Immo Luschin - LDS Translator, Temple President, Nazi
Immo Luschin - LDS Translator, Temple President, Nazi
Immo Ernst Friedrich Luschin Von Ebengreuth was born on January 9, 1919 in Graz, Austria. His dad Friedrich was Czech by birth, but moved to Austria in 1914 at the start of World War I. Friedrich was a member of the Central Powers navy during the war, but I can’t find much else about what he did. A relative, Arnold Luschin von Ebengreuth, was an Austrian legal scholar and numismatist. His work earned him a posting in one of Graz’s many universities, making him contemporaries with Ludwig Boltzmann and Nikola Tesla. Arnold later served in the upper legislative chamber of the Austria-Hungarian Empire until the empire collapsed at the end of the Great War.
Immo was acutely aware of the fallout from World War I. Austria, to him, had fallen from its previous glory, forced to grovel before the lesser nations of Europe. Even in 1962, he was still banging on about this. With resentment building for the Entente powers, and Central Europe ever in disarray, young Immo was primed for the racially motivated revanchist Nazi ideology.
In 1937 Hitler annexed Austria, putting the Luschin family under the Nazi government. Two years later, the Germans blasted across Poland, starting the Second World War. Immo Luschin entered the fray, joining the newly formed 6th Mountain Division under the command of Ferdinand Schörner.
The 6th Mountain Division was part of the elite German Gebirgsjäger troops — lightly armed soldiers specializing in alpine combat. These were some of the Wehrmacht’s best soldiers, capable of combat operations over otherwise impassable mountain terrain. Their elite status was reflected by their commanding officer. Schörner was an unimpressive general but a fanatic Nazi and old Freikorps veteran. The 6th wasn’t ready in time for the Battle of France but got deployed to the country for occupation duties. This was the start of Luschin’s war.
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To track Immo Luschin’s war record, I have taken information from FamilySearch and corroborated it with the history of the unit I think he was part of, the 6th Mountain Division. This unit occupied France, fought in Crete, and ended the war in Finland, so it checks out. I’m fairly certain I got these details right, but it’s confusing. Luschin summarized his war service while talking to a New Zealand Mormon:
Brother Roberts was a commissioned officer in the New Zealand armed forces; I, a commissioned officer in the German armed forces. We fought each other in Africa, in Italy, and right up into Germany.
The 6th Mountain Division did not fight in these three theaters. However, this was recounted by a speaker at a BYU devotional, telling a story from years earlier. It’s possible the countries aren’t accurate, but the professor threw out famous theaters where a New Zealander and Nazi would have been in combat. I prefer the FamilySearch record since it tracks more closely with a specific unit and was probably added by Luschin’s family.
Later in life, Immo would portray himself as a “Golden Investigator," somebody already primed to accept Mormon teachings due to his independent spiritual development. On FamilySearch, his relatives have shared that Luschin promised himself that he would remain “sexually pure” throughout the war. This, of course, dovetails with the Law of Chastity, the purity law commanding Mormons to only have sex with their legal spouses. Late-life Immo decided to use this moment — heading into occupied France, serving with genocidal armed forces notorious for using sex as a weapon — as an example of his self-proclaimed piousness.
Immo didn’t see frontline combat in France, but Hitler’s conquest wasn’t over. As Nazi high command began a bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, Hitler’s attention was pulled south. His Italian allies had invaded Greece in early 1940 but got bogged down and were now threatened with increased British support for the beleaguered Hellenic armed forces. Hitler, concerned with a new front opening on his south, turned the Wehrmacht to Greece.
The 6th Mountain Division was pushed to the front as German forces streamed across the Bulgarian border. In their way was the Metaxas line, a series of fortifications anchored on its ends by 7,000-foot tall mountain peaks. Greek commanders considered these mountains impassable, but the 6th Mountain Division proved the Greeks wrong, using their elite alpine training to scale the mountains and capture the rail line to Thessaloniki.
