In the late 1940s Helmuth Hubener, a Mormon teenager, decided to leave Hitler’s Youth and confront the Nazi regime and his church leaders. Eventually, he was excommunicated from his church and became one of the youngest opponents of the Third Reich to be executed. We’ll examine the conflict of conscience occasioned among Mormons by the extreme circumstances of the Third Reich; and consider the question articulated by German novelist Gunther Grass: Why did [Hubener] know and I didn’t know?
Our guest for the hour will be Alan Keele, professor emeritus of German studies at Brigham Young University, who gave a talk at USU as part of a recent symposium series on the Holocaust presented by the USU Religious Studies Program. We’ll also hear excerpts from a documentary film on the subject, “Truth and Conviction”
