Chapter 31
The Right Track
The Salt Lake Tabernacle was quiet and still on the afternoon of October 7, 1945, as George Albert Smith stood to address the Saints at general conference. He had spoken many times in the Tabernacle during his four decades as an apostle, but this conference was his first time speaking to the entire Church as the prophet of the Lord.
He had just returned from dedicating the Idaho Falls Temple in southeast Idaho, a reminder that the latter-day work was moving forward. But he knew that Saints across the globe were suffering after years of deprivation and war. And they now looked to him for guidance and reassurance.
“This world might have been free from its distresses long ago,” President Smith told his audience, “if the children of men had accepted the advice of Him who gave His all.” He reminded the Saints of the Savior’s invitation to love their neighbors and forgive their enemies. “That is the spirit of the Redeemer,” he declared, “and that is the spirit all Latter-day Saints should seek to possess if they hope someday to stand in His presence and receive at His hands a glorious welcome home.”1
Among Church members, President Smith was known as a kind, peace-loving leader. When he was a younger man, he had composed a personal creed to guide his life. “I would not seek to force people to live up to my ideals but rather love them into doing the thing that is right,” he wrote. “I would not knowingly wound the feeling of any, not even one who may have wronged me, but would seek to do him good and make him my friend.”2
Now, as he looked to the future, President Smith was especially concerned about helping Saints whose lives had been shattered by war. Earlier that year, he had asked the Church Welfare Committee to create a plan for sending food and clothing to Europe. Shortly after the October conference, he met with several apostles to discuss shipping the goods overseas as soon as possible.3
Sending aid to Europe was no straightforward task. The Church needed help from the United States government to coordinate relief efforts with so many countries. To work out the details, President Smith traveled to Washington, DC, with a small group of Church leaders.4
They arrived in the nation’s capital on a cloudy morning in early November. Among their many meetings with government officials and European ambassadors was an appointment with Harry S. Truman, the president of the United States. President Truman welcomed the Church leaders graciously, but he warned them that it did not make sense financially to ship food and clothing to Europe when its economy was bad and currencies unreliable. “Their money isn’t any good,” he told President Smith.5
The prophet explained that the Church did not expect to be paid. “Our people over there need food and supplies,” he said. “We want to help them before winter sets in.”6
“How long will it take you to get this ready?” President Truman asked.
“We are ready right now,” the prophet said. He described the stores of food and supplies the Saints had gathered, along with over two thousand quilts sewn by Relief Societies during the war. The Church simply needed help transporting these goods to Europe.
“You are on the right track,” President Truman said, shocked at the Saints’ preparedness. “We will be glad to help you in any way we can.”7
Before leaving, President Smith told President Truman that the Latter-day Saints were praying for him. The prophet gave him a leatherbound copy of A Voice of Warning, a missionary tract written by apostle Parley P. Pratt in 1837.
It struck President Smith that during Elder Pratt’s lifetime, the Saints were barely surviving. They never could have sent aid across the ocean to thousands of struggling people. But over the past century, the Lord had taught the Saints how to be ready for times of distress, and President Smith was happy they could now act quickly.8
As the Church prepared to ship aid to Europe, Helga Birth continued her service as a missionary in Berlin. Germany was still in disarray months after the war. Both the city of Berlin and the country as a whole had been divided into four zones, each controlled by a different occupying nation. Since the war had left most German Saints homeless, they often sought help from Helga and the other missionaries at the mission home. Herbert Klopfer, the acting mission president in eastern Germany, had died in a Soviet prison camp, so his counselors, Paul Langheinrich and Richard Ranglack, led efforts to minister to the refugees.
Needing more space to house these Saints, the two men received permission from military leaders to move the mission home to an abandoned mansion in the American-controlled zone in western Berlin. Helga’s hometown of Tilsit, meanwhile, was in a part of Germany under Soviet control, and she had no idea how to find her father and mother or her brother Henry, who was missing in action. Nor could she easily learn the whereabouts of friends and former branch members.9
In the fall of 1945, Helga received a letter from her aunt Lusche. More than a year had passed since they survived the air raid that killed Helga’s grandparents and aunt Nita. Now, Helga learned, the Soviet army was holding Lusche and other German refugees in a deserted castle near the German-Polish border. The Soviet authorities had decided to release them, but only if they had relatives who could take them in. Helga quickly wrote back, inviting her aunt to live at the mission home.
Lusche arrived in Berlin a short time later with a woman named Eva, a distant relative who had been imprisoned with her. Both women looked hollow and emaciated. Helga had experienced much hunger and suffering during the war, but her aunt’s stories of torture and deprivation shook her soul. Eva’s baby girl had died of cold and starvation, and Lusche had considered taking her own life.10
Other Latter-day Saint refugees found their way to the mission home as well, and Paul Langheinrich found places for them to stay. Soon, upward of one hundred people were being housed and fed under one roof. Yet Helga’s father, mother, and brother were nowhere to be found.
