Jews, let me tell him that I saw it firsthand."

One night after this horrible experience, Bruno and a Hungarian comrade buried their uniforms, dressed in their civilian clothes, and began walking southwest toward the British lines, as they imagined them. In five days they made it as far as the Carpathians, where they were captured by Germans at a small border crossing. Bruno and his companion suspected that a Pole who had befriended them earlier had alerted the Gestapo about them.

Dachau

Bruno was taken back to his unit and tried by the SS-und Polizeigericht VI (SS and Police Court VI) in Krakau, Poland. The judge reportedly said to him, "Der Alte Fritz hatte Sie erschossen!" ("Old Emperor Friedrich would have shot you!") When he was sentenced to seven years, Bruno laughed. Apparently this was a nervous tick of his (he had laughed when a bomb had landed near him during the war).

He was first sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, Germany, then was moved to a labor camp in nearby Allach that was making BMW aircraft engines. In 1944 he grasped at an opportunity to volunteer for a kind of suicide mission involving one-man submarines, but when he got to Berlin and party officials looked more closely at his record, he was sent right back to Dachau. From there he was sent to Budweis, Czechoslovakia, on a Bewahrungsaufsatz (probationary assignment), but he left the train in Vienna to go to the amusement park at the Prater, as he recalls it, and overstayed his leave. When he finally arrived in Prague, he was tried again and given an additional three years of imprisonment in Dachau. In December 1944, he was sent to a labor facility in Neckar-Els bei Moosbach, near Heidelberg. Here he worked assembling Daimler-Benz aircraft engines in filthy underground tunnels that dripped cold water on him as he worked.

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Conclusion

Bruno's story leaves room for much conjecture: Why did he join the SS? His mother was anti-Bolshevik, but he says she was also philosemitic and anti-Nazi. I got the impression he had been, as a very young and impressionable man, simply motivated to get away from a possessive mother and have some excitement, a young man who did not have the perspective to see what Nazism really promised. Yet when he saw Nazism in its true light, he had the courage to flee from it. And when he returned to the narrow path of the gospel, he held onto the rod with the strength of a man who had literally been to hell and back.