Hansjakob Werlen:	So good evening, or good afternoon. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce today's speaker, a [couple things 00:00:09] out, but a pleasure to welcome back to Swarthmore College a most accomplished recent graduate, Benjamin Goossen, highest honors graduate in history and in German studies. 
	Ben, who is currently a graduate student in history at Harvard University, spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the Free University Berlin after receiving the 2013 Lang award for excellence in scholarship from the faculty of Swarthmore College. That this was a very prudent decision is confirmed by today's event because it's a rare undergraduate who has his thesis published by Princeton University Press a couple years after graduating. 
	I could read here, actually, a rather long list of awards and grants that Ben has received in his very young academic career. But rather than listing all that stuff, I'm going to just say a couple things about Ben as a person, as a student I knew him. When we talk here at Swarthmore about respect for and thoughtful engagement with diverse views, I think of Ben as that exemplary practitioner of that ideal. Ben always connected his intellectual gifts with kind interest in other people and with an unwavering dedication to social responsibility. And it was that keen ethical intelligence and helpful personality that was always taking a genuine interest, not just in the Swarthmore College community but in communities beyond the college campus. 
	Ben is also a great lover of nature and an accomplished mountaineer. And I always loved hearing about the newest mountaineering adventures that you were engaged in when you were a student here and I hope you do that still. Ben has succeeded in combining his adventurous spirit with his academic endeavors. His Harvard dissertation entitled "The Year of the Earth 1957-1958: Cold War Science and the Making of Global Consciousness," will take him on an 18 month journey retracing the steps of scientists, explorers, politicians, and journalists of 60 years ago. 
	Ben will do research in archives at universities, research stations in every continent or on every continent, including Argentina, Morocco, India, Japan, Germany, and Australia. Today's talk, while covering substantial geographical expanses is a little less far flung but very topical after some recent events and it is entitled, "Researches the Nazis from Swarthmore to Paraguay." Please join me in extending a very warm welcome back to Ben Goossen.
Ben Goossen:	Hello, everybody. Thank you so much [Hans Yaggin 00:03:06]. That's a wonderful introduction. And it's, of course, wonderful to be back here at Swarthmore College to see so many familiar faces in the crowd and also some new ones is a real joy. I feel like this is a homecoming of sorts in part because I have given a number of talks before in this particular space. I have a long and fond connection to the Swarthmore College libraries, particularly because of the A. Edward Newton book collecting competition. 
	So, some of you have been here for those events and it's absolutely terrific to be back, particularly on this wonderful day. Thanks also to Pam and Wendy and Chris for inviting me to speak and for organizing the event, and the history department, the German studies section, peace and conflict studies, and to the Swarthmore College libraries, including the Friends Historical Library and the Swarthmore College Peace Collection for sponsoring this talk. 
	It's truly a pleasure to be here to talk to you about "Chosen Nation Mennonites in German in a Global Era," the title of this book that I first drafted as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. It's a homecoming not only for me but also for this particular project, which began right here in this building. And I'd like to give you, in the following 40 minutes or so, a sense of what it was like for me to research this project, to write it, and also to do a little bit of advocacy work speaking about it and so forth in the recent months since it's come out. 
	My relationship to the Swarthmore College libraries and to research here on Swarthmore campus goes back quite a long way. This is a image of my very first trip to the Swarthmore College Peace Collection back in 1995. I wasn't the one doing the research at that time. It was my mother, Rachael Waltner Goossen, who was researching her own dissertation on Mennonites, particularly Mennonite women who were conscientious objectors or individuals who were opposed to the United States involvement in the second World War. This is a picture that was taken on Swarthmore College's campus. I don't remember this particular trip to Swarthmore. In fact, only remember hearing the Swarthmore College many years later. 
	But this particular trip had a number of significant consequences. One of which was the publication of my mother's dissertation as a book, "Women Against the Good War," which is a fabulous book. I commend it to all of you. But perhaps more relevant for our own context is that this connection that she had as a historian to the wonderful collections here at the Swarthmore College libraries led her to suggest to me one day when I was in high school that I might take a look at Swarthmore College as a place to consider going myself. And so that led me, in 2009, to become a student here where I was involved like all Swattie's in a variety of eccentric activities, including pillow fights in downtown Philadelphia. 
	I also made many wonderful friends, lots of whom are in the audience today. A shout out to the Swarthmore College grounds crew, including lots of you who I see here. So, thanks so much for all the support that you've given me, both in terms of my love of nature and in the nurture that I experienced in your community and the other sort of communities around Swarthmore College during my time here and then on a number of visits back since my graduation in 2013.
