A complete story of the Mennonite Church honestly and fairly told, covering all phases of war relations during the critical period from 1940 to 1945.

European Mennonites and the Holocaust is one of the first books to examine Mennonite involvement in the Holocaust, sometimes as rescuers but more often as killers, accomplices, beneficiaries, and bystanders.

John Werner was a storyteller. A Mennonite immigrant in southern Manitoba, he captivated his audiences with tales of adventure and perseverance. With every telling he constructed and reconstructed the memories of his life. John Werner was a survivor. Born in the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was named Hans and grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Siberia. As a young man in Stalinist Russia, he became Ivan and fought as a Red Army soldier in the Second World War. Captured by Germans, he was resettled in occupied Poland where he became Johann, was naturalized and drafted into Hitler’s German army where he served until captured and placed in an American POW camp. He was eventually released and then immigrated to Canada where he became John. The Constructed Mennonite is a unique account of a life shaped by Stalinism, Nazism, migration, famine, and war. It investigates the tenuous spaces where individual experiences inform and become public history; it studies the ways in which memory shapes identity, and reveals how context and audience shape autobiographical narratives.

In the postwar era, Mennonites were no longer "the quiet in the land"; they began to articulate publicly their concerns about such issues as the draft, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War.".

Showing how gender history contributes to existing understandings of the Second World War, this book offers detail and context on the national and transnational experiences of men and women during the war. Following a general introduction, the essays shed new light on the field and illustrate methods of working with a wide range of primary sources.

The Mennonite Church In The Second World War, Guy F. Hershberger has made a major contribution towards the full history of the life, work, and witness of the church during the second World War. This book is not merely an account of the direct relation of the church to the war, although there is a complete coverage of all phases of our "war relations." 312 Pages.