Allied positions fell apart, leading to a full UK withdrawal from Greece. The Mediterranean island of Crete held on until the Wehrmacht — riding in a massive fleet of tri-motor airplanes — parachuted onto the island on May 20, 1941. Immo wasn’t in the paratrooper assault. Lucky him, for the losses were so high that Hitler forbade any further airborne attacks. FamilySearch recounts this most likely bullshit story from Immo’s time on the island:
During a firefight in Crete, Immo and an Allied soldier shot at each other from across a river, hunkered down. Neither managed to kill the other. Years later, at the meeting held for all temple presidents (13 at the time), Immo seemed to recognize one of the brethren present. After a brief exchange, the two realized that they had fought each other all those years ago.
After Crete, Ferdinand Schörner got a new command, heading north for the upcoming assault on the Soviet Union. In this theater, Schörner gained a reputation for cruelty against the Soviet people, enamoring him with Hitler. Fast forward a few years, and Schörner was in charge of the Volkssturm, the Nazi civilian army formed as a last-ditch defense of the Reich. Under Schörner’s orders, anyone deserting was shot on sight. As a reward for service, Hitler named Schörner the commander-in-chief of the German Army in his suicide note.
Fortunately for Immo Luschin, the 6th Mountain Division didn’t follow their bloodthirsty commander into the Eastern Front meat grinder, moving instead to Finland, across the border from Murmansk, where the Soviets were actively demolishing Schörner’s forces.
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Finland has one of the weirder World War II histories. While they didn’t technically join either side, they fought a series of concurrent wars against the Soviet Union starting in 1939. The first conflict, the Winter War, saw the Finns supported in their fight by the US, British, French, and Italians. The war ended in 1940, but after 15 months of peace, started up again in the aptly named Continuation War. The Nazis had invaded the USSR, so now the Allied Powers liked the Soviet Union. The Finns requested Axis support instead. Nazi high command agreed and moved the 20th Mountain Army (with the 6th Mountain Division as a part) into Finland.
Things didn’t go well for the Finns. After three years of fighting the deteriorating military situation on the Eastern Front, combined with a virtual stalemate in Finland, led the Finnish government to seek peace with the Soviets. Finnish President Mannerheim sent a note thanking Hitler for the help, broke diplomatic relations, and ordered the Nazis out of his country.
The evacuation started smoothly at first but descended into chaos as Finnish and Nazi units began shooting at each other. Now fighting their previous allies, the Nazis adopted a scorched-earth policy, destroying the Finnish countryside as they fought to the Norwegian border. (The World War II movie Sisu is set during this conflict.)
This became known as the Lapland War. By April 1945, the last Nazis had evacuated Finland. While the conflict itself had few casualties, the Nazis devastated Lapland. It wasn’t until 1957 that the area fully recovered.
Immo Luschin, with the remnants of the 6th Mountain Division, spent the rest of the war in Norway. The Axis war effort was kaput, but the Nazi hardliners still had plans to continue, using Norway to stage U-boat raids. It was not to be. Hitler killed himself; the Soviets took Berlin. On May 7th, 1945, Admiral Karl Dönitz ordered all Nazi armed forces to stand down. The British entered Norway, the 6th Mountain Division surrendered, and Immo Luschin’s war ended. What would the future hold for an elite Nazi soldier?
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With the war over, the Allied nations swept into Central Europe, eager to grab what they could from the corpse of the Third Reich and vying to turn their vision of the post-war consensus (whatever the hell that meant) into reality. Scientific teams scoured the countryside, looking for Hitler’s technological terrors. Soon the British were launching captured V-2 rockets out of Cuxhaven, the Americans were carting them off to New Mexico, and the Soviets were reverse engineering the missiles at Kasputin Yar.
Germany was now divided into four occupation Zones, eventually ossifying into West and East Germany. Former Nazis, especially higher-ranking ones, found their fates determined by which chunk of Central European geography they were occupying when the war ended. Finding yourself in the right Zone was paramount. In general, ending up in the British, French, or American Zones was a better deal.