	Being at Swarthmore College as a student from 2009 to 2013 was an opportunity for me, like all college students, to kind of explore who I was and what I was interested in and what I wanted to become. And one of the things that I didn't really expect was to be kind of pulled back once I was in this very diverse community in terms of an interest in my home community, a place that I came from and a place that I was interested, in fact, in leaving and sort of getting away from during my college years. 
	I come from a small tightly-knit Mennonite community in central and eastern Kansas. It's a relatively religious place. Mennonites are a small, there's about 3 million worldwide today, Christian denomination. Most Mennonites would identify as protestant and as pacifists. These were sort of Christian pacifists who emphasize humility, simple living, and many of them are closely related, in terms of cultural practices, to the Amish. So, that gives you a little bit of context for the type of community that I came from. 
	Mennonites identify often as being part of a global worldwide diaspora. Here's a map that was produced by one Mennonite scholar in the 1950s that shows Mennonite migrations from central Europe. The sort of narrative that I heard growing up about Mennonites was that they had originated in the 16th Century reformation in Europe. Many of them had been persecuted for their beliefs, which included things like adult baptism, refusal to swear oaths, refusal to serve in state militaries, and opposition to state churches. They were interested in having independent congregations. And because of the repression that was meted out against them by both protestant and Catholic rulers at that time, many of them had spread out across the world, living in predominantly German speaking communities, in places as diverse as Siberia, Manitoba, Paraguay, Brazil, and my own home community in Kansas. 
	Mennonites settlement the Great Plains primarily coming from imperial Russia in the late 19th Century. This included most members of individuals in my family a few generations back. These were folks who were not interested in serving in the state military when universal conscription was instituted in the Russian empire in the 1870s. Many of them coming to Kansas to farm the newly opened land, which was the way in which many of them became famous. So, if you hear about Mennonites in the central part of the United States today, often you hear about them as bringing turkey red wheat and being wheat farmers on the Kansas and Nebraska plains. 
	One thing that was sort of common in the way that I heard about Mennotinism or [anabaptism 00:09:22] growing up was that we, at least my particular branch of the Mennonites, were part of what might be called a kind of German religion. This is a picture of my paternal grandfather, a man named Henry Goossen, who was a minister for most of his life. I knew him as a retired minister, a thoughtful and congenial man, who always arrived at church a half hour early, and who habitually proclaimed himself a proud Prussian. 
	I thought that this was unusual for an avowed pacifist who had spent his life preaching non-resistance, simplicity, and humility from the pulpit. It was also a little bit incongruous with the fact that our family had left from Prussia to come to the central plains of the United States some six generations earlier. And his statements about being a proud Prussian were made a full 60 years after Allied map makers had wiped any country known as Prussia from the European map.
	I also realized just a few minutes ago when sort of going through this presentation on my laptop that he passed away during my first semester when I was at Swarthmore. And so, it's sort of coming back to me now, but I'm realizing that this project, which I began during my first year here at Swarthmore, was in part sort of a desire to sort of reconcile myself with or sort of deal with his legacy in my life as someone who had been very important and who had passed away, but who had also given me sort of a conundrum or a puzzle in terms of thinking about my own identity. 
	On one hand, I thought of myself as part of a small religious group associated with pacifism, humility, and simplicity, sort of the antithesis of pride and earthly nationality, which is what I associated with Prussia, a country that we often think of as being a militarist nation. These two identities are things that my grandfather held in his own mind and body, and that was a tension that I was interested in exploring. 
	So, during my time here at Swarthmore College, I thought about what it would look like to go about developing the tools that would be required in order to excavate this conundrum or this paradox that I had learned to know in my own background in Kansas and through the person of my grandfather. So, here are just a few images of some of the many people who I got to know very well when I was here at Swarthmore. I took the opportunity to major in both history and in German studies, disciplines that gave me an opportunity to think historically and also to learn the language that was required to read early Mennonite documents. I also took classes in religious studies, and in peace and conflict studies, among other departments, which were all sort of geared towards working at a history of Mennonites and German nationalism, which is how I initially framed the project myself.
	I did the very first research for this project right here in McCabe Library, at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, the Friends Historical Library, and through the stacks on, I think, all of the levels. My research was not entirely revolving around this project, as you can see from the picture on the right hand, or on the left hand side here. There is a copy, I discovered, and was very excited about this, along with my roommate Chris Gysler of four years who some of you may know. We discovered, or were told by our librarian friends here, that there is an original copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit" in the rare book rooms upstairs. So, if you're a Tolkien fan, that is a must-see and we were super excited to find that. 
	But, of course, this, despite being a wonderful library, does not have all of the archival records that one would need in order to research a history of Mennonites and German nationalism. So, it became very clear that I would also need to do research in other places around the United States, but also around the world. Stop number one was Germany. This is a map of what Germany would have looked like in the late 19th Century. You can see that Mennonite communities, which are shaded in dark colors, would have been spread across a variety of national borders. 
