Chapter 26
War’s Foul Brood
On August 24, 1939, eight days before the invasion of Poland, the First Presidency ordered 320 North American missionaries in the British, French, West German, East German, and Czechoslovak Missions to evacuate to Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or the Netherlands—whichever neutral country was closest.1 Apostle Joseph Fielding Smith, who had been visiting the Saints in Europe that summer with his wife, Jessie, stayed in Denmark to coordinate the evacuation from Copenhagen.2
After receiving the order to leave, Norman Seibold, a twenty-three-year-old missionary from Idaho serving in the West German Mission, saw to it that all the North American missionaries in his district immediately left the country. Then, instead of going straight to the Netherlands, he made his way to the mission home in Frankfurt.
When he arrived, Norman found his mission president, Douglas Wood, sick with worry. President Wood had sent telegrams instructing all missionaries to evacuate, but lines of communication throughout Germany were overwhelmed. Only Norman and a handful of missionaries had confirmed receiving the message. And to make matters worse, government officials in the Netherlands had barred any noncitizens from entering the country unless they were only passing through. Now dozens of missionaries were likely stranded in western Germany with useless train tickets to the Netherlands and no money to purchase new ones.3
President Wood and his wife, Evelyn, were leaving to oversee the evacuation of a group of elders who had already arrived at the mission home, and they needed someone to stay in Germany to locate the remaining missionaries.
“It will be your mission to find them and see that they get out,” President Wood told Norman. “Follow your impressions entirely. We have no idea what towns these thirty-one elders will be in.”4
Late that night, Norman left Frankfurt on a crowded train, heading north along the Rhine River. He had tickets to Denmark and money for any missionaries he came across—if only he knew where to find them. And he had to hurry. The German government had just announced that the military needed the railways to transport soldiers, so seats would soon be scarce for any civilian traveling by train.
When the train stopped in the city of Cologne, Norman felt he should exit, and he elbowed his way out of the passenger car. The station was swarming with people, so he climbed onto a baggage cart to see above the crowd. But he did not recognize any missionaries. Then he remembered the “missionary whistle”—the tune to “Do What Is Right,” which was familiar to everyone in the mission. Norman had little talent for music, but he pursed his lips and whistled the first few notes as best he could.5
People immediately took notice, and soon Norman saw a missionary and a local German Saint coming toward him. He continued to whistle, and more elders and an older missionary couple found him as well. He sent the missionaries to safety, and then he boarded a train to another city.
A few hours later, in the city of Emmerich, Norman found more missionaries. As he gave them money from the mission president, he attracted the attention of a police officer, who seemed to think the missionaries were trying to smuggle cash out of Germany. The officer demanded that they turn over their money and tell him what they were doing. When Norman refused to cooperate, the officer grabbed him and threatened to take him to the city authorities.
Norman usually listened to the police, but he did not want to go with the officer into the city. “You’d better unhand me,” he said, “or there might be a fight.”
By then a crowd had formed, and the officer glanced at the people nervously. He let go of Norman and took him to a military official at the train station to explain who he was and what he was doing. The official listened to Norman’s story, saw no reason to detain him, and even wrote a letter of explanation for him to give to anyone else who might stop him during his travels.6
Norman continued on, stopping to look for missionaries whenever the Spirit directed him. At one remote town, hardly anyone was standing on the railway platform, and it seemed silly to look for missionaries there. But Norman felt he needed to get off the train, so he decided to go into town. He soon came to a small restaurant and found two elders drinking apple juice purchased with the last coins in their pockets.7
After days of searching, Norman had located seventeen missionaries. To get to Denmark, he and his companions had to catch trains commandeered for troop transport, bluffing conductors and avoiding policemen all the way. When Norman arrived in Copenhagen, one day after the invasion of Poland, every North American missionary in the German missions was safe.
The next day, September 3, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany.8
“The long-threatened and dreaded war has broken out,” President Heber J. Grant announced at the October 1939 general conference. For years, he had watched with alarm and apprehension as Hitler led Germany down a violent and dangerous path, unleashing misery and bloodshed on the world. Now the Axis powers, led by Nazi Germany, were locked in combat with the Allied nations under the United Kingdom and France.
