Do You Know The Country Without Freedom?
For the moment, we have dropped seven words from the following quote.
“Do you know the country without freedom,
the country of terror and tyranny?
Yes, you know it well, but are afraid to talk about it.
They have intimidated you to such an extent
that you don't dare talk for fear of reprisals.
Yes you are right…
Through their unscrupulous terror tactics
against young and old, men and women,
they have succeeded in making you
spineless puppets to do their bidding.”
Helmuth Hubener
Because we’ve witnessed the dedication of young men of his Church on “mission” in Bolivia, Chile, Peru and Venezuela, it is uncomfortable to write about Helmuth Hubener. It’s difficult to walk the knife blade-thin line between praising this 16-17-year-old and disparaging his Church’s elders of eighty years ago.
The missing words give perspective: “Yes you are right; it is Germany - Hitler Germany!”
Hubener was just thirteen years old and had been a proud Boy Scout before the Nazis disbanded the organization and forced kids to join Hitler Youth. Having witnessed members of the Hitler Youth participating in the horror of the November 1938 “night of broken glass” – Kristallnacht, Hubener abandoned the Nazi movement.
Announcement of Helmuth Hubener’s Execution, October 27, 1942
He also watched as elders of his Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) joined the Nazi Party and his congregation became increasingly supportive of the Third Reich – a common occurrence as Mormons became increasingly fearful that they, like Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and the disabled would be persecuted.
When his older brother, a soldier, gave him a shortwave radio, sixteen-year-old Hubener secretly tuned in to forbidden German-language BBC broadcasts, hearing descriptions of Nazi Germany that were dramatically different from Hitler’s propaganda system of disinformation. His BBC link to the outside world opened hm to the racism and manipulation of the Reich and the fact that Germany was losing the war.
Following his conscience rather than his fears, Hubener enlisted the aid of three trusted friends from St. Georg LDS – with over 400 members, the largest Mormon community in central Hamburg: Rudolf “Rudi” Wobbe, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Gerhard Duwer. Using a Mormon branch (congregation) typewriter, the young men printed and distributed up to 60 pamphlets that included information from the BBC and called their fellow Germans to resist Hitler. They pinned their pamphlets to public bulletin boards, left them in phone booths, and stuck them in the pockets of strangers. One bulleting announced:
“The Führer has promised you that 1942 will be decisive and this time he will stop at nothing to keep his promise. He will send you by the thousands into the fires in order to finish the crime he started. By the thousands your wives and children will become widows and orphans. And for nothing!”
Helmuth Hübener’s “mug shot,” February 5, 1942
Because BBC frankly reported Allied victories and losses, as well as Allied and Axis casualties, he told his friends, “I’m convinced they’re telling the truth and we’re (the German authorities) lying. Our news reports sound like a lot of boasting – a lot of propaganda.”
When a coworker observed Hubener preparing another pamphlet and reported him to Nazi authorities, he was arrested on February 5, 1942 – less than a month after turning seventeen. Hubener and his friends were imprisoned, intimidated and tortured for ten weeks in Gestapo prisons in Hamburg and Berlin before being taken to Berlin’s Plotzensee Prison, the site of sham trials and summary executions.
When the Nazi head of Hubener’s Mormon congregation learned of his arrest, he excommunicated the boy from the Church.
During his trial, Helmuth deliberately antagonized the presiding judges of the “People’s Court” in an effort to draw attention from his friends, so that they would receive lighter sentences. When as judge asked if he really thought Germany would lose the war, he asked, “Don’t you?” His ploy worked. They were sentenced to labor camps; on October 11, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit high treason and furthering the enemy’s cause. His alleged “crimes” gave the Nazis legal justification for his execution as a minor and the torture he had already suffered.
When asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, Helmuth responded, “You have sentenced me to death for telling the truth. My time is now – but your time will come.”
Helmuth Hübener, flanked by Rudolf "Rudi" Wobbe (left) and Karl-Heinz Schnibbe (right)
On October 27, 1942, Plotzensee guards informed the seventeen-year-old that Hitler had personally refused to commute his sentence. Hours later, he was executed by guillotine – the youngest person to be sentenced and executed by the “People’s Court.”
Only one of Helmut’s letters from prison survived the firebombing of Hamburg. In it he wrote:
“I am very grateful to my Heaven Father
that my miserable life will come to an end tonight –
I could not bear it any longer anyway.
My Father in Heaven knows that I have done nothing wrong…
I know that God lives and He will be the Just Judge…
I look forward to seeing you in a better world!
Your friend and brother in the Gospel,
Helmuth
As the United States approaches Election Day 2024, a four times-indicted, found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records, thrice-divorced, six times bankrupted would-be (“on the first day’) dictator threatens arrests and imprisonment at Guantanamo for Americans who disagree with or challenge him, Helmuth Hubener stands not in judgment or condemnation (although both may be merited) but as a prophetic warning.
Ruddi Wobbe’s identification card indicates that he was a political prisoner.
Excommunicated when his actions were seen as endangering the Church itself, today Helmuth Hubener is hailed as a hero. The Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star (usually shortened to Millennial Star) is the longest continuously published periodical of the LDS Church. On December 14, 2021, LDS member Geoff B. posted to MS:
“The story of Helmuth Hubener is one of heroic opposition to an evil regime. This much is clear. But it also should raise questions for all of us regarding our own stances on moral issues. In short: when must we speak out against tyranny in our own lives?...
“Hubener’s case raises hundreds of moral questions for future generations to consider. Hubener broke the law, yet he is seen as a hero today. How do we know when laws are immoral and can be broken?...
