Bruderhof
Description
Allen Butcher:
"There is one organization that has survived from the 1920s German youth movement. German
Christian youth were inspired to activism by the times, even though the primary sentiment was non- Christian. This is the Bruderhof, a Christian communal group also called the Society of Brothers, which today has about 3,000 members in about 25 communities, mostly in the United States. Emmy Arnold, wife of the Bruderhof founder, Eberhard Arnold, wrote in the 1974 second edition of the book Children in Community, ...
- In Germany after the First World War, the Youth Movement arose and was very much alive in our Christian circles. My husband, Eberhard Arnold, and I were closely connected with this movement for many years. We were part of a group of people who often met in our home in Berlin in a search for a new, genuine way of life. A few of these people felt together the very strong urge to build up a life in truthfulness, simplicity, and poverty, as opposed to the life we saw everywhere around us. In the year 1920 this community life came into being; a very simple life in complete sharing was begun by a little group in Sannerz, Hesse. This life in community has continued for over fifty years. We have gone through sorrow and struggle, yet we have known deep joy and enthusiasm. A life shared in common is a miracle. People cannot remain together for the sake of traditions. Community must be given again and again as a new birth. (Society of Brothers, p. 173)
The Bruderhof “genuine way of life” was of course incompatible with Nazism, and so like all the other
“new religions and occult sects whose prophets grew like mushrooms,” as Walter Laqueur wrote, the
Bruderhof was targeted for elimination. (Laqueur, quoted in de Graaf, p. 16)
Formed in 1920, the Bruderhof sect was raided in 1937 and its leaders imprisoned. They were saved when their jailers were called to one of the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg with its searchlight nighttime spectacle, enabling the remaining jailer crew to set free the Bruderhof members. All the remaining Bruderhof members sought asylum first in England then elsewhere, yet were refused everywhere except Paraguay, due to concerns that they may be German spies. After WWII the Bruderhof immigrated to the U.S.A. "
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