In May 1933, Germany’s new National Socialist government passed a law establishing two national anthems: the traditional “Deutschlandlied” and the recently composed Horst Wessel song, a feverish ode to fascist power. The law required students in Germany to learn both songs. So it was not a surprise when, during a school inspection on December 5, 1933, the inspector asked Trudi Hüssy’s students to sing the Horst Wessel song. They did not know it. He asked Trudi if she knew it. Yes. “Why then were the children not taught it, as ordered?”

The inspection had not been a surprise either. The school was in rural Hessen, and belonged to the Bruderhof, a community of around a hundred Christians who lived and worked together on a farmstead, sharing all their possessions and seeking to live in accordance with Jesus’ teachings. The students were children of community members as well as several orphans (including my husband’s grandfather, Rudi Hildel) and foster children (including Rudi’s best friend, Wolfgang Loewenthal) whom the Bruderhof had taken in. In the months preceding the school inspection, pressure on the community had been growing. On May 28, the community was woken at 5:00 a.m. by storm trooper rifle exercises; their hay field was trampled and officers came into the community courtyard, demanding to be shown the printing shop (the Plough publishing office). During summer, bands of storm troopers with flags and swastika armbands marched by at all hours of the day and night, bursting into the Horst Wessel song as they passed the community. That October, police warned Bruderhof members that failure to participate properly in a national day of thanksgiving would result in arrests.

Eberhard Arnold, who cofounded the community with his wife, Emmy, and her sister Else von Hollander in 1920, was realistic about the new regime, as his comments in community meetings throughout May 1933 show: “One gets the impression that under the tyrannical despotism of the present government, one can no longer rely on any law.… It really is politics of the dirtiest kind that treads the law underfoot, a wickedness that cries to heaven, a revolting, lawless frivolity.” “Let us ask God that we may hold on to freedom of conscience in these times of bondage.” And, “We have to represent … the politics of the kingdom of Jesus Christ.” The church members’ efforts to do this would lead them into deeper conflict with the government.

After a national vote of confidence in the Nazi government was announced for November 12, 1933, Eberhard visited the district administrator to find out if there was any way to avoid participating. No, he was told, and further, anyone who did not vote in support would put themselves at risk of being sent to a concentration camp. Returning from this conversation, Eberhard slipped and broke his leg in the icy November night. In the following days, Bruderhof members discussed how to vote, deciding they would not check the box for yes or no but paste a statement onto the ballot. It began, “My conviction and my will bid me stand by the gospel and for the discipleship of Jesus Christ [and] the coming kingdom of God.” Because he was unable to walk, a ballot box was brought to Eberhard’s bedroom. The local paper reported the Bruderhof votes as positive, but four days later, the community was raided by over 150 armed and uniformed men led by the local Gestapo.

“We had just started school, and through the window I saw them come down the hill, like an army of ants,” Wolfgang Loewenthal, who was twelve at the time, remembered later. A guard stood at every door. Trudi and the children were in their classroom, where they could hear the tramping of heavy boots in the room above. Then two SS entered, looking at the textbooks and notebooks. Wolfgang continues, “When one man saw my [typically Jewish] last name on the front of my copybook, he asked, ‘Is this you?’ Then he grinned and said, ‘We’ll get rid of the likes of you. You won’t be here much longer.’” The Gestapo left in the evening after searching each room and questioning most members. They were laden with “subversive” books: red-covered ones (assumed to be communist) and reproductions of great works of art (deemed to be pornographic). The officer in charge told community members that they should consider emigrating, adding, “The children are not to be brought up this way.”

Private schools were unusual in the Weimar Republic, but the Bruderhof had been given permission to homeschool in 1920 and obtained a private school license in 1928. Following the November raid, however, it seemed likely that government interest would turn to the school: for several months, news had been reaching the community of progressive schools being closed and teachers with suspect ideas being fired. As a precaution, Bruderhof parents began applying for passports for their children. The Nazi strategy of increasing political power by indoctrinating youth was accelerating: during 1933 membership of the Hitler Youth went from one hundred thousand to over two million, and laws were passed revising school curricula to, in Eberhard’s words, “concentrate on the barbaric and idolatrous worship of German racial blood.” When two Bruderhof members (Swiss citizens, to decrease the possibility of arrest) visited Gestapo headquarters in Berlin in December to deliver letters begging that the community be left undisturbed, they were told that the community’s radical ideas made it impossible for them to be allowed to educate children.