	There were three major Mennonite communities in central and western Europe in the late 19th Century, one in the northeastern side of this map, one in the northwestern side of the map, and one in the southwest. Each of these communities straddled national borders. In the northeast they would've often spoken both German and Polish. In the northwest, Mennonites would've often spoken German and Dutch. And in the southwest, they often would've spoken both German and French. So, in the late 19th Century, it was by no means certain that Mennonites were necessarily associated with Germanness. Often they were associated with more regional cultures or often with some of these other cultures that we might think of as French, Dutch, or Polish. 
	And so, it's sort of unusual that this narrative developed relatively recently that Mennonites are fundamentally German, as I had heard as a child. And I was interested in knowing where this idea came from. When I was in Europe, both as an undergraduate here and then the subsequent years as a Fulbright scholar, I was affiliated with a number of institutions of higher education, including the Free University of Berlin, the [inaudible 00:14:39], and the University of Frieberg in southern Germany. These were both sort of urban places that were a lot of fun to be a student and then to hang out in. 
	But it turns out that Mennonites, being a predominantly rural culture, at least in central Europe, were not primarily located in these large cities. And so, to do the research that I was interested in, I had to go to more rural spaces, such as this Mennonite stronghold in a very remote town in the Palatinate, a place called [inaudible 00:15:06]. This is the largest Mennonite research center in Europe, it's called the [foreign language 00:15:10]. It looks very cute in this particular picture, but in fact it's actually madness if you go inside. This is the archive, the sort of lower level of the archive where you can see the kinds of papers and books that I was faced with when I showed up here knowing sort of spotty German and having a kind of interest in this rather arcane topic.
	Well, I was able to pour through rare books and rare manuscript collections in a way that was utterly fascinating to me because it gave me a sense of how Mennonites began in the late 19th Century to develop this narrative of being German, something that I found terribly surprisingly, very surprising but also interesting given the sort of larger context of the formation of the German nation state in the 1870s, about 100 years after the United States itself was formed.
	One of the things I set out to inquire about was what happened to those Mennonites who remained in Europe when military service was introduced? A time which prompted my own family to leave over the issue of military service because they were pacifists and come to the United States. It turns out that Mennonites who remained behind were often interested in performing military service as a way of integrating, as they saw it, into nationalizing cultures including German national culture. Here, for example, is a family in the northeastern part of Germany, a place called West Prussia, shortly before the first World War. You can see that they still clearly identify as Mennonite, being oriented around the family Bible, but at the same time they've adopted the trappings of militarist German nationalism, including things like military uniforms, a sailor uniform for the youngest child, things like mustaches, and even the worldly technology of photography. 
	The other thing that I discovered, having had basically no prior knowledge of something that had been more or less hidden from Mennonite communities, including my own, for some 70 years was the fact that Mennonites continued to nationalize with the wider culture around them as they remained in Germany. I had not set out to research this particular aspect of European Mennonite history, but it became apparent to me as I was in Europe doing this research that despite the fact that I had grown up thinking of Mennonites as pacifists who could not possibly have anything to do with the radical right or something as heinous, at least as I learned of it as a young person, as Nazism. But that was, in fact, not the case. And a good number of Mennonites in Europe and also in other places around the world during the 1930s and '40s became deeply interested in national socialism. 
	Just to give you a sense of what that would've looked like, here's an image of Mennonite members of the [Vauffin 00:17:43] SS hoisting a swastika flag in the largest Mennonite colony in Eastern Europe, a place called [Maluchna 00:17:48] in Ukraine on the occasion of a visit from Heinrich Himler, possibly the second most powerful man in the Third Reich at the time during the Second World War, and also the main architect of the Holocaust.
	What shocked me as I got into this research was that there was not merely an interest in Nazism among Mennonites in Europe, but also among groups in other parts of the world. Here, for example, you can see a Mennonite choir performing at a Nazi rally in Winnipeg in Manitoba in 1939. This was extremely late, only a few months before the entry of Britain and Canada into the Second World War. 
	Jumping to yet a third continent, this is an image from the Colony Hall in Farenheim, the Mennonite colony in central Paraguay. Very removed, seemingly, both from Europe and also places like Canada and the United States. But this was a place where Mennonites also had a extreme interest in national socialism. You can see the Nazi slogan, "The common good above the good of the individual," slung above a picture of Adolf Hitler hanging in the main administrative building of this Mennonite colony, deep in a relatively rural area, known as the Chaco.
