Helmuth Hubener

Helmuth Hübener, born 8 January 1925 in Hamburg – excecuted 27 October 1942 in Berlin, came from an unpolitical family. Like his mother and grandparents, he belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. His adoptive father, an SS officer, gave him the name Hübener.

Helmuth Hübener was once a Boy Scout, but after the organization was suppressed by the Nazis, he belonged to the Hitler Youth, although he was not always comfortable with its drilling, nor did he find Kristallnacht to his liking. When the church congregation to which he belonged undertook to bar Jews from its religious services, Hübener found himself repelled by the new policy.

After Hübener finished middle school in 1941, he began an apprenticeship in administration at the Hamburg Social Authority (Sozialbehörde). He met other apprentices there, some of them with a communist family background, and they got him listening to enemy radio broadcasts, which was strictly forbidden in Nazi Germany, being considered a form of treason. In the summer of that same year, Hübener began listening to the BBC by himself, and used what he had heard to compose various anti-fascist texts and anti-war leaflets, of which he also made many copies. The leaflets were designed to bring to people's attention how skewed the official reports about the war from Berlin were, and also to point out Adolf Hitler's, Joseph Goebbels's, and other leading Nazis' criminal behaviour. Other themes covered by Hübener's writings were the war's futility, and Germany's looming defeat. He even mentioned the mistreatment sometimes meted out in the Hitler Youth.

In the autumn of 1941, he managed to involve three of his friends in his unlawful listening, Karl-Heinz Schnibbe and Rudolf Wobbe, who were later also co-workers, and later Gerhard Düwer as well. Hübener also had them help him distribute about 60 different pamphlets, all containing material from the British broadcasts, and all consisting of typewritten copies. They distributed them all over Hamburg, using such methods as surreptitiously pinning them on bulletin boards, sticking them through letterboxes, and stuffing them in coat pockets.

In early February 1942, Helmuth Hübener was arrested by the Gestapo at his workplace at the Hamburger Bieberhaus. While trying to translate the pamphlets into French, and trying to have them distributed among prisoners of war, he had been noticed by a Party member, Heinrich Mohns, who had denounced him. (Mohns was jailed after the war, but freed by the Bundesgerichtshof by the early 1950s).

On 11 August 1942, Hübener's case was tried at the Volksgerichtshof in Berlin, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit high treason and treasonous furthering of the enemy's cause. He was sentenced not only to death, but also to permanent loss of his civil rights, and on 27 October, at the age of 17, he was beheaded at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. His two friends, Schnibbe and Wobbe, who had also been arrested, were given lengthy prison sentences of 5 and 10 years respectively.

It was highly unusual, even for the Nazis, to try an underaged defendant, much less sentence him to death, but the court stated that Hübener had shown more than average intelligence for a boy his age. This, along with his general and political knowledge, and his behaviour before the court, made Hübener, in the court's eyes, a boy with a far more developed mind than was usually to be found in someone of his age. For this reason, the court stated, Hübener was to be punished as an adult.

It was not at all surprising that Hübener's lawyers and his mother appealed for clemency in his case, hoping to have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, but truly astonishing was that the Berlin Gestapo also did. In their eyes, the fact that Hübener had confessed fully and shown himself to be still morally uncorrupted were points in Hübener's favour. The Reich Youth Leadership (Reichsjugendführung) would have none of it, however. They said that the danger posed by Hübener's activities to the German people's war effort made the death penalty necessary. On 15 October 1942, the Nazi Ministry of Justice upheld the Volksgerichtshof's verdict. Hübener was only told of the Ministry's decision at 1:05 p.m. on the scheduled day of execution and beheaded at 8:13 p.m.

Owing to his political activities, Hübener was excommunicated by his own church, but posthumously reinstated some years after the war..

A youth centre and a pathway in Hamburg are nowadays named for Helmuth Hübener. The latter runs between Greifswalder Straße and Kirchenweg in Sankt Georg.

From one of Helmuth's many pamphlets:
"German boys! 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 and extent that you don't dare talk for fear of reprisals. Yes you are right; it is Germany — Hitler Germany! Through their unscrupulous terror tactics against young and old, men and women, they have succeeded in making you spineless puppets to do their bidding." —

(The article above, and some interesting pictures, can be found on Wikipedia.)

Karl-Heinze Schnibbe, Rudi Wobbe, and Helmuth Hubener's two half brothers, Hans and Gerhard Kunkel, were among the German immigrants who made Salt Lake City their home in the early 1950s.
"We were not so naive to bring Hitler down to his knees. Helmuth wanted the people to think ... think." Schnibbe says.
At the time, few in Germany dared to think for themselves. Fewer resisted.

