Mennonite Weekly Review

NORTH NEWTON, Kan. — Four record books from one of the earliest Mennonite congregations, salvaged from the ruins of World War II, are preparing to cross the Atlantic Ocean again.

Rich Preheim, director of the Mennonite Church USA Historical Committee, examines one of four congregational record books from Danzig Mennonite Church that are scheduled to be transferred to the Mennonite archives at the Weierhof in Germany. — Photo by David Fast/ for MC USA

The books, about 300 years old, are from a congregation in Danzig in West Prussia (now Gdansk, Poland), where Dutch adherents to the fledgling Anabaptist movement began settling in the 1530s.

The volumes will return to Europe this summer after being housed in the Mennonite Library and Archives at Bethel College for more than six decades.

Dirk Philips, a 16th-century Anabaptist leader, is considered the Danzig church’s founder. Menno Simons likely visited the group, though before it was a formally organized congregation.

It soon had more than 1,000 baptized members in its urban location, at a time when most Mennonite congregations were small and rural.

“Given Danzig Mennonite Church’s size and prominence, many Low Germans in the world, from Paraguay to Canada to Germany, can trace some connection to the congregation,” said Rich Preheim, director of the Historical Committee of Mennonite Church USA, under whose auspices the archives at both Bethel College and Goshen (Ind.) College fall. “It was Danzig church members who led the migration to Ukraine and the establishment of the first Russian Mennonite colony at Chortitza [in 1789].”

Four centuries of Mennonite presence in West Prussia came to end at the close of World War II, when the region’s Mennonites — who identified themselves as German — scattered to flee the advancing Soviet army.

Those refugees spirited out many of the surviving West Prussian congregational materials, with some exceptions, including the four record books from Danzig Mennonite Church.

Oral tradition says Mennonite historians Cornelius Krahn and Harold S. Bender — from Bethel and Goshen colleges, respectively — instructed American Mennonite relief workers who went to Europe after World War II to be on the lookout for items of possible historical significance. Visiting the bomb-damaged Danzig Mennonite Church, one of those workers found congregational records either in the building or in the possession of a neighbor.

The books list births, deaths, marriages, baptisms and ordinations. The latter go back to 1598, although the books themselves probably date from the late 17th to early 18th centuries and had earlier records copied into them — and later ones through 1943. The Americans brought the materials to the United States, where they were deposited in the Mennonite Library and Archives.