The Church was ten years old in Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1939. The Mission there was led by Wallace F. Toronto and his wife Martha (accompanied by their several small children), and eight missionary elders. Some 128 converts had joined the Church in the Mission in the past decade; through emigration and the inevitable falling away, membership numbers that summer were smaller, but the four branches were still strong and hopeful …

Hopeful, despite the certainty that hard times were ahead. The previous year had seen the takeover of Austria by Germany – war seemed so certain then that missionaries were removed from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, but only as far as the neutral countries of Switzerland, Holland and Denmark, where they spent two months trying to assist elders in those countries but generally anxious to get back to work in their own missions.

The elders were back in Czechoslovakia in March, 1939, when Hitler’s Germany annexed Czechoslovakia, on the excuse that ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia were being mistreated. German officials took over the government of Czechoslovakia, but troop movements were limited to the German side of the border; war did not seem imminent, so the elders were not evacuated a second time.

Along with the annexation came new laws imposed on Czechoslovakia by the German government. New laws regarding foreign currency affected the elders in particular, because all of them were being supported by dollars sent from the United States. Under the strict new law, all foreign currency was expected to be converted to Czech crowns as soon as it was received, and all such conversions were to be conducted at banks – no one could legally hold foreign currency, nor sell it to private citizens outside the banking system. American dollars and British pounds were especially coveted by the German government. The law – in a move alien to most Keepa readers, because the United States Constitution