Education had been at the heart of the Bruderhof’s mission since it was founded. Eberhard and Emmy’s five children were the first students to be taught by Trudi when she arrived at the community in 1921. The school grew with the community, and in 1933 there were forty-eight children. School subjects included German (grammar, reading, literature), history, art history, social studies, geography, biology, physics, and English – during the inspection for school licensure, the eighth-grade students read aloud from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and translated orally into German. Teaching emphasized the coherence between different academic subjects: one student remembered how painting stars on a backdrop for a play developed into an astronomy lesson that led to a lecture on the religious history of the Chaldeans and Egyptians. Eberhard himself was a trained theologian who had written his doctoral dissertation on Christian elements in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work. He taught Latin as well as logic and grammar, which, as Trudi later wrote, he believed to be “very important to balance a tendency to exaggerated poetical fantasies.” Religion was not a school subject: children were to learn about faith from their parents, and from being part of the daily life of the church community.

In the afternoons the discipline and order of the classroom gave way to outdoor play, reflecting the principles of Friedrich Froebel. Famous for founding the first kindergarten, Froebel’s educational philosophy emphasized respect for each child as well as the importance of play in nature. The school he founded in Thuringia was then operated by the family of my grandmother, Annemarie Wächter, a kindergarten teacher who joined the community in 1927, bringing Froebel’s ideas with her. The children spent long hours in woods and by streams, engrossed in building branch houses, acting out fairy tales, and playing games of robbers and princesses. Other afternoon activities included collecting fossils, identifying orchids and mushrooms, woodworking, sewing, and bookbinding. The children joined community projects: bringing in hay, pitting plums for jam-making, and harvesting fruit, berries, and nuts to supplement the often meager diet. Running and gymnastics were daily activities as well, since the children were also supposed to learn physical bravery and toughness. Bravery was needed to use the sledding track that was built up and iced on winter nights by Eberhard, who joined the children in their daily sledding adventures.

From the beginning, the Bruderhof was intended to be an “educational community” – everyone was to support the education of the children, and adults were expected to continue learning, taking an interest in the natural world, history, and the ideas and events of the day. The goal of children’s education was to guide each of them to full use of their gifts and talents, to think independently, and to be curious about the surrounding world. Training in manual skills was as important as academic learning: “The variety of talents must be respected,” wrote Eberhard, “for in a true educational community, all gifts and all abilities are of equal value.”

In 1933, the thing of greatest value, apparently, was knowing the Horst Wessel song. Trudi was a tiny woman, just five feet tall. Nevertheless, she stood face to face with a Nazi official in the same classroom where, weeks earlier, she had watched members of the Gestapo sift through notebooks and threaten her students. “We do not teach our children street-fighting songs,” Trudi told him. The inspection moved on. She wrote later, “The final subject was English. Quite by chance I opened the lesson book to a short account of the Mayflower, the ship that in 1620 carried the Pilgrims who had left England for their consciences’ sake.” A student read the passage aloud and translated it into German.

In the weeks following the school inspection, Eberhard wrote repeatedly to government officials, asking for assurance that the school would be allowed to continue. But at the end of December a letter came from the district education office: the license to operate the school was revoked, and the community was instructed “to await further directions” regarding the education of their children. “The Gestapo’s detailed report,” Eberhard explained to a correspondent, “stresses our educational work and its influence as the decisive question. May we point out that it is this very aspect of our communal life that touches the vital nerve of the task given to our church community. Without our educational work we cannot exist. If we have understood the demands of the state correctly, our school is to be dissolved or placed under National Socialist direction. We would not find a dissolution acceptable.… The upbringing and instruction of children in the spirit of the Christian church is a moral obligation for us.”

There were twenty German children who would become subject to the new teaching regime when the holidays ended in mid-January (children of Swiss families were not yet a target). On January 13, the Bruderhof notified the government that the school had been dissolved, saying, “There are now no children of school age of German nationality at the Bruderhof.”

This was because the children, together with their teachers, had fled the country.