“God is grieved by war,” President Grant told the Saints. “He will hold subject to the eternal punishments of His will those who wage it unrighteously.” The prophet urged the leaders of the world, and all people everywhere, to seek peaceful solutions to their differences.
“We condemn all of war’s foul brood—avarice, greed, misery, want, disease, cruelty, hate, inhumanity, savagery, death,” he declared. It pained the prophet to think of the millions of people suffering and grieving because of the conflict. Many thousands of them were Latter-day Saints, and some were already in harm’s way. He said, “We earnestly implore all members of the Church to love their brethren and sisters, and all peoples, whoever and wherever they are, to banish hate from their lives, to fill their hearts with charity, patience, long-suffering, and forgiveness.”9
In the weeks and months after general conference, thoughts of war weighed heavy on the prophet’s mind. He wrote to his daughter Rachel in December about the unnecessary loss of life. “It makes my heart ache,” he wrote. “It does seem as though the Lord ought to wipe off the earth people who create and start wars, like Hitler.”10
In the winter of 1940, President Grant traveled to Inglewood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, where the Saints looked forward to hearing from him at their stake conference. As he arrived at the chapel, he felt dizzy and found it difficult to speak. When he stepped out of the car, his legs were unsteady, and he struggled to make his way to the door of the meetinghouse. The dizziness seemed to pass soon after he took his seat on the stand. Still, he asked to be excused from making his remarks.
Later, after a nap, he felt strong enough to speak at the conference’s afternoon session. Standing at the podium, he addressed the Saints for nearly forty minutes. But that night, when he tried several times to get up, he nearly fell. The following morning, his left side felt numb and he could not raise his arm or move his fingers on that side. When he tried to stand, the strength in his left leg was gone. His tongue felt thick, and words slurred together when he spoke.
With the help of his family and friends, President Grant went to a nearby hospital, where doctors found that he had suffered a stroke.11 He spent the next few months in California, slowly recovering his strength and movement. His doctor cautioned him to rest more, eat better, and avoid any strenuous activity. By April, the prophet was well enough to return to Salt Lake City.
“I have been good and lazy carrying out the doctor’s instructions,” he informed his daughter Grace shortly after his return. “I do not know how long I can keep it up.”12
On June 28, 1940, the war in Europe was far from the minds of the Saints in Cincinnati, Ohio. That evening, twenty-one-year-old Connie Taylor heard the opening notes of Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” her cue to start walking down the aisle of the Cincinnati Branch meetinghouse. The chapel was full of family and friends, all gathered to celebrate her marriage to Paul Bang.13
Connie and Paul had been engaged for just over a year. They wanted to be sealed together, but like many Latter-day Saint couples living far from a temple, they had decided first to be married civilly in the meetinghouse chapel.14
As Connie made her way to the front of the room, she saw her father sitting among the guests. At weddings in the United States, fathers traditionally walked their daughters down the aisle. But since her father had trouble walking, her brother Milton walked with her instead. Connie was just glad her father was there. Her patriarchal blessing had promised that he would someday enjoy the blessings of the gospel with her. That day had not yet come, but he had attended a sacrament meeting once on Easter Sunday, and that was a good sign.15
After Connie joined Paul at the front of the chapel, their branch president, Alvin Gilliam, performed the ceremony. For many people in the room, the evening marked the end of an era. Aside from the next Sunday’s meetings, the wedding was the last time the Cincinnati Branch would gather in the little chapel they purchased eleven years earlier. The old building was falling apart, so the growing branch had recently sold it and purchased land north of the city to build a new meetinghouse.16
The newlyweds left the next afternoon for Niagara Falls, New York, in Paul’s father’s truck. They took three baskets of food from the family grocery store, some clothes, and around sixty dollars in cash.
On their way, Connie and Paul visited the Kirtland Temple. The building was now used as a meetinghouse for the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The temple door was locked when they arrived, but a man with a key opened the building and let them spend an hour touring it on their own. They explored every inch of the temple, including the steeple, where they looked out on the tiny village where hundreds of faithful Saints had lived more than a century earlier.17
From Kirtland, they moved on to Niagara Falls. The resort town was a popular honeymoon destination on the border of the United States and Canada, but the war in Europe had put everyone on alert. Although the United States had not entered the conflict, Canada was part of the British Commonwealth and had declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland. Before Connie and Paul could cross into Canada, border inspectors carefully checked them over to make sure they were not spies.