American soldiers who had been missionaries in Germany visited the mission home often. One soldier brought sandwiches to share, made with fluffy white bread from the United States. Helga eagerly devoured a sandwich, but it hardly relieved the relentless hunger plaguing her and her housemates. At times they went days without eating. When Helga managed to purchase or scavenge a meal, the old potatoes and watered-down milk provided little nourishment. She was so weak that some days she could not get out of bed.11
Good news came in January 1946, when a letter arrived from her father, Martin Meiszus. He had lost his left eye during an air raid near the end of the war and spent some time in a refugee camp in Denmark. Now he was back in Germany, living in the city of Schwerin, about 130 miles from Berlin.12 Paul and other mission leaders had been traveling around Germany for several months, searching for displaced Saints and helping them band together to survive. Since they were already planning to visit Schwerin, they invited Helga to join them.13
On the crowded train, Helga struggled to stay warm as frigid winter air blasted through the broken windows. In her hands she gripped a small box containing a few pieces of American chocolate. The candy was scarce, so she had decided to save it for her father. Still, she sometimes held the chocolate to her nose just to inhale its delicious aroma.
In Schwerin, Helga was overjoyed to see her father again. He was surprised when she gave him the chocolate, and he tried to share it with her. “Kindchen,” he said. Dear child.
“No, Dad,” Helga said. “I’ve had so much to eat.” And it was true—she no longer felt hungry. She was too full of happiness.14
On the other side of the world, Neal Maxwell’s division in the United States Army was part of the occupying force on mainland Japan. During the war, the country had been devastated by thousands of air raids and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neal had expected the Japanese to welcome him as a conquering hero. But over three hundred thousand Japanese civilians were dead, and his soul was wrenched by seeing what the war had cost the people.15
Neal was now serving as a first sergeant over a company of about three hundred unruly and demoralized men, many of whom wanted nothing more than to go home. Although Neal was only nineteen years old, his superiors had decided he was the right man to bring order to the group. Neal was not so sure.16
“I do many things here that require such mature judgment I shiver when I think of the responsibility,” he wrote in a letter to his parents. “Way down underneath I’m just a kid, so homesick and young that he doesn’t know what to do.”17
Still, he found ways to succeed as a leader and win the respect of some of the men. He often turned to his Father in Heaven, seeking help. Many nights, he would wander alone outside to pray, finding closer communion with God under the star-studded sky.18
He also found strength among fellow Latter-day Saint soldiers. Throughout the war, Church leaders had encouraged Saints in the military to meet together, take the sacrament, and provide spiritual support to one another. In postwar Japan, as well as in Guam, the Philippines, and other places around the world, hundreds of Latter-day Saint servicemembers met together.
These groups often had unexpected missionary experiences. Soon after the war ended, Latter-day Saint servicemen in Italy were granted an audience with Pope Pius XII at the headquarters of the Catholic Church. They told the pope about the Savior’s visit to the Western Hemisphere and presented him with a copy of the Book of Mormon.19
In Japan, meanwhile, local Saints who had not attended church in years sought out the servicemember groups and participated in their meetings. Under the new occupation government, the Japanese were free to explore their spiritual beliefs, and some Latter-day Saint soldiers invited their Japanese friends to learn about the Church. Soon, American soldiers like Neal sat side by side with their former enemies, partaking of the sacrament and learning together about the gospel of Jesus Christ.20
Neal had many months of military service to complete before he could return home. But his experiences on Okinawa, and now on Japan’s mainland, solidified his desire to serve a mission as soon as he possibly could.21
“There is a field of men ripe for the gospel who are just as Christian as ourselves,” he wrote to his family back home, “but have a great need of the gospel to guide them.”22
Back in Germany, Paul Langheinrich contacted the head of the Soviet forces in Berlin. Thousands of Latter-day Saint refugees were now living in Soviet-occupied areas, and Paul was concerned for their welfare. “Because of Hitler’s unfathomable actions,” he wrote, “many of our members are now on the highways, without home or homeland, banished and cast out.”
Paul asked the commander for permission to purchase food and transport it to these Saints. As a former genealogical researcher for the German government, he also felt prompted to ask if he could search for caches of important records, which the Nazis had hidden in remote areas of the country to protect them from damage or theft. Since German Saints would someday need these records to do temple work for their ancestors, Paul wanted to preserve them.
“These records are of no value to you,” he wrote the commander. “For us, they are priceless.”23
A week later, Paul received permission to buy whatever food Church members needed. And as far as the genealogical records were concerned, if the Saints could find them, they were free to keep them.24
Paul eventually learned about a collection of documents at Rothenburg castle, southwest of Berlin. On a frigid day in February 1946, he and sixteen local missionaries hiked up an icy road to the old castle, which stood at the top of a mountain. Once inside, the men found piles of parish registers, microfilm, and books containing German genealogies.25
A number of the registers were centuries old and contained thousands of names and dates, some written in beautiful German script. Long scrolls depicted family trees illustrated in vivid color. Much of the cache was in good condition, although some of the records were covered with ice and snow and did not look salvageable.26
Once Paul and the missionaries secured the records, all that remained was to safely convey them down the mountain. Paul had arranged for a rented truck and trailer to pick up the records and carry them to a railroad car on its way to Berlin. But as time passed, the truck did not arrive.27
A missionary finally appeared, trudging up the mountainside. The truck was stranded partway up, its tires spinning against the icy roads.28
Paul decided it was time to pray. He asked three missionaries to walk with him into the woods, and they pleaded for the Lord’s help. At the moment they said “amen,” they heard the sound of an engine and saw the truck rounding the curve.