	As I was doing my research, it became increasingly clear to me that I would have to go visit Paraguay. In part because Paraguay is a totally fascinating place that I had never been to before, but also because it increasingly became apparent to me that Paraguay was, in some ways, a key to understanding Mennonite interest in Nazism and not only in Latin America, but also in multiple continents around the world. Paraguay was a place that in the 1920s and '30s, Mennonite refugees from around the world began coming. They were given blanket entry rights by the Paraguayan government, including freedom from military service and from oaths, as well as complete judicial and administrative jurisdiction over a large percentage of the Paraguayan state. 
	I had known of Paraguay since I was relatively young, often hearing about these refugees who had come there to establish what, at the time, was called a Mennonite state. This was a kind of Zionist-like project that Mennonite leaders in Paraguay, North America, and Europe thought of as a place where individuals who were persecuted, whether in Canada, the Soviet Union, Poland, or elsewhere, would be able to find refuge in times of need. I also learned in the course of my research that in the Paraguayan Mennonite colony of Farenheim in the central Chaco, in the northwest region of the country, around 80% of Mennonites by the late 1930s had signed a document stating that they were willing to settle unconditionally in Hitler's Germany.
	A few years ago, I decided that Paraguay was within my sights and that it was necessary to go there to research this project. I flew into Asuncion, the capital, which is a place of contrast, like many Latin American cities. You can see here in the distance the relatively wealthy, or at least comparatively wealthy, business, financial, and administrative district of Asuncion. In the foreground is one of the largest slums in the country. 
	I got to the Chaco, this region where these Mennonites had settled, by bus. It's about a five hour bus ride along a route that's called the Trans Chaco Highway that goes north through the state. And I was interested in particularly finding this area where Mennonites had settled that was inhabited primarily by indigenous folks, members of the [inaudible 00:21:02] tribe during the late 1920s and early 1930s. 
	At the time, when I was on this bus heading down the Trans Chaco Highway deep into this remote bush jungle, I thought of myself as, in some ways, following the footsteps of other travelers who had come to the Mennonite colonies years before, including this individual, Herbert Vilhelmy, who had arrived in the Chaco during the 1930s. I was in some ways quite different that Vilhelmy. He was a geographer not a historian. He was coming from the University of Keel in the 1930s rather than from the United States. And he was also traveling with funding from the Nazi party. Herbert Vilhelmy was interested in finding Mennonites and other German speakers across Latin America and assessing the degree to which they had retained their so-called German customs and way of life. He was also interested in propagating Nazism and Nazi ideals among the Mennonites and other German speakers that he encountered.
	I first learned to know Vilhelmy in this building. It's called the foreign office and it has a beautiful archival room close to the Schpray in Berlin. If you've ever been to Germany's capital, this is just a few steps from the beautiful museum island, which you may know as home to plundered treasure such as the Pergamon Altar and the Ishtar Gate, which I at least think of as testament in some ways to the huberous of fallen German empires. 
	In the 1930s, it was still conceivable, I think, that Hitler's Reich might last 1,000 years and that's certainly the message that travelers like Vilhelmy brought to the Paraguayan Chaco when they arrived there after their own arduous journey through the bush. It's possible that these were some of the individuals that Vilhelmy talked about, talked to on cool evenings as he showed slides of idyllic German landscapes and spoke of the economic prowess and political will of Adolph Hitler. He was interested in bringing Nazism to this colony. And indeed, this was a place where Mennonites were unusually receptive to the news of national socialism brought by individuals like Vilhelmy.
	The reason for that was that these individuals were themselves refugees who had left from the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. There was a large German speaking Mennonite population in the Soviet Union, which had come under persecution because they were German speaking, because they were religious, and because they were, on average, relatively wealthy. Those were, of course, the three strikes against anybody in the Soviet Union to be labeled as a so-called enemy of the people. And many Mennonites were summarily executed, shipped to forced labor camps, or otherwise harassed by the Soviet government. That led to a large effort to leave the Soviet Union by Mennonites and with the help of the German government in 1929, about 4,000 of these individuals were able to get out of the Soviet Union, which was a deeply unusual event, and were brought to a series of transit camps in Northern Germany.
	While they were there, they learned to become familiar with a rising strand of German nationalism, which was racial German nationalism, the idea that the German people were not merely inheritors of a particular cultural background, literary culture, and language, but that they had something fundamentally German or Aryan in their blood and bone structure. While they were in these transit camps, about 1,000 of these Mennonite refugees were tested by so-called racial anthropologists from the University of Keel, incidentally the same place that Herbert Vilhelmy was working, and they were examined in terms of their pigmentation of their hair and of their skin, and also their bone structure. 
	So, there's a robust literature on the size of Mennonite noses that comes out of this particular encounter. If you want to read something very strange, I commend that to you. But these scientists would essentially measure the different parts of these Mennonite's bodies, sort of assess the degree to which they had blue eyes and blond hair, etc., against different color wheels, and also measure parts of their faces and how tall they were. According to these racial scientists, Mennonites, or at least these particular Mennonites in these transit camps in 1929 and 1930, were more Aryan, this was the language used at the time, than the average German. 