After touring Niagara Falls, the couple drove a hundred miles east to Palmyra and Manchester, New York.18 Over the years, the Church had acquired several historic sites in the area, including the Hill Cumorah, the Sacred Grove, and the frame home of Lucy and Joseph Smith Sr. Recognizing the sites’ potential for missionary work, the Church had begun opening them to visitors and advertising their historical and spiritual significance on roadside signs. In the early 1920s, under the direction of B. H. Roberts, mission-wide conferences were held on the Hill Cumorah, and they had since developed into an annual pageant open to the public.19
While in Manchester, Connie and Paul stayed the night in the Smith home for a small fee. They climbed the Hill Cumorah and thought about the gold plates being buried there for so long. At the crest of the hill was a new monument of the angel Moroni, and they paused to take pictures of it and appreciate the magnificent view of the surrounding area. Later, they took a walk through the Sacred Grove, enjoying the holiness and beauty of the place. Before leaving, they knelt together in prayer.20
The newlyweds made a short visit to Washington, DC, where they attended a service in a massive marble meetinghouse the Church had dedicated in 1933. The Church had experienced significant growth in the city since 1920, when apostle Reed Smoot and a small group of Saints had organized a branch there. In fact, shortly before Paul and Connie’s visit, apostle Rudger Clawson had organized a stake in Washington, calling forty-year-old Ezra Taft Benson as president.21
After a few days in Washington, Connie and Paul returned to Cincinnati, where they settled into a drafty apartment not far from the Bang family’s grocery store. They had spent all but one penny of their money on their honeymoon, but Paul still had a job with his father. In a few years, after they saved some money, they could take an even longer road trip—this time to Salt Lake City and the temple.22
On a cold December night in 1940, the menacing drone of Nazi bomber planes filled the sky above Cheltenham, a town in South West England. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, had been bombarding Great Britain with relentless air raids for six months. Attacks had first focused on air bases and ports, but the bombers had since moved into civilian areas in London and beyond.23 Cheltenham was a peaceful place with beautiful parks and gardens. Now it was a target.
Nellie Middleton, a fifty-five-year-old Latter-day Saint, lived in the town with her six-year-old daughter, Jennifer. To prepare her home against air strikes, she had used her modest wage as a dressmaker to furnish an area in her basement as a shelter, complete with food, water, oil lamps, and a small iron bed for Jennifer. Following instructions from the government, Nellie had also covered her windows with netting to catch flying shards of glass in the event of an attack.24
Now, all over Cheltenham, bombs were whistling through the air and crashing to the ground with a thunderous roar. The terrifying noise grew ever closer to Nellie’s home until a tremendous explosion on a nearby street rattled her walls, shattering the windows and filling the netting with razor-sharp glass.
In the morning, the streets were filled with rubble. The bombs had killed twenty-three people and left more than six hundred homeless.25
Nellie and the other Cheltenham Saints did their best to endure after the attack. When British Mission president Hugh B. Brown and other North American missionaries left the country nearly a year earlier, the small branch and others like it struggled to fill callings and run Church programs. Then the local men went away to war, leaving no priesthood holders to bless the sacrament or formally administer branch business. Before long, the branch was forced to disband.
An older man named Arthur Fletcher, who held the Melchizedek Priesthood, lived about twenty miles away, and he rode his rusty bicycle to visit the Cheltenham Saints whenever he could. But most of the time it was Nellie, the former Relief Society president in the Cheltenham Branch, who took responsibility for the spiritual and temporal welfare of the Saints in her area. With the branch closed, the Church members could no longer meet in the rented hall they used on Sundays, so Nellie’s living room became the place where the Relief Society prayed, sang, and studied Jesus the Christ and Articles of Faith together.26
Nellie also ensured that her daughter learned about the gospel. She had been nearly fifty and unmarried when she adopted Jennifer. Now the little girl joined the women when they met to study, and they were careful to discuss the gospel in a way that Jennifer could understand. Nellie and other Relief Society sisters also took Jennifer along when they visited the sick or the elderly. No one in the branch had a telephone or a car, so they made their visits on foot, bringing a pot of jam or a bit of cake along with a message.27
But once the sun set, all visiting ceased. To make it harder for German bombers to see their targets, towns and cities across the United Kingdom disconnected streetlights and shut off illuminated signs. People draped their windows with dark cloth and unscrewed the lightbulbs in their entryways.
