A Canadian Baptist Youth Trip to a Hitler Youth Camp

A while ago I was looking through Canadian Baptist periodicals in the archives at McMaster Divinity College and I made a serendipitous discovery of an article that described a visit of Canadian youth to a summer Hitler Youth Camp. This discovery is an excellent example of finding something from the past that makes little sense in the present. 

Obviously, that trip to a Hitler Youth summer camp may rank high on the list of most regretted youth trip destinations and it is definitely hard to understand from our post-World War Two perspective. Our knee jerk reaction to that destination for Canadian church youth may be one of perplexity, disbelief, outrage, or condemnation. However, as an historian, I am first of all interested in figuring out what led Canadian churches to send some of their youth to such an event. ​ (click on below image to enlarge)

Since I try to limit my blogs to 800 words maximum it will be hard to make sense of such actions in any detail or to most people’s satisfaction. There is a good deal of research (some of it mine) on the subject of Baptists and responses to Nazism. If you are interested in going into detail, see this footnote.[1]
 
But whether 800 words or 80,000 words, some key questions to ask of any such document will revolve around (1) pre-knowledge - what did they know about Hitler and Nazism in those early years of Nazi rule? (2) motives - why were they carrying out such youth exchanges? (3) outcome – what was the actual outcome of such exchanges? 
 
Note that my concern is primarily for what people thought then, not so much what we think today. Of course, we today can make judgments about what we find about the past, but judgments about the past must wait until we at least understand the past.
 
That said, what can we say about their pre-knowledge, motives, and outcome? What follows are some brief comments that place the trip in context.
 
Canadian Baptists were not entirely naïve, for while there had initially been some sentiment among some that Hitler would bring internal peace to Germany by stopping the rise of communism, there had also been public criticisms of Nazi Germany. What many in Canada were trying to do in those early stages was to separate the German people from the Nazi Party. Like many they also believed that engagement was a way to influence Germany, such as other nations thought when they participated in the Berlin Olympics (1936) despite distrust and dislike of Hitler.
 
Baptists were also like many who built bridges with Germans through cultural exchanges to avoid another horrendous war. It was felt that if Germans and those in other nations could simply get to know one another, build friendships, and understand one another the tensions could somehow be kept from turning to violence. The background to that desire for such international exchanges was the memory and trauma of the First World War that had occurred less than a generation earlier. For most, that Great War was a nightmare that simply could not be allowed to happen again. And such exchanges were made with that hope in mind.
 
While they could not see it until it was too late, those attempts at building relations to avoid war were futile. In fact, a few months after the student exchange Canada was once again at war with Germany. And the high hopes for peace that had marked much of the interwar years were shattered.
 
Obviously, such well-meaning but very Pollyanna attempts by church leaders to avert another international conflict failed because the issues between nations were rooted in geopolitical matters that eclipsed any warm feelings generated by a handful of youth at camp. And sadly, in the final years of the war some of those same Canadian and German camp buddies may have been in their respective armies trying to kill one another.
 


[1] Gordon L. Heath, Christians, the State, and War: An Ancient Tradition for the Modern World (Lanham/Boulder/New York/London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2022); Gordon L. Heath, “Engaging War and Empire: 400 Years of Baptist Attitudes and Actions,” In ‘Step Into Your Place’: The First World War and Baptist Life & Thought, edited by Larry Kreitzer (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2014), 158-188; Bernard Green, European Baptists and the Third Reich (Didcot: Baptist Historical Society, 2009); Andrea Strübind, “German Baptists and National Socialism,” Journal of European Baptist Studies 8, 3 (May 2008): 5-20; Andrea Strübind, Die Unfreie Freikirche: Der Bund Der Baptistengemeinden Im Dritten Reich (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1991); David T. Priestly, “The Baptist Response in Germany to the Third Reich,” In God and Caesar: Conference on Faith and History edited by Robert Dean Linder (Longview, Texas: 1971), 102-118; Karl-Heinz Heller, “The Protestant Church in Nazi Germany: Ecclesiastical Survival at the Expense of Political Protest,” In God and Caesar: Conference on Faith and History edited by Robert Dean Linder (Longview, Texas: 1971), 125-134; William Lloyd Allen, “How Baptists Assessed Hitler,” (September 1982): 890-891 (Online: www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1336); E. Earl Joiner, “Baptists and the Holocaust,” A Research Paper Presented at the International Conference on “Remembering for the Future”, Oxford, England, 10-14 July 1988 (Online: www.floridabaptisthistory.org/docs/monographs/baptists_holocaust.pdf ).