	So you can see how someone like Herbert Vilhelmy, who had access to these kinds of studies, would believe that Mennonites in a place like Paraguay were sort of paragons of German or Aryan culture. They seemed to have preserved their German way of life even in a relatively hostile environment when most people around them were speaking indigenous languages like [inaudible 00:25:44] or colonial languages like Spanish. These Mennonites continued to speak German and produce their German folk ways. 
	That, at least, was the narrative that Vilhelmy gave to his hosts, which was quite laudatory. But he also had a number of reservations about the Mennonites in the Paraguayan Chaco, which he shared in a private letter to the German foreign office, a letter that I was able to find in that archive when I was in Berlin some years ago. What he wrote was deeply interesting to me and somewhat shocking because his view of these Mennonites was not as rosy as he had led them to believe.
	So, I have just a few quotes to give you a sense of how a Nazi geography in the 1930s might have spoken about this diaspora group of Mennonites. There's a few quotes that I'll read you here. These are from Vilhelmy that I've translated into English. 
	The first thing that he said was, "Centuries of isolation and an astounding genealogical tradition have awakened in the Mennonites, the notion that they are an independent race or an independent tribe. Everywhere in the world, observers count the Mennonites not among the German racial groups, nor among the Russians or Canadians, but rather consider them members of their own Mennonite nation." He was critical of this idea that they were there to form a Mennonite state. He went on, "The settlers who limit themselves to Mennonite thinking are the ones who, years earlier, migrated to a remote wilderness to establish an ideal Mennonite state. The group of religious fanatics consider Nazi supporters as being traitors to the Mennonite cause. They consider them to be rebels who would soon lose their Mennonite identity if they were to live scattered among other Germans or Paraguayans."
	And then, and this is truly the most shocking part to me of the letter, he penned what was, at the time, the cardinal insult of national socialist ideology. He classed his hosts as better followers of Abraham than of Hitler. "Jewish history," he wrote, "dominates the Mennonites in all the details. Through the giving of Jewish first names, they seek to compare themselves to the Jewish race. Like the Jews, Mennonites believe the bonds of blood make them not just a single race, but the chosen race of God."
	I found this to be a very curious tension. On one hand, Mennonites were identified or could be identified by Nazi scholars as the most Aryan group that there was. In fact, what made scholars like Vilhelmy so interested in Mennonites was the fact that most of them lived not in Germany itself, only about 13 thousand Mennonites lived in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, but that of the half million members living worldwide, most of them lived outside of Germany. And despite the fact that they lived outside of Germany and often had for hundreds of years, many of them continued to speak German and to advance German folk ways. 
	According to Nazi scholarship produced during the 1930s, Mennonites had a so-called colonial potential, some 14 times greater than that of German protestants and an astounding 50 times that of German Catholics. During the 1930s, Mennonites were quite literally the poster children of maintaining Aryan identity outside of German borders. 
	These are two posters from a 1935 film produced by the Nazi party that were shown widely in Germany. This was a kind of Nazi blockbuster. And it was about Mennonites, a small Mennonite colony in the Soviet Union. You can see how Mennonites were kind of coded in this visual imagery. On the left hand side, you see the villain of the film, a sort of stereotyped kind of Semitically coded member of the Red Army, a Red Army captain, who's shown in this kind of demonic red communist light. And on the right hand side, you can see the hero of the film. This is the Mennonite elder or bishop of the congregation who's shown in these kind of chiseled agrarian, Aryan features. 
	The plot of this film, which I found totally fascinating, was that the small Mennonite community in the Soviet Union had lived for generations in peace, basically not interacting with anybody else in the Russian empire. But with the communist revolution in 1917, they had come under Bolshevik rule and had been suppressed by the Red Army, which was occupying their village. So, it's clearly a short of fight against German Aryan ideals, this German speaking community, and Bolshevik oppressors. 
	I have just a very short clip from this film, which I would like to show you. I think it gives you a sort of sense of some of the ambiguities of Mennonites as being depicted by national socialists during the 1930s. It's about a minute and a half long. It comes from about a third of the way through the film. It's in German, but there are English language subtitles, so hopefully you can follow along. But this will give you a sense of what it would've looked like to see Mennonites on the big screen in 1935 in Nazi Germany. 
	This comes about a third of the way, as I said, through the film. And what's happening in this scene is that the elder or bishop of the congregation, who's on the left, is arguing that Mennonites should retain their traditional pacifism and turn the other cheek and be receptive to these Communists who have invaded their village. He's arguing, in this scene, with the man on the left, who represents the kind of young men of the colony who's arguing that Mennonites should abandon their historical principle of pacifism and take up arms against their Bolshevik oppressors. I'll play it for you here.