The Americans ere especially eager to put Nazi manpower to use. The CIA established the Gehlen Organization, a German intelligence apparatus staffed by former Nazis. When the time came to re-arm the German Air Force, NATO tapped some of the best Luftwaffe pilots from the war. Believing that war with the USSR was inevitable, Dwight Eisenhower and the Army created the myth of the clean Wehrmacht — the idea that the war crimes had been committed only by the SS, not the rank-and-file soldiers. Through publishing the memoirs of Rommel and von Mannstein, the USA cleaned up the image of these Nazi leaders to boost public support for German rearmament.
On the ground, former Nazis and their families roamed Central Europe, trying to find themselves on the NATO side of the Iron Curtain. One such story is that of Mormon apostle Dieter Uchtdorf. His dad Karl had been an officer in the Nazi border guards and found himself in the Soviet Zone. They fled East Germany due to what official church sources vaguely describe as Karl’s political beliefs. Guessing which political ideas Karl had that the Americans and Nazis didn’t mind but the Soviets did is left as an exercise for the reader. During this time Immo Luschin made his way down from Norway into West Germany.
From the mid-40s to the early 60s, Immo Luschin kept a low profile. But when Americans start showing up, the Mormons aren’t far behind. Before the war, the German congregations were strong. However, the Mormons left Germany when hostilities broke out despite collaborating with the Nazis to hand over dissenters and Jewish genealogical records. Now they were back, and they found Immo.
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One of the most annoying Mormon tropes is the idea of the “Golden Investigator.” Everybody has a story of somebody who was asking all the right questions before meeting the Mormon missionaries, things like: “Why do the Catholics practice infant baptism?”, “Is it possible to be married in heaven?”, “Why did Jesus only visit the people in the Old World?” Stuff like that. These stories are, with very few exceptions, fabricated.
Immo Luschin became a critical part of the Mormon program in Europe, so he gave himself a Golden Investigator story. By his own recollection, before his baptism, he was very concerned with the idea that unbaptized infants would go to hell. He was also disturbed that the marriage vows say, “Till death do us part.” When the Mormon missionaries showed up, he was surprised to learn they had all the answers to his questions. Wow! He must have told somebody about this because in 1960 — the same year he was baptized — Elder Alvin R. Dyer shared Luschin’s conversion story in General Conference, concluding it with this saccharine nonsense:
This man had never met the missionaries before, and we inquired as to where he got such questions. His answer was ‘We have not been satisfied with our faith. My wife and I determined that through prayer and the desire to know that we would find out the true church.’ The missionaries said ‘Why, these are our teachings,’ and thus Brother Ebengrueth was baptized with his wife. This brother is a skilled interpreter. He speaks English, I am confident, better than I do, and he now will become a translator for the Church of the German language.
I guess in between machine-gunning Greeks “Brother Ebengrueth” had the time to ask himself the hard questions about life.
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The Book of Mormon, combined with the Spirit, is your most powerful resource in conversion. It provides powerful evidence for the divinity of Christ. It is also proof of the Restoration through the Prophet Joseph Smith. An essential part of conversion is receiving a witness from the Holy Ghost that the Book of Mormon is true. As a missionary, you must first have a personal testimony that the Book of Mormon is true. This testimony can lead to a deep and abiding faith in the power of the Book of Mormon during the conversion process. Have confidence that the Holy Ghost will testify to anyone who reads and ponders the Book of Mormon and asks God if it is true with a sincere heart, real intent, and faith in Christ. This witness of the Holy Ghost should be a central focus of your teaching. (Preach My Gospel, Chapter 5: What is the Role of the Book of Mormon?)
Mormons, naturally, find the Book of Mormon very important. It’s not just the foundational text of their religion — it also functions as proof of Joseph Smith’s divine calling and a conduit for God’s power. Anybody who reads the book and asks God if it is “true” will feel the Holy Ghost telling them the book is a real record of the ancient inhabitants of the Americas. Then, the person who felt this spiritual experience will get baptized and join Mormonism. Every conversion story centers around this mystical experience.