In Cheltenham, the Saints retreated to their homes. Any glimmer of light could put them and their neighbors at risk.28
The following year, Vienna Branch president Alois Cziep was finding his calling more and more difficult. The war had severed the usual channels of communication between Church headquarters and branches in Axis-occupied areas. Der Stern, the mission’s German-language magazine, had ceased publication. The acting mission president, a German member named Christian Heck, was doing his best to keep the Church functioning amid the chaos. Alois did the same for his branch.
While the physical destruction and devastation of the war had not yet reached Austria’s borders, Alois knew the British Royal Air Force had attacked German cities. The Soviet Union was now at war with the Third Reich as well. Like Great Britain on the other side of the conflict, Austria was under nighttime blackout orders to protect against enemy aircraft that might be circling overhead.29
Most of the men in the Vienna Branch had been drafted for the German army when the war began. Since Alois had lost an eye to disease some years earlier, he was exempt from military service. And despite the rising challenges, he was fortunate to have two counselors, several young Aaronic Priesthood holders, and his wife, Hermine, to assist him. As Relief Society president, Hermine carried much of the emotional burden of women in the branch, who were often overwhelmed, lonely, and afraid—especially if they received news that their loved ones had been taken prisoner or killed in battle.
Hermine would encourage them to trust in God and carry on, and she tried to do the same.30
Even as the branch grew smaller after the start of the war, divisions among its members continued, despite Alois’s efforts to steer meetings away from politics. Once, at the beginning of a Church meeting, a visitor from Germany offered a prayer for Adolf Hitler. “Brother,” Alois said after the man finished, “in this place we do not pray for Hitler.”
With Nazi Party members and sympathizers in the branch, Alois often had to be more careful about what he said. Informers and spies could be anywhere, ready to denounce him and his family to the government. While he and Hermine believed in honoring the law of the land, sometimes doing so was painful.31
Two members of the branch, Olga Weiss and her adult son Egon, were Jewish converts who served in the branch each week with their musical talents. But when the Nazis invaded Austria, the Weisses knew they had to leave the country or risk falling prey to the regime’s violent anti-Semitism. Even though the family no longer practiced Judaism, the Nazis considered them “racially Jewish” because of their ancestry.
Some months after the German annexation of Austria, the Weisses wrote urgent letters to the First Presidency and former missionaries they knew, hoping to find someone who could help them and a few of their relatives emigrate to the United States. “Conditions here are terrible for us Jewish people,” Egon wrote in his letter. “We must get away from here.”32
Like many people throughout the world, President Grant had received conflicting reports about Hitler’s hostility toward Jews and the extent of the danger they faced in Germany. The prophet had denounced such anti-Semitism publicly and privately.33 Yet Church leaders were unable to help the Weisses or any other European individuals hoping to emigrate. U.S. law, they observed, no longer allowed religious organizations to sponsor immigrants, and for many years the Church had declined all requests for such assistance.34 As the war in Europe escalated, the First Presidency frequently expressed dismay that the U.S. government did not permit them to help migrating refugees. When President Grant and his counselors received letters such as Egon’s, they could do little more than respond with sympathy, sometimes recommending organizations that they hoped could help.35
In September 1941, Egon and Olga were still in Vienna. The Nazis were at that time requiring all Austrian Jews to identify themselves by wearing a yellow Star of David on their clothing. When Nazi officials discovered that Jews were coming to meetings at the Vienna Branch, they ordered Alois to forbid them from attending. If he refused, the Saints would be evicted from their meeting place.
Alois decided he had to comply with the demand. Conflicted and full of regret, he met with the Weisses and told them they could no longer attend meetings. But he and other branch members continued to visit the family faithfully—until, one day, Olga and Egon were nowhere to be found.36