	[foreign languag 00:31:15].
	So, you can see that there was some ambivalence on the part of national socialists to Mennonites. They were interested, often, in the racial aspect of the Mennonite church, but were deeply skeptical of Mennonite theology, particularly this historic emphasis on pacifism. When Mennonite, or excuse me, when Nazi anthropologists, geographers, linguists, biologists, and other racial scientists fanned out from Germany looking for Mennonite communities in remote deserts, jungles, and prairies, they often came back with relatively mixed reviews.
	For example, here you can see the opinion of a Nazi anthropologist who visited a Heterite community in Manitoba. He called them a Christian Communist sect. Communists, of course, being the major enemies of the Nazis at this period. This was not a compliment. 
	Nazi anthropologists were often deeply skeptical of very conservative Anabaptists, particularly those who refused to drive automobiles, use electricity, or maintain a so-called living relationship with Germany. When they visited Amish, and conservative old colony Mennonites in places like northern Mexico or rural Canada, they called them "probably the strangest spiritually and culturally insane splinter of the German nation." 
	These individuals, these groups, had [inaudible 00:33:42] been ossified, according to these Nazi anthropologists, since before 1800. And one of the charges was that their blood had been weakened and that they had become degenerate, language that was often reserved for individuals who the Nazis were persecuting at this time, particularly the Jews, through so-called pacifist inbreeding. This pacifist inbreeding, this sort of language of degeneracy because of their faith, according to many Nazi scholars is what had led many of these conservative Anabaptists to turn their back on the German nation, as these Nazis would have seen it. 
	Of course, they were much more positive about Mennonites who had an active relationship to Germany and were enthusiastic about national socialism, particularly those in the Farenheim colony in Paraguay. 
	So, it was very interesting for me to go and meet many of the descendants of these individuals who had met Vilhelmy and other Nazi scholars during the 1930s. Mennonites still live in the Paraguay, in the Chaco in Paraguay today. Many of them remain German speaking and remain in these relatively closed German speaking colonies. Here, you can see a number of acquaintances and friends of mine outside a German language Mennonite church in the Paraguayan Chaco. And one of the interesting things is that they continue to maintain a belief that Anabaptism or Mennontinism, at least in the Chaco, is fundamentally a German religion or a religion that comes from a sort of German origin. 
	That's, of course, something that I find to be not quite commensurate with the demographic reality of the Mennonite church today. This is a map that was produced by the Mennonite world conference two years ago. It shows the demographic reality of Mennonite congregations across the world in the 21st Century. You can see that most Anabaptists, in fact, are individuals of color, often living on current or former mission stations, and in evangelized congregations in places like Congo and Ethiopia and India and in Indonesia. 
	Even in a place like Paraguay, about two thirds of the Mennonites, in fact, are not individuals who I'd identify as white or as German speaking. About a third of them are Latino and about a third of them are indigenous, including members of the Emlat or Langua tribe that lived in the land the first white Mennonite settlers came to in the 1920s. 
	Nevertheless, despite the fact that most Mennonites in Paraguay are individuals of color, the disparities between the economic and social and even religious practices of different members within the Mennonite church in Paraguay are deeply unequal. Here, for example, you can see a shanty town that has been built for displaced persons in Asuncion because of flooding of the Paraguayan River in 2016. You would never find a white German speaking Mennonite living in a place like this. German speaking Mennonites in Paraguay earn, on average, about 45 thousand US dollars a year. That's an enormous sum that goes quite a long way in a place like Paraguay. It's about 8 times the national average and some 80 times that of the average per capita income of indigenous Paraguayans.
	That posed certainly some ethical issues for me as I was researching in the Paraguayan Chaco. I found that I was often welcomed by these communities largely because I conformed to what it looked like to be a settler colonist. I spoke the right language, German. I had the right last name, there are lots of Goossen's running around the Chaco. And I could practice the right [shibalis 00:37:22] and passwords in terms of what it meant to practice Mennonite faith by going to church on Sundays. I knew the right prayers and knew the right foods, things like [sweebock 00:37:32] and [verenica 00:37:32] that I was familiar with from growing up in central and eastern Kansas.
	This was a family that took me in. I stayed with them a couple of times. Their name is Friesian. They are wonderful people. This is a photo that I showed to my class when I was teaching a course on ancestry at Harvard this last semester. And when I was returning from Paraguay after a trip over spring break. One of the first things that one of my students said was, "You look like you could be a member of their family." And I though that was really astute because that's precisely the way that it felt. It felt like I was being welcomed by members of a close-knit extended family. 