The driver told Paul he had detached the trailer to make it to the castle. He intended to turn the truck around and leave, but Paul persuaded him to stay and help them transport as many records as possible down the slippery road. Without the trailer, though, the truck was not big enough to transport all the records. If they wanted to get everything out in time to meet the freight car the following day, the ice on the road would have to melt. Once again, Paul and the missionaries turned to God in prayer.29
A warm rain fell that night. When Paul woke in the morning, the roads were free of ice. He also learned that the freight car had been delayed by a few days, giving the missionaries the time they needed to load up every salvageable item. Paul could not deny God’s role in the marvelous manifestation, and he was grateful to be an instrument in His hands.
Once the last of their cargo reached the railway station, Paul and the men said a final prayer. “We have done our part,” they prayed. “Now, dear God, we need Thee to take this freight car to Berlin.30
On May 22, 1946, Arwell Pierce, president of the Mexican Mission, stood with President George Albert Smith on top of the Pyramid of the Sun, a popular historic site just northeast of Mexico City. The stone pyramid, which had once been the center of an ancient city that came to be known as Teotihuacán, rose over two hundred feet into the air and offered spectacular views of the surrounding landscape. Although President Smith was now in his late seventies, he had climbed the pyramid’s many stairs with relative ease, joking with Arwell and the missionaries who were with them.31
Arwell was happy the prophet had come to Mexico. It was the first time any Church president had toured the mission, and the visit meant a great deal to the local Saints. For the last decade, the Church in Mexico had been split between the main body of Saints and the twelve hundred people who had joined the Third Convention. President Smith’s visit offered a real chance for reconciliation—something Arwell had diligently sought over the past four years.32
When Arwell became president of the Mexican Mission in 1942, the schism between the Third Conventionists and the other Saints in Mexico ran deep. When Arwell was set apart by the First Presidency, J. Reuben Clark had charged him with trying to heal the breach.33
At first, the Conventionists were suspicious of the new mission president. Like his predecessors, Arwell was a U.S. citizen, and the Conventionists did not receive him warmly. Instead of trying to force them to see the error of their ways, Arwell decided to earn their trust and friendship.
He began attending Third Convention meetings and developed a friendship with Abel Páez, the leader of the organization, as well as other Conventionists. The more time he spent with them, the more he thought that reunification was possible. The Conventionists still kept their faith in the core doctrine of the restored gospel. They continued to administer Church programs, and they believed in the Book of Mormon. If he could help them see all they were missing by separating themselves from the body of the Saints, he believed they would return. But he would have to proceed carefully.
“We haven’t done much good in the past with harsh methods,” he informed the First Presidency. “Let us hope that kindness and sane, patient reasoning may do some good.”34
Under the First Presidency’s direction, Arwell led efforts to build or remodel several chapels in Mexico, addressing a shortage that had troubled Conventionists when they first broke from the Church. He also met often with Abel to encourage him to seek a reconciliation. “What you here in Mexico really need is a stake organization,” he told Abel and the Conventionists. “We cannot have a stake in Mexico until we are more united.”35
He reminded Abel that the Conventionists were forgoing temple blessings. In 1945, the first Spanish-language endowments took place in the temple in Mesa, Arizona. Although many of the Mexican Saints could not afford a trip to Mesa, Arwell said he believed there would someday be temples in Mexico that Abel and so many other Conventionists could enter.36
One day, Arwell received a phone call from Abel. He and a few other Third Convention leaders wanted to meet with him to discuss a reconciliation. The men talked for nearly six hours. Eventually, after recognizing ways they had erred, Abel and the others decided to appeal to the First Presidency to be readmitted as members of the Church. President Smith and his counselors reviewed the request and decided that if Conventionists were willing to sever their relationship with the group and sustain the president of the Mexican Mission, they could again be members of the Church of Jesus Christ.37
Now, as Arwell toured the mission with President Smith, they spoke with Conventionists who wanted to return. “There has been no rebellion here,” President Smith observed, “only a misunderstanding.”38
On May 25, 1946, Arwell took President Smith to the Ermita Branch in Mexico City. More than a thousand people, many of them members of the Third Convention, crowded into the small chapel and an overflow pavilion to hear the prophet speak. Some Conventionists worried that President Smith would condemn them, but instead he spoke of harmony and reunion. Afterward, most Conventionists committed to return fully to the Church.39
A few days later, at a meeting of nearly five hundred Saints in the city of Tecalco, Abel thanked President Smith for coming to Mexico. “It is our purpose to follow the leadership and instructions of the general authorities of our Church and the president of the Mexican Mission,” he told the congregation. “We are following a prophet of the Lord.”40