How the Mennonite Church Covered Up Its Members’ Collaboration in the Holocaust

Fleeing religious persecution in post-Reformation Germany, large numbers of Mennonites came to the New World, where they and other sects became known as the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” Others settled in what is now Ukraine, where they benefited from the same religious toleration that attracted Jews in the 16th and 17th centuries. Also like Jews, they would be routinely attacked and massacred by anti-Communist forces during the Russian Civil War, and then subjected to expropriation and persecution by the victorious Bolsheviks. The similarities end, however, during World War II, when German invaders saw the German-speaking Mennonites as fellow Aryans. After the war, the Mennonite church’s central philanthropic body, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), claimed that East European Mennonites “were brutally treated by the German occupation authorities” and “did not receive favored treatment.” Ben Goossen tells a different story: