While Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government was persecuting Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses and driving forty-two small German sects underground, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints continued to practice unhindered. How some fourteen thousand Mormons not only survived but thrived in Nazi Germany is a story little known, rarely told, and occasionally rewritten within the confines of the Church's history-for good reason, as we see in David Conley Nelson's Moroni and the Swastika. A page-turning historical narrative, this book is the first full account of how Mormons avoided Nazi persecution through skilled collaboration with Hitler's regime, and then eschewed postwar shame by constructing an alternative history of wartime suffering and resistance ... Recovering this inconvenient past, Moroni and the Swastika restores a complex and difficult chapter to the history of Nazi Germany and the Mormon Church in the twentieth century-and offers new insight into the construction of historical truth. [from the publisher]

Deliverance on the night of broken glass -- Mormonism's long nineteenth century in Germany : from pariahs to skilled survivors -- German Mormons in the Great War : lessons learned in the crucible of combat -- Mormons in the Weimar Republic : honing survival skills in a fledgling democracy -- The Mormon battle plan in the Third Reich -- Genealogy : promoting a common worldview on Earth and in the afterlife -- Mormon basketball diplomacy in Hitler's Reich -- Boy Scouting : the Mormons' only unconditional surrender to the Nazis -- The Führer's chosen peiople? The Mormons' Hitler myth -- A countervailing myth : Nazi persecution of the Mormons -- God's Oberführer : the Mormon mission president -- J. Reuben Clark : Mormon ambassador plenipotentiary and his entourage -- The Second World War and its aftermath -- Forgotten heroes and rediscovered villains -- Mormons and Jews : an inconvenient association -- Helmuth Hübener : a memory beacon with a dimmer switch -- A premature curtain call -- To save the church?