Wolfgang, in additional danger because of his Jewish heritage, was one of the first to leave, taken to an orphanage under a false name for temporary protection. Rudi spent some weeks waiting for his passport in his birthplace, Nuremberg; while there, he watched Hitler drive through the streets, “standing in his car with his arm outstretched. Everybody raised their arms as he passed except my guardian and I who watched it from our window.” Both were relieved to rejoin the other children at the farm of a friend in Switzerland, a temporary haven where they were cared for by Annemarie and another teacher, Lene Schulz. But the Swiss government had made it clear that the political risk of accepting the children for more than a few weeks was too high. With cash and time both very short, a new home had to be found.

The Principality of Liechtenstein lies between Austria and Switzerland. A six-mile-wide and seventeen-mile-long microstate, it has a vertical range of seven thousand feet between the rich farmland of the Rhine Valley and the summits of several dozen Alpine peaks. In 1933 the country was home to ten thousand people governed by a constitutional monarchy under the Princely House of Liechtenstein, one of Europe’s most ancient noble families. Prime minister Dr. Franz Josef Hoop did much of the actual governing, and it was to him that Eberhard applied to settle in Liechtenstein. Either his three-page letter or the references he gave (including Prince Günther von Schönburg-Waldenburg, a friend and benefactor of the community) were persuasive, because permission was granted almost immediately.

Their new home was a former guesthouse perched at 4,700 feet on the mountain near Vaduz Castle, “a swallow’s nest on a house wall,” as one of the new residents called it. Two weeks earlier, when Eberhard and Emmy first visited, the horses that took them by sleigh sank to their necks in snow and had to be shoveled out. The guesthouse was designed for summer use and was not insulated – few people lived at that elevation in winter because of the practical challenges: fetching the mail, for instance (the daily responsibility of Wolfgang and Rudi), meant a fifteen-minute trip down in a sled and three hours hiking up. Although it was unsuitable in many ways, “Silum” (after the local village of the same name) seemed a miraculous solution to the need for a refuge, all the more when a day after the lease was signed (despite not having the funds needed), an envelope containing an unexpected gift of money was given to Eberhard, enough for the down payment and the children’s travel. By mid-March the children and their teachers had moved in, and official permission to operate a school was received exactly a month later.

Now the children’s education continued in a couple of rooms in the guest house, and on the veranda in good weather. There was much to learn about their new home: plants and rocks to identify, castles to hike to, slopes to ski, and Zeppelins to watch flying in the Rhine Valley below. A newsletter produced by Wolfgang and Rudi shows that the children remained informed about the increasingly dire political situation as well. They certainly knew when Germany introduced military conscription in 1935, since all Bruderhof men of military age who had not yet left Germany appeared at Silum the following day, having crossed the border overnight. The community grew by other means as well: families and university students joined; a young SS officer resigned his commission and joined them; the first English members arrived in 1934; babies were born. Soon the little settlement was home to a hundred people – 1 percent of the population of Liechtenstein.

There were pictures of Liechtenstein in the albums I pored over in my grandparents’ house growing up. I loved the picture of my grandfather (one of the young men who had left Germany to avoid conscription) playing violin on a mountain peak. There was a picture of Trudi perched on steep banks of snow with her baby twins, and children playing in Alpine meadows. It looked like a place in a fairy tale, and I knew the happy ending: my grandparents fell in love and, under the stars on Christmas Eve 1934, got engaged. But real life in Silum was not a fairy tale, and no one then knew how the story would end. Food was poor, consisting mostly of polenta, sometimes flavored with beets. Money was scarce, and there was a scarlet fever outbreak. The political news was terrifying. In 1935 Eberhard Arnold died during an operation on his broken leg, which had never healed. There must have been days when it seemed that things could not get any worse, and yet the story went on.

My grandparents were married in March 1936, which was the last thing they did in Liechtenstein. Immediately after the ceremony, they left for England via Switzerland and France: it had just been announced that Germans living abroad were required to register for military service, and Liechtenstein was too tiny and too close to Germany to offer meaningful protection. Over the next months the Liechtenstein community dwindled until, in a remarkable coincidence, the last German members left Liechtenstein on the day Hitler annexed Austria in March, 1938. Because of the English members, it was now possible for the community to buy land in England, and a new location was started in the Cotswolds. By now Wolfgang and Rudi had left school for further training, Wolfgang apprenticed to a typesetter, and Rudi studying building. (One day Rudi gave a cup of tea to a visiting Oxford student who had just cycled up; this was his future wife, Winifred, who would shortly leave her studies to join the community.) Trudi was still teaching in the school, which now had close to fifty students; Annemarie had a preschool class of twenty-five. “The future is the children’s,” said the lead editorial in a special edition of Plough on children’s education that was published – with the world hurtling toward war – in autumn 1939. “God is theirs. Theirs is his coming kingdom.… They point us to the source and goal of all being, namely to God, and so to community.”