“I could go on and on about the moral dilemmas raised by Hubener’s case. One of the primary lessons, it seems to me, is that people who are quick to condemn others as they struggle with worldly moral issues are on the wrong track. Life is always more complex than it seems. Hubener was certainly not considered a hero in the 1940s, but just 20 years later he began to be lionized….”
From the Holocaust Memorial Museum:
“Jehovah's Witnesses were subjected to intense persecution under the Nazi regime. Nazi leaders targeted Jehovah's Witnesses because they were unwilling to accept the authority of the state, because of their international connections, and because they were strongly opposed to both war on behalf of a temporal authority and organized government in matters of conscience…
“In the concentration camps, all prisoners wore markings of various shapes and colors so that guards and camp officers could identify them by category. Jehovah's Witnesses were marked by purple triangular patches…
“At least 3,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps (this figure includes at least 200–250 Dutch, 200 Austrians, 100 Poles, and between 10 and 50 Belgians, French, Czechs, and Hungarians).
“An estimated 1,000 German Jehovah's Witnesses died or were murdered in concentration camps and prisons during the Nazi era, as did 400 Witnesses from other countries, including about 90 Austrians and 120 Dutch persons.”
Plotzensee Prison
The Museum reminds us:
The Nazi regime harassed and targeted gay men and lesbians by banning their organizations, shuttering their presses, and raiding and closing their meeting places… For gay men, harassment worsened over the course of the 1930s, eventually turning into brutal persecution. Beginning in 1935, the Nazi regime used a revised version of Paragraph 175 (that criminalized sexual relations between men) to arrest large numbers of men… Some of these men were sent to concentration camps….”
Oh, but that could never happen in the United States and he’s just spouting-off and using hyperbole. Perhaps. Except the Holocaust Memorial Museum reminds us:
“After the Nazis came to power in 1933, police in Germany began more rigorous enforcement of pre-Nazi legislation against Roma (Gypsies)… The Nazis identified Roma as having ‘alien blood’ (artfremdes Blut) and, therefore, as being racially ‘undesirable.” The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, one of two Nuremberg Race Laws adopted by the Nazis in September 1935, was expanded in November to include the Romani population.
“A definition of ‘Gypsy,’ therefore, was essential in order to undertake systematic persecution of the Romani population. To do this, the Nazis turned to ‘racial hygiene’ (Rassenhygiene), also known as eugenics….”
Execution site at the Plotzensee Prison
The Holocaust Memorial Trust (“The Roma Genocide.” www.hmd.org.uk) reports:
“Historians estimate that up to 500,000 Roma and Sinti [a subgroup of Roma or Romani people] people were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Many were imprisoned, used as forced labour or subjected to forced sterilization and medical experimentation.
“Roma and Sinti men, women and children were targeted for persecution and imprisonment, with a specific focus of clearing Berlin before the city hosted the Olympic Games in 1936….”
But, but, but…
“Many Germans did not want to be reminded of individuals who did not measure up to their concept of a ‘master race’ and were considered ‘unfit’ or ‘handicapped.’ People with physical and mental disabilities were viewed as ‘useless’ to society, a threat to Aryan genetic purity, and, ultimately, ‘unworthy of life.’ At the beginning of World War II, individuals with mental or physical disabilities were targeted for murder in what the Nazis called the ‘T-4,’ or ‘euthanasia,’ program.
“The Euthanasia Program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which individuals with disabilities should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings…
“Despite public protests in 1941, the Nazi leadership continued this program in secret throughout the war. About 200,000 people with disabilities were murdered between 1940 and 1945….”
The guillotine at Plotzensee Prison
But, but, but…
Consider (“Catholic priests, nuns were among those killed by Nazis.” Catholic News Service, May 10, 2020):
“Half of all Poland’s Catholic priests, monks and nuns suffered repression during the six years of World War II, with more than 2,800 killed at Nazi and Soviet hands. Researchers like Anna Jagodzinska of Poland’s National Remembrance Institute say clergy were particularly targeted as upholders of national culture and identity.
“Of the nearly 2,800 clergy of all denominations incarcerated at the Nazi concentration camp of Dachau, 1,773 were priests from Poland, of whom 868 were killed. Others were subjected to exhausting labor and pseudo-medical experiments….”
[EDITORS’ NOTE: Despite the almost fifty priests, nuns and lay men and women who died at the hands of the Nazis and their Axis-of-evil and who have either been declared saints or whose process of canonization remains under way, we are too ashamed of the Catholic Church leaders who raised their hand in Nazi salutes and remained silent in the face of horror to even write about them. Clearly, they don’t deserve mentioned with Helmut Hubener.]
When United States Senators Linsey Graham (SC), Josh Hawley (MO), Yale Law- educated vice presidential candidate JD Vance (OH), Ted Cruz (TX), Rick Scott (FL), and their cohorts advocate for a man who married two immigrants and fathered four children by them and accuses immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the nation, the story of Helmut Hubener becomes critical.
The execution chamber where Helmuth Hübener was beheaded on October 27, 1942
Standing, even today, as a quiet sentinel against hatred and cowardice, as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints honors him and bows in shame for its institutional cowardice and the protection of its self-interest, we pray in thanksgiving for a seventeen-year-old German boy whose youthful and courageous spirit shouts from the grave,
“Do you know the country without freedom,
the country of terror and tyranny?
Yes, you know it well, but are afraid to talk about it.
They have intimidated you to such an extent
that you don't dare talk for fear of reprisals.
Yes you are right…
Through their unscrupulous terror tactics
against young and old, men and women,
they have succeeded in making you
spineless puppets to do their bidding.”
Helmuth Hubener
“They have succeeded in making you spineless puppets to do their bidding.”
History’s greatest condemnation.