My mom had an extra ticket to the newly released movie by T.C. Christensen Escape from Germany, and she invited me to watch it with her. Let me share my thoughts about it while the movie is still fresh in my mind.
Escape from Germany is a good movie. My favorite part of the movie was the original footage that one of the missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints managed to smuggle out of Germany. The movie is based on the novel Mine Angels Round About: Mormon Missionary Evacuation from Western Germany 1939, by Terry Bohle Montague.
The plot is simple. In the summer of 1939, the prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President Heber J. Grant, received a revelation from the Lord to remove the missionaries from Germany. There were eighty-five American missionaries in Germany just before the outbreak of World War II, seventy-nine of whom were stranded. In the film, the mission president was inspired to select Elder Norman Seibold for the mission of guiding the remaining thirty-one missionaries to safety, but in reality Elder Seibold volunteered for the mission.
The best lines of the film were undoubtedly the following:
“Our U.S. military has no knowledge of any such aggressive activity on the part of the Nazi army.”
“If I may sir, I believe that President Heber J. Grant has a better source of intelligence than the U.S. military.”
I enjoy a good escape movie, such as The Great Escape, The Shawshank Redemption, The Fugitive, or The Count of Monte Cristo. Escape from Germany is a unique escape movie because the Lord orchestrated the escape of many missionaries through the faith and courage of one missionary. As Hitler and his armies rapidly closed the borders of Germany, Elder Seibold had only a few days to rescue his stranded fellow missionaries. In the strength of the Lord, he succeeded.
As I watched the film’s depiction of the Gestapo’s cruel treatment of the missionaries, the Jews, and others, I couldn’t help but think of conditions in our own country, especially in recent years during the so-called “pandemic” (or more accurately, the plandemic - one, two, and three). As most of us watch Escape from Germany, we naturally sympathize and identify with the brave missionaries and other people who resisted the ideologies and evil actions of the Nazis. Surely we would never be like anyone in the crowds of cheering Germans who supported Hitler and his policies. Furthermore, surely nothing like Nazi cruelty could ever happen again, especially in the United States of America.
Nevertheless, how many of us withstood the tyrannical pronouncements of Fauci and other “experts” as they forced innocent people to “mask up,” “flatten the curve,” and jab themselves with a dangerous bioweapon (the allegedly “safe and effective vaccine” which has caused the untimely deaths of millions of innocent people)? How many of us refused to believe that loving our neighbor was synonymous with kowtowing to the tyrannical medical measures of our own local, state, and national Gestapos?
Perhaps someone will accuse me of exaggeration because our modern American Gestapo hasn’t yet carted Jews away to the gas chambers. But I mention these things now, in our pre-totalitarian or near-totalitarian conditions, because now is the time to resist, before the next Hitler or Hitlers, whoever they may be, start rounding us up and transporting us into camps. Take a lesson from the great Frederick Douglass, and consider where we are today:
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Elder Siebold and his friends were blessed to miraculously escape from the evils and the injustices of the Nazi regime, but millions of other innocent people perished with the consent, tacit or otherwise, of other millions of otherwise good people. We’ve all seen the famous picture:
We can ask ourselves if we were among those who metaphorically made the Nazi salute and consented to the tyrannical measures of the “experts,” or if we were like the man in the picture above. (If the former, have we sincerely apologized?) Here is a picture that represents my choice, wearing my freedom mask, or protest mask, at a freedom rally:
These are some things to keep in mind as you watch Escape from Germany.
Like Mordecai standing before Haman amidst the crowd of prostrate people.