In the years since the school in Liechtenstein was closed in 1938, Bruderhof children have been educated in England, Paraguay, Uruguay, the United States, Germany (again), Australia, Austria, and South Korea. All these children would find that long-ago school very familiar (although Latin isn’t part of the curriculum anymore). Academic classes are still taught to show the underlying coherence between different subjects. Afternoons are still spent playing in the woods, building tree houses and damming streams, going on berry-picking or fossil identification expeditions, and learning crafts and the basics of skilled trades. Teachers still join their students to make sledding tracks, produce plays, and fly kites. Some days the school pitches in on community projects: potato harvest, landscaping, helping prepare a celebration. There are differences too, of course, in time and place, but education – in the words of Eberhard Arnold, the “upbringing and instruction of children in the spirit of the Christian church” – remains at the heart of church community.

September 7, 2024, was – as the Liechtenstein locals said – Kaiserwetter, a day worthy of an emperor. Early in the afternoon, over a hundred people gathered on the site of the former Bruderhof. A memorial stone was unveiled by two great-grandsons of Rudi Hildel, both thirteen, the same age he was in March 1934. Flowers from the Loewenthal family were placed by the stone. Trudi’s namesake granddaughter, also a teacher, was there, along with my husband Kent and me, and several dozen other descendants of former residents. A Bruderhof pastor, Andrew Zimmerman, expressed thanks to the people of Liechtenstein and its government for providing a safe place during a complicated and difficult time.

This event – themed around Matthew 25:35, “For I was a stranger among you, and you welcomed me” – was the result of new friendships and acts of welcome. In 2019, at the suggestion of members of both Anabaptist and Catholic churches, a Bruderhof community was established in Austria’s Weinviertel. During a conversation about Bruderhof history during World War II, a neighbor of this new community, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, offered to make introductions to the Liechtenstein family. Some months later Princess Maria-Pia Kothbauer, Liechtenstein’s ambassador to Austria, came to visit, and plans were made for an event to commemorate how, as the Cardinal said in a video message recorded for the event, “The Princely House of Liechtenstein had the courage to take in this community … and even give them the opportunity to found a school. I could name other examples of how they gave shelter to refugees and thus set an example of Christian magnanimity.… The mutual Christian witness is so important to us, listening to and learning from each other what it means to be Christians today. That is my experience with the Bruderhof community, for whose presence I am so grateful.”

Prince Nikolaus of Liechtenstein, who attended the September 7 event, also spoke about the unlikely encounter between this group of refugees and his family and nation:

1934 is a long time ago, but people are still coming to terms with these times, which were also very difficult for Liechtenstein. And so it was certainly a divine coincidence that the Bruderhof found its way here. I believe it was an enrichment for Liechtenstein. But the Princely House was fully behind the Bruderhof, even if there were also difficult times. Thank God the community found refuge here for several years.

If we go further back in history, there is perhaps something special that should be mentioned. Earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Liechtenstein family also gave refuge to the Moravian Brethren, the communities that were influenced very strongly by Jan Hus. This lasted for many decades and our family was fully behind it. These communities were very strongly integrated into these places, also contributing economically, and it was a beautiful symbiosis, just as it was later with you.

From everything I have seen and heard, there is no question that your community contributes a great deal to bringing the Christian message into this world, through living together in a modest way, inspired by Christian values, above all love of neighbor. This is very relevant today, when we live in material abundance, so to speak, with all its problems, so it is all the more important that we can show that there are also communities in the world that can live together in peace and in a life that respects nature and respects their fellow human beings.

I am thankful for this day of remembrance, this God-given, beautiful, sunny day.

Further reading: Zeugnis, Liebe und Widerstand: Der Rhönbruderhof 1933–1937 by Thomas Nauerth (Schöningh Verlag);
An Embassy Besieged: The Story of a Christian Community in Nazi Germany by Emmy Barth Maendel (Wipf and Stock).