	That, of course, raised a number of questions for me. What did it mean to be researching the history of white nationalism and Nazism at the same time that I was cashing in on my own cultural privilege? I had a wonderful time in Paraguay, as well as in the communities I visited in North America and across Europe. But my access to documents and to communities was often facilitated by my white skin and my cultural privilege as well as sort of underwritten by the labor of local individuals of color. 
	It was also a deeply rewarding time, to be traveling and to be researching. I was able to access many documents that would be unavailable to people who didn't look like me, including to women and especially to people of color. I was also able to meet with individuals who had lived through many of the events that I was researching. This is the colony administrative building in Farenheim in the Chaco. 
	Just a few feet from this building is a Mennonite retirement home where I met folks like a man named Nicholas Goossen, a feisty conversationalist who's 90 years old but continuous to bike about 20 km per day. He was a terrifically interesting person. He shares my last name and undoubtedly a good bit of my DNA. His arm also bears the hallmark tattoo of the [Vauffin 00:39:26] SS. Like many individuals in Paraguay, he was not born in Latin America, but rather in the Mennonite colonies in Eastern Europe. He grew up in the period of the Soviet Union and experienced Nazi occupation during the Second World War, at which time he was considered not as Herbert Vilhelmy might have classed him as Semitic, but rather by Nazi occupiers as being fundamentally Aryan. 
	These are drawings done by Nazi artist named Heinz Himdorf who visited the Mennonite colonies in 1943, depicting individuals who Nicholas Goossen might have known as a young man. What's important here is not these individual's names. They have not been preserved in historical record, but rather the fact that they are portrayed with classic Aryan features.
	Between 1941 and 1943, the large Mennonite colonies encompassing some 35 thousand individuals located in Ukraine, came under Nazi occupation where they experienced some of the bloodiest fighting and some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War. Here, you can see a map of the Mennonite colonies, which are shaded in black. To the south is the Black Sea, the Sea of [inaudible 00:40:29] is to the right. Crimea, which was annexed by Putin recently is at the bottom. All of these Mennonite colonies came under Nazi occupation. And because of their experiences under Bolshevism during the previous more than a decade, they had decided to welcome the Nazi occupiers not as invaders but as liberators from Bolshevism. 
	Here, you can see a parade that has gathered to welcome Heinrich Himler in October of 1942. Nicholas Goossen may be one of the young men in the calvary squadron organized by the Lauffen SS here in the front of the photo.
	Just to give you a sense of what the Nazi occupation would've looked like for Mennonites in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, I have two very quick propaganda films that were filmed by Nazi propagandists in these Mennonite colonies. I think they're pretty interesting and give you sort of a sense of what this occupation would have looked like. The first clip comes from the oldest Mennonite colony in Ukraine, which is called [Corditsa 00:41:28]. It doesn't have any sound, but I'll narrate it as it goes along.
	So, it opens with a banner, which says, "The colony of Corditsa welcomes the Reich minister." They're welcoming Alfred Rosenberg who was the main administrator of the occupied eastern territories during this period of the Second World War. This is the summer of 1942. And here you can see these Mennonites and other locals arrayed as Alfred Rosenberg and his entourage of Nazi officers comes around the corner. The Mennonites are giving the Hitler salute with lots of swastika flags. This is Johann Epp, who was the Mennonite mayor of Corditsa. The entire colony included a total of about 19 villages. There's also Ukrainians in traditional dress who are here. And I think that this is the most telling moment of the film. This is a young boy, presumably a Mennonite, who despite having lived under Nazi occupation for less than a year, knows that when Alfred Rosenberg gives him his hand to shake, he should instead give the Nazi salute.
	This is the second and final clip and this comes from the largest Mennonite colony of [Maluchna 00:42:34], somewhat to the south. This is not of any particular event but rather a propaganda series that would've been shown in news reals across the Nazi empire to show what it would've looked like to live in a allegedly idyllic, agrarian colony. Note how peaceful this looks, but also keep in your mind that this was occurring at the same time that there was a brutal total war being waged relatively nearby on the eastern front. 
	So, here you can see this kind of agrarian setup in the front with the animals. This is a sign that reads, [Halpstatt 00:43:10], the colony was renamed Halpstatt, which was a more German sounding name from the original Ukrainian Maluchna. It's labeled as a German colony. Here is a map of the re-organized colony. It now includes things like a SS barracks. These, again, are presumably Mennonite children wearing swastika armbands, who are pointing out the sort of re-organized structure or layout of this village. 
	And then, the remainder of the clip shows them walking into a building, which is called a [foreign language 00:43:38], which means the German store. This would've been a segregated grocery store that only German speakers, Mennonites, and other German speakers would've been able to enter. The whole Mennonite colony system was segregated with these kinds of segregated grocery stores, but also theaters and other buildings that would've been accessible to German speakers, but not to their neighbors, including Russian speakers, Ukrainian speakers, and particularly Jews. 
