The heroic story of Helmuth Hübener, a teenage Latter-day Saint activist who was executed in 1942 for distributing leaflets trying to warn Germans about the lies of Hitler, is familiar to many members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the United States and abroad.
He has been the subject of plays, articles, books and a documentary. For those who still don’t know about Hübener, now there is a feature film, “Truth & Treason,” that recounts his harrowing experience of faith and courage.
What is fact and what is fiction in the film? More important, what is its message to modern believers?
Here are lightly edited excerpts from a recent Salt Lake Tribune “Mormon Land” podcast with Alan Keele, an emeritus professor of German language and literature at Brigham Young University, who first publicized the story.
(Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand) An undated photograph of Helmuth Hübener.
How did you first learn about Helmuth Hübener?
In 1968, I went to Princeton University to get a Ph.D. in German studies, and I eventually did my dissertation on postwar literature. There was one writer who really stood out: Günter Grass (he later won a Nobel prize). In his fourth novel, published in 1969, Helmuth Hübener is not just mentioned, he is the mythic hero whom Grass wants the young people in the novel to emulate. The novelist includes a real newspaper article about [this young Mormon boy]. I was immediately astonished because I had never heard of him. I went back and found the article that Grass had actually found in an obscure Hamburg newspaper. One day, I was sitting in my BYU office, and I thought, wait a minute, didn’t some Mormons emigrate to Utah after the war? So I grabbed the Salt Lake phone book and looked up Karl Schnibbe [one of Hübener’s Latter-day Saint friends]. There he was. I dialed his number, and he picked right up, and he said, “I’ve been waiting for this call for 25 years.”
So what was the first thing you wrote?
A cover story in the independent magazine Sunstone, titled “The Fuhrer’s New Clothes: Helmuth Hübener and Mormons in the Third Reich.”
Why did you want to write the story?
I had the same instincts about this story that Günter Grass did. The Vietnam War was going on, and I was completely opposed to it and it wasn’t just because I was a hippie. It was because I thought that the whole thing was based on lies. I wanted to share this with others, because that’s exactly what Hübener did. He wanted to share the truth that he discovered on the radio with others.
Did you like the movie?
(Angel Studios) In the movie "Truth & Treason," Ewan Horrocks plays Helmuth Hübener, a Latter-day Saint teen in Hamburg, Germany, who began writing pamphlets in resistance to the Nazi regime during World War II.
I loved the movie. I was amazed at the cinematography. Every scene looks like it was painted by Rembrandt, with chiaroscuro and the lighting and the angles and the movements. The acting is absolutely superb, the editing, everything about that film. I could not have changed one thing that would have made me happier about the way that my “baby” was portrayed in that film.
Were Latter-day Saints in Hamburg all Nazis or anti-Nazis or were they a mix?
In a book called “Moroni and the Swastika‚” [author] David Nelson wants you to believe that the Mormons and the Nazis were totally in sync and sympathetic with each other and so forth. I instinctively knew that wasn’t right. Just anecdotally, for every Nazi [Latter-day Saint] that we knew about who did horrible things, I could give you lots of people who, like Helmuth Hübener, were on the other end of the spectrum. [According to recently unearthed Gestapo documents], some 500 pages show that the Nazis did not like the Mormons because they weren’t joining their party nearly as much. In fact, Mormons joined the party at a rate of 2.4% and the average rate across Germany was 10%. As far as the St. Georg branch — which was the largest German-speaking branch in Europe — there were photos of members wearing their brown shirts [showing] they were in [Nazi storm troopers] as well as Solomon Schwartz, who was considered Jewish, who was killed in Auschwitz.
Did Latter-day Saint branch members give the “Heil Hitler” salute like in the movie?
What actually happened, I think, was that Arthur Zander (called a bishop in the film but he was the branch president) wanted to bring the radio in on Sundays, to lock the doors and say, “OK, we’re going to listen to the führer’s speeches before or after or during church or something. Otto Berndt, the second counselor, would not let him, according to his son.
One of the real controversial elements of the story is that Zander wrote “excommunicated” on Hübener’s membership records. Was he really excommunicated?
(Jugendstrafanstalt Berlin) A mural of Helmuth Hübener at a school for juvenile offenders named after him near the Plötzensee Prison in Berlin where he was executed.
It’s much more complicated than that. What happened was Zander wrote that word on a piece of paper. I’m actually glad he did, because it’s very likely that that averted the attention of the Gestapo away from the branch. He had a golden pin that meant he joined the Nazi Party before anybody really had to. Here’s a guy, saying “No, no, he’s not a member of our church anymore.” After the war, church leaders wrote on Hübener’s membership record: “Decision reversed by the First Presidency.” It’s not the same as reversing the excommunication, because that would [suggest] that the excommunication was allowed. On the church’s website it says (something I am trying to get changed) that he was excommunicated, but he was “reinstated” by the First Presidency. It may seem like splitting hairs, but it’s not. Some of the German Saints still have this thing from 1942. “Wow, he broke the 12th Article of Faith. He got himself killed. My gosh, he could have got us killed.” Emotionally, that’s huge. Then the last nail in the coffin is that the church excommunicated him, of course, “so he’s a bad guy. We shouldn’t talk about him.” But you know, for one thing, the church doesn’t excommunicate people for listening to radios…. We believe in being “subject to kings” and so forth. But that’s not the whole story. And I say to Mormons, you have to go to the 98th Section of the Doctrine and Covenants, where the Lord does tell them the whole story. And what he says is, “Look, as far as law, you hold my law, you keep my law.” But then, as far as earthly laws are concerned, “Look, if it’s constitutional…and it protects you in your rights and your freedom and your dignity, then that law you should uphold. Anything less than that comes from evil. He said, therefore you should seek good, honest and wise politicians and work really hard to uphold them, because when the wicked rule, the people mourn. And then he goes on to say, and even if this costs you your life, you will be with me in paradise. So renounce war and proclaim peace. It’s like he wrote that for Helmuth Hübener.
Did Hübener know about the “excommunication” on his membership? Did he go to his death believing himself to be a member?
That “excommunication” was illegitimate, if he even knew about it. I don’t think anybody at the time thought that the excommunication was, you know, was some valid thing. But he saw himself as a Mormon to the end, because in his final letters to several members, he says, “God will be the judge of this matter. I did nothing wrong.”
Why do you think the excommunication wasn’t mentioned in the movie?
I’m told it’s going to be mentioned in the four-part streaming series, which is twice as long.
What do you see as the story’s message for our time?
It’s always relevant, but it’s much more relevant today [in this country] than anywhere else. As I look at the world today, I see a kind of renaissance of neo-totalitarianism. I use the metaphor of a sea of lies and a tsunami of that sea washing up onto our shores. … So this is a really serious problem in our day. The very foundations of this nation are shaking, deeply shaking, and I don’t know a better antidote to that than the simple fact that Hübener found the truth and had the courage to do something about it, to share it with others.
People ask: Why did he throw his life away? Did it do any good?
He didn’t bring down Hitler, true. But there was something in the German soul afterward that knew we should have done better. There should have been more of us. And, in 1989, when in East Germany, which was a pretty nasty communist dictatorship, they started going out of the church on Monday nights with a candle in their hands, a dozen, and then a hundred and a thousand and then hundreds of thousands…and the Berlin Wall fell. I think that’s a late manifestation of what Helmuth was trying to get over and what the other brave resistance fighters were trying to do. I hope the message comes across.
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