https://www.deseret.com/faith/2022/4/20 ... -world-ldsWhat readers of ‘Saints, Vol. 3’ can expect
The third volume picks up following the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple in 1893 and tells the story of the Saints as they enter the modern era. During this time the restored gospel spreads around the world, hastened by innovations in transportation and communication, while church members face economic hardships, a worldwide pandemic and two world wars, ending in 1955 with the dedication of the Bern Switzerland Temple.
“There is a lot of institutional history that is kind of submerged in the stories,” said Lisa Olsen Tait, a general editor of the series. “To me, one of the real accomplishments of the book is to pack so much of that kind of history that people might find dry and uninteresting if they just read a straight narrative of it, but to show how people lived it, how they experienced the changes and what it meant.”
Here is the author of another book on that subject talking briefly about what happened…
https://religionnews.com/2015/02/19/mor ... ird-reich/David Conley Nelson: Ordinary Mormons were ordinary Germans. Hitler was very popular, so they supported the government. There’s nothing unusual about that. But also, the LDS mission presidents recognized the vulnerability that an American-led church had under this dictatorship, and they put together a program to formalize the church’s support of the government. By doing so, they resurrected the 12th Article of Faith, which the Mormons had not obeyed before during their history of missions in Germany. Between 1851 and 1918, Mormons had been banned in a lot of the German states, so to get around that they would register as English teachers, students, or commercial developers instead of as missionaries.
So in the 1930s the mission presidents formulated this program to keep the church safe, but then found opportunities that were too good to pass up, especially in genealogy. In the past they had been banned from German archives because pastors did not want their records used to baptize the dead as Mormons. But during the Reich, suddenly all these ordinary Germans had to prove their ancestors were not Jews, so the Church’s genealogy program experienced newfound freedom. By the time Nazi Germany was in full swing, just about every branch had a genealogical president, two counselors, and a secretary.
The shocking thing is that there seemed to be very little sensitivity to the racial reasons for genealogical research. Newspaper articles would appear in the Deseret News, bragging about how much success the Church was having in Germany with the new government. The same newspaper was also running AP articles about the plight of the Jews. So the Church knew what was going on in Germany, but emphasized cooperating with the Third Reich.
It will be interesting to see how transparent ‘Saints Vol 3’ is about those same events.