Because the Mormons believe this, the Book of Mormon is the key to their missionary efforts, making language translation a bottleneck for their goals. They don’t think they can convert somebody without the Book of Mormon, so translating the book into as many languages as possible is a key push for the church. BYU’s defense think tank, the Eyring Research Institute, researched computerized translation software to churn out Book of Mormon translations, (allegedly) inadvertently inventing the modern word processor. This research — along with an influx of DoD cash — was also used to develop the language learning curriculum at the Missionary Training Center.
Elder Alvin Dyer called Immo Luschin to be an official church translator, noting that he already knew many European languages. I guess that checks out. Can’t be a good occupier if you can’t bark orders at your victims. Luschin was the church’s lead German translator for the next 40 years.
Between 1959 and 1979, Immo Luschin and a team of translators went to work on the church’s materials, putting together a new German Book of Mormon translation. They also translated two other unique Mormon scripture books, James Talmage’s Jesus biography, and the church’s lesson plans. Deseret News’s article about the German Book of Mormon translation euphemistically points out that Luschin “served in the German army before joining the LDS Church.”
But this was only the start of Immo Luschin’s career. In 1972 Mormon leadership called him to be the President of the Bern, Switzerland temple while keeping him on as a translator.
Temple Presidents are some of the highest-ranking Mormons. The temple, after all, holds the keys to Mormon life and death — only by attending the temple and participating in its ordinances can a Mormon make it to the highest level of heaven. The Temple President oversees this all, ensuring the sanctity and orthodoxy of the temple staff. Since the temple rituals are very precise, this is no small task. The Temple President sits astride this world and the next, keeping the gate that leads Mormons to their celestial destiny.
The question becomes: Can somebody who fought for a genocidal regime change enough to hold one of the holiest positions on Earth (to the Mormons)? That’s for you to decide.
But the answer’s no.
The Bern, Switzerland temple was the ideal place for Luschin’s gifts. It was the first temple in Europe and the first temple outside of North America. Positioned in the middle of Europe, the Mormons expected it to serve saints from every European nationality. That meant lots of different languages flowing through the doors, each of them needing the temple rituals translated precisely. The solution was to make a movie.
Up until that point, the temple ceremony — most of which is a reenactment of the Genesis story — was performed “live.” In the classic temples, the characters (God, Jesus, Eve, Adam, Satan, Peter, James, and John) were performed by in-person actors. When everybody is speaking English, that works out fine. But imagine the chaos of having six different Satans all stepping over each others’ lines in different European languages. Bedlam. Hilarious, but chaotic.
Movies, on the other hand, can be dubbed over easily with the help of polyglots like Immo. The same video can be used all around the world without variation. Better still, they no longer had to train elderly temple workers on how to play the roles, just how to push play on the movie projector.
Immo Luschin continued to serve as a translator during this time, completing the definitive German Book of Mormon translation, the edition that is still used today. He translated at regional conferences. Luschin also did work for NASA. LDS astronaut Don Lind (who we met in last month’s article) taught a course at Universität Bern on the Skylab program. Luschin translated for Lind during classes and extracurricular talks about science and religion on temple grounds.
As an aside, the first link in the paragraph above does something I’ve noticed a lot while researching this article. Notice how when it talks about the Book of Mormon’s history in Germany it skips from 1930 to 1959. But then it goes into great detail about the Book of Mormon and Latter-Day Saints in East Germany. This is how they write about the church in Germany every time. They are exceptionally cagey and vague about anything during the Nazi years but then suddenly have a lot to say about the Communist government of East Germany. Kind of interesting.
Luschin served as temple president through 1977 and remained committed to the Church’s growth in Europe. He was instrumental in convincing West German authorities to approve a Mormon temple in Frankfurt. He was also a theological writer, contributing articles about temple worship and priesthood ordinances to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism and Latter-day Saint Essentials. He died in 1998, a faithful Mormon to the end.
Now readers, here’s an interesting question to chew on: Did Immo Luschin get the Second Anointing?