Helmuth was eventually arrested and executed for his actions but not before the church excommunicated him for “conduct unbecoming a member of the church”

Rudi Wobbe talks about how even a branch president wasn't exactly helpful and was discrimintory because young Huebener typed some of the leaflets on the typewriterbelonging to his LDS branch and recruited two fellow Mormons to distribute them. In doing so, Huebener alienated some Church members, including his branch president, a member of the Nazi party, who excommunicated the young political dissenter shortly after his 1942 arrest. Huebener’s membership was reinstated posthumously in 1946 with a note that reads, “Excommunicated by mistake.”.

Huebener’s life has been the subject of several films, articles, books, and an award-winning play by Thomas F. Rogers. An article, “The Führer’s New Clothes: Helmuth Hubener and theMormons in the Third Reich” by Alan F. Keele and Douglas F.Tobler, was published in the November 1980 SUNSTONE. (go to: page 20)

The following excerpts are from the article by Alan F Keele and Douglas F. Tobler:

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus drew the division between secular and religious life with a single sentence: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." But the precise location of that boundary has proved to be a continuing problem for members of the Mormon church. Whereas earlier Latter-day Saints often faced the challenge of anarchic violence unchecked by civil authorities, in our own time Saints have more often faced the opposite dilemma: how should they respond to a totalitarian government's demands for total, exclusive allegiance? Helmuth Hubener was one of many Saints who struggled to sort out their conflicting loyalties. His decisions as a devout Latter-day Saint ultimately led to his execution for high treason against the German state.

These events, however, can only be understood in the context of a tense, suspicion-filled situation. Gestapo men had been attending branch meetings, contributing to the long-standing fears of some members for the continued existence of the Church as well as for their very lives. Additionally, there were no American Church authorities available to whom the local German leaders could turn for counsel in this time of near-panic. Having had little previous experience in Church government, some now tended to see Hubener's actions, not as the religious and patriotic idealism he claimed, but as an almost criminal disregard for Mormon doctrine.

The German Saints were not eager for a confrontation with their national government, and they were happy to follow President Grant's advice. By and large, the Mormons and the Nazis coexisted comfortably. Some Church members even saw Hitler as God's instrument, preparing the world for the millennium. Superficial parallels were drawn between the Church and the Nazi Party, with its emphasis on active involvement by every member. The women's auxiliary of the Party and the Hitler Youth were regarded by some as secular equivalents to the Church's Relief Society, MIA, and Scouting programs. The vital importance of "Aryan" ancestry gave new significance to genealogical research. And the Fuhrer himself, the non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarian who yielded to no one in his desire for absolute law and order, seemed to embody many of the most basic LDS virtues.

Hubener's own title for "Leaflet w" was "The Voice of the Homeland." The Gestapo regarded this pamphlet as an "attempt to involve theological issues in behalf of the enemy's seditious efforts." The pamphlet does indeed seem to show that Hubener saw his opposition to Nazism as a necessary consequence of his religious beliefs.

MESJ - Mormons for Equality and Social Justice, recognizes the terible dillemmas isolated Latter-day Saints were facing in the second world war. The following, taken from the web pages from MVG - Mormonen voor Vrede en Gerechtigheid, the independent Dutch sister organization of MESJ, illustrates how tensions ran high within branches of the church in the neighboring, occupied, Netherlands:

"Certain tensions were created because of the presence of two political groups in the church. One group consisted of members who sympathised with the Germans, the other group rebelled against the German regime. Even though they were all members of the Mormon church, each group refused to speak with members of the other group.. During the meetings they would each sit on opposite sides of the chapel. If the sacrament was passed to the sympathisers first, then their opponents (Dutchmen) would refuse the sacrament, as they believed it would be wrong to partake of the sacrament with hateful hearts".
(Rond De Tweede Wereldoorlog - The History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Netherlands and Flanders. MVG-website)

As individual members of our faith communities we sometimes boast that the truth is exclusively ours, but that confidence doesn't always carry over into the world around us, beyond the comfort and safety of our testimony meetings, and sometimes it takes a courageous 16 year old to drive this point home to us. One wonders what the last hymn was that young Helmuth sang out loud with the brothers and sisters in his branch, could it have been hymn 272?


The sceptre may fall from the despot's grasp, when with winds of stern justice he copes
But the pillar of truth will endure to the last
and its firm rooted bulwarks outstand the rude blast
And the wreck of the fell tyrant's hopes

Hymn 272 - O Say, What is Truth?
( Hymns of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)

 

 

April 2006 - by Robert Poort

 

 

 

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