	At the same time that the SS was meting out generous welfare benefits to these Mennonite communities, the same organization was committing genocide on a massive scale, initiating a process that has become known worldwide as the Holocaust. It was in this part of Eastern Europe in makeshift graves, in secluded barnyards, in ravines, and in urban ghettos that the SS through a process of roving killing units known as [foreign language 00:44:35] group under task forces initiated the Holocaust. They would round up Jews, forced them to dig mass graves, and shoot them. Others loaded them into gas vans where they were asphyxiated. Other Jews were forced to remove the bodies before they, too, were killed. About 1.2 millions Jews were murdered in Ukraine during 1941 and 1942. That was about 98% of the local Jewish population, only 2% survived the war.
	These statistics can be given in marked contrast to the fate of Mennonites in Eastern Europe during the Second World War, who were treated as members of the racial Aryan elite by the occupying national socialists. And even when the war began to go very badly for the Nazis on the eastern front, especially following the loss at Stalingrad in 1943, as the [Veramoft 00:45:25] retreated, it was decided by the SS and military leaders to bring virtually all of these Mennonites who had remained in this part of Europe with the retreating army. So, virtually all 35 thousand of these Mennonites accompanied the Vauffin SS and the Veramoft westward out of Ukraine, often being resettled in camps in occupied Poland or in Germany itself. 
	Just as the military was pushed westward by the Red Army in 1943, the Red Army continued to advance during the spring of 1945 and by May, Hitler was dead and Germany had surrendered completely and unconditionally. This left, however, a problem for these thousands of Mennonite refugees, many of which had actively identified as German during the war. Because of their collaboration with national socialism, they were due for repatriation or forceable return to the Soviet Union. In the minds of many of these individuals, that meant clearly that they would experience sexual assault, perhaps summary execution, and certainly years, in the best case scenario, of hard labor in Siberian gulags. That meant that many of them fled westward into parts of western Germany that were occupied not by the Soviets, but especially by the British and the Americans. 
	There, they were gathered into refugee camps by a North American Mennonite organization called the Mennonite Central Committee, based actually here in Pennsylvania, which claimed, along with many of these refugee charges, that these Mennonites were not German but in fact members of their own Mennonite nation that had not collaborated with the Nazis but, in fact, had been persecuted during the war like the Jews. Mennonite Central Committee printed thousands of these so-called Mennonite passports that claimed that the Mennonites were of so-called Dutch origin, which then allowed many of these individuals, despite prohibitions on giving exit visas to individuals who had identified as German during the war, these sort of claims of Mennonite ethnicity or Dutch nationality allowed a majority of these refugees who arrived in Mennonite Central Committee camps to leave on transportation vessels funded by the United Nations, which went to places like Canada and to Paraguay.
	This is a story, then, not only of collaboration with national socialism, but also the cover up of this widespread collaboration by prominent Mennonite institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. It's a story that has not surfaced in any substantive public way in multiple countries for around 70 years. And, in fact, the first public discussions of this in a sort of sustained way across national borders only began occurring in 2015. And so, it was in the middle of researching this project that there became this broad public interest in the history of Mennonites and national socialism. And it's been one of my privileges to be part of that process of uncovery.
	This is an image of the very first conference, which was held by the German Mennonite Historical Society about Mennonites and Nazism in 2015 in the city of Munster. You can see on the right hand side the president of the historical society welcoming guests who are coming from multiple continents to discuss this important history. The second such conference occurred this past March in Paraguay. Here, you can see attendees gathering outside of the conference building during a coffee break. And this conference was about Mennonites and fascism in Latin America. 
	These two initial conferences will be followed by a third one, which is going to be in Kansas. It's sponsored by Mennonite Church USA, which is the largest governing body of Mennonites in the United States. And this topic is going to focus, unlike the previous conferences which were primarily about Mennonite experiences under Nazism, on the experiences of those who suffered under Nazism, this conference is on Mennonites and the Holocaust and is going to be held March 16th and 17th. So, certainly an event that you can follow along with if you're interested in learning more. 
	This topic, of course, is not only of interest to the Mennonite church, but also of broader interest to those who are concerned with the rise of white nationalism including Neo Nazi and KKK movements in the United States and beyond. We're currently living in the largest resurgence of right wing nationalism on a trans national scale since the end of the Second World War, as revealed most notably by the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia three weeks ago. 
	This is a topic that I have come to understand, sadly, is not merely relegated to history, but also one that has ongoing relevance for my denomination, for the wider US society, and also for world politics, economics, and society. It's one that I think it would behoove all of us to think about and certainly one that I am interested in continuing to address in the following weeks and months.
	That's my presentation. Thanks so much for listening. And I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have.