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Kassel, April 9, 1937

Office of the Secret State Police

Order of the Gestapo:

In accordance with paragraphs 1 and 4 of the Reich president’s decree for the protection of the Volk and the state of February 28, 1933, (RGB 1 I.S. 83): the incorporated society Neuwerk-Bruderhof, Veitsteinbach, district of Fulda, is being dissolved for state police reasons, this to take effect immediately. The entire property of the association is confiscated.

Violations of this order, in particular any further activity in the sense of the dissolved society, are liable to punishment according to paragraph 4 of the above-mentioned decree.

There is no means of legal redress against this order, but a complaint can be addressed to the Gestapo office in Berlin.

(Signed) Herrmann¹

Around 10:00 in the morning of April 14, 1937, about fifty SS and Gestapo surrounded the community of the Rhön Bruderhof, some emerging from the woods, others arriving by car or bicycle. Armed guards positioned themselves at the doors of every building.

The forty members of the community were herded into the dining hall, and the Gestapo commissar read out the announcement: The Bruderhof no longer existed. Its members were required to return to their former homes, and those German nationals of military age were to register for military service. They were questioned individually: name, date of birth, names of their parents and of their children. From where had they come to join the community? Had they ever belonged to a political party banned in 1933? Books and papers were carried from the office to the cars below. The three members of the executive committee—Hans Meier, Hannes Boller, and Karl Keiderling—were questioned at length and then taken away in a Gestapo car.

Eberhard Arnold, founder of the Bruderhof, had been dead for over a year. Now his life work was destroyed and his followers were to be scattered.

But the little group refused to return to their former homes; neither would they register with the military. They had pledged their lives—not to Eberhard Arnold, but to the kingdom of God—and they trusted that they were in God’s hand, even if this meant their deaths.

Two days later they were trudging up the hill to the waiting buses—carrying their little children, a sick woman who was unable to walk, and whatever bags they could hold. Thirty-one of them would go to England via Holland and the remaining eleven to the principality of Liechtenstein. Hella Römer, a thirty-one-year-old single woman, was left to close out the accounts.