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While Immo’s contribution to European Mormonism was significant, it is his son Hanno that is more well-known among the average Latter-Day Saint. Dieter Uchtdorf, although now demoted back to the Quorum of the Twelve, was getting his taste of LDS stardom in the 2000s while serving as President Thomas S. Monson’s counselor. Uchtdorf’s sermons were always hits, sprinkled with airplane stories and easily shareable pithy quotes tailormade for mommy bloggers and Mormon Facebook pages. His most iconic talk from this period was his October 2008 address “Lift Where You Stand,” starring Hanno:
Some years ago in our meetinghouse in Darmstadt, Germany, a group of brethren was asked to move a grand piano from the chapel to the adjoining cultural hall, where it was needed for a musical event. None were professional movers, and the task of getting that gravity-friendly instrument through the chapel and into the cultural hall seemed nearly impossible. Everybody knew that this task required not only physical strength but also careful coordination. There were plenty of ideas, but not one could keep the piano balanced correctly. They repositioned the brethren by strength, height, and age over and over again—nothing worked.
As they stood around the piano, uncertain of what to do next, a good friend of mine, Brother Hanno Luschin, spoke up. He said, “Brethren, stand close together and lift where you stand.”
It seemed too simple. Nevertheless, each lifted where he stood, and the piano rose from the ground and moved into the cultural hall as if on its own power. That was the answer to the challenge. They merely needed to stand close together and lift where they stood.
I have often thought of Brother Luschin’s simple idea and have been impressed by its profound truth. Tonight I would like to expand on that simple concept, “lift where you stand.”
Hanno, following his father’s footsteps, is a key player in the European Mormon church. After his family converted, Hanno was called an area architect for the church in Eastern Europe. In this role, he was one of the first Mormons to scope out Russia for conversion efforts after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Hanno’s climbed the church hierarchy, eventually becoming the project manager for five LDS temples in Europe: Preston, England; the Frankfurt, Germany renovation; Hague, Netherlands; Helsinki, Finland; and Kyiv, Ukraine. He remains friends with Dieter Uchtdorf, as seen in this photo.
All-in-all, the Luschin family has played an important role in European Mormonism. Fortunately for the Mormons, none of the people — the Greeks, French, Finns, or Brits — that Immo fought killed him. And fortunately for Immo, he happened to find an American church that proclaimed the inferiority of people based on their race, excludes LGBT people, and teaches that women should have no career outside the home, instead focusing on raising the next generation the right way.
CODA
Now you might be wondering if Luschin really had given up his ideology when he got baptized, you know — turned things around. Well, in 1962, two years after his baptism, and following his family history of Austrian nationalism, he wrote a monograph about Austrian customs. It ends with these two paragraphs, which I’m going to quote in full. The ellipses are not mine. You should be able to read between the lines:
Quite probably you are dwelling in a room which is rather expensive although not very comfortable. Of course you are fully justified in your opinion that you should be able to expect something in return for your money. However, you may rest assured that it is not deliberate maliciousness on the part of Mr. and Mrs. Austrian when the blankets aren’t so good as at home, when the furniture isn’t so serviceable as at home, when the bathroom isn’t so existent as at home … Then you should recall that Mr. and Mrs. Austrian have lost two World Wars and had to pay for them; that they were forced to enjoy the part of host to four foreign armies for a period of eleven years, during which many things learned to walk and run which are generally considered to be of an immobile nature. In this country the earth yields no cotton, and here there are few sheep to be fleeced, and year after year many a pretty penny goes for reparation to the winners of the last war.
Anyway, one thing is certain: the earth is round and every day first one side is on top and then the other; everywhere people eat and drink when they are hungry and thirsty; everywhere they must sleep. Everywhere men know that man alone is nothing; that his goal and purpose lie upwards and forwards; and that there is good and evil. Here as there you will find wicked men. There as here the same good men are to be found and these are the ones you are searching for. With them you will be a like among likes. This, however, is one of those points where human beings have their certain peculiarities and if you do not want to be conspicuous or out of place, you must learn of these peculiarities. In view of your duty and ability you will and should be conspicuous, but you know exactly how I mean…