How a spiritual prompting contributed to the ‘Escape From Germany’

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The movie “Escape From Germany,” a thriller about the evacuation of Latter-day Saint missionaries in 1939 before the Nazis invasion of Poland, surpassed $2 million at the box office this week.

That makes the small-budget movie a hit in the Latter-day Saint genre. The movie was in 131 theaters in Utah, Arizona, Idaho and Nevada early in its run and remains in 89 theaters right now in the American West. The movie has a 94% positive viewer score on Rotten Tomatoes.

The movie tells the story of Elder Norm Seibold, who received an overwhelming assignment from his mission president after President Heber J. Grant of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent a message to evacuate: Go find missionaries across northern Germany and get them across closing borders to Holland and Denmark.

The Deseret News interviewed Terry Bohle Montague to talk about the true story of the evacuation. The movie is based on her book “Mine Angels Round About: West German Mission Evacuation 1939.”

Montague interviewed dozens of the evacuated missionaries in the 1980s.

“If not for Terry this story would have mostly been lost,” said the film’s producer-director-writer-cinematographer, T.C. Christensen, in an interview with the Davis Journal.

Deseret News: What drew your interest to this story?

Terry Bohle Montague: I’m a Baby Boomer and as children playing outside when we were little, one thing we had in common was that our parents had been involved in World War II. We all knew what each other’s parents did during the war. My dad was combat-wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. My mom was a welder at Fort Ord. My friend Joan from across the alley, her dad was an airplane mechanic. So I was attuned to that. Then, when I was 15 sitting in biology class, a boy named Jerry Seibold was sitting behind me, and a boy came up to him and said, “Is it true your dad was a missionary in Nazi Germany?” Boy, did that catch my attention. The terms Nazi Germany and missionary do not belong in the same sentence. I mean, that is immediately the source of conflict, just to say that, and the heart of any story is conflict. A few years later, after going to BYU and returning to Rupert, Idaho, with my husband, I was a little bored caring for a 2-year-old, bored and thought I’d write an article. I decided to talk to Jerry’s dad, Norm Seibold, who was our county commissioner and one of the missionaries.

DN: That started you on quite a journey, didn’t it?

TBM: Yes, I interviewed Norm and then decided I need to verify everything, so I went to the Church Archives in Salt Lake City, where I found a list of the names and hometowns of all of the missionaries. We didn’t have the internet then, so I started checking phone books at our library and found some missionaries that way. I called school districts, and they shared names and addresses — you couldn’t do that today. Inspiration helped, too. One time, on our way back from a camping vacation, we were passing through a dinky town and I told my husband we needed to stop. He pulled over at a gas station and I went in and asked for a phone book. I found one of the missionaries in that phone book. I was able to find 55 or 56 of them. By that time, I think there were 15 that had died.

DN: Why are people going to see this?

TBM: People are flocking to see this movie because the world is really nasty right now. Online comments about church members are discouraging enough that I don’t look at them anymore. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think that people are looking for something that says good things about what they believe. I think missionary work is always a good subject, and that this movie portrays urgency that’s based on the belief system that we have, on a testimony of the gospel. I think that that’s why people are going to see it. I think this was exactly the right time to release it.

DN: What are some of the challenges you faced in compiling information and writing the book?

TBM: President Joseph Fielding Smith, who was then an apostle, told the missionaries when after they got out of Germany, “Don’t tell anybody what’s happened.” Some refused to talk about it all the way to their deathbed. You have to think he was worried what would happen to the church in Germany. I asked Norm, “Why did you choose to talk about it?” He said, “It was time.” I sent out postcards to missionaries when I found their addresses, telling them I was interested in their experiences in 1939 and asking whether they were willing to talk about it. One missionary, Vern Marrott, who was charged with getting two very ill missionaries out to Holland, responded immediately. I told my husband, we need to go see him in Utah. When we arrived, he said, “I always knew you would come,” and he ushered me into this room, and there were all of these people in there, and he introduced them as his family members. Then he turned to me and said, “President Smith told us we shouldn’t ever talk about this, so I’ve never told my family and this is the first time they’re going to hear it.”

DN: When did T.C. Christensen contact you about turning the book into a movie?

TBM: In 2019 or 2020. He wanted to release it by 2022, I believe, but the pandemic complicated the schedule. He’d had the book for about 14 years in his files, but he’d always thought it would be too expensive to make into a movie. Finally, he decided there was a way to do it. If the movie makes people feel better about the world and the lives they’re living, it was the right thing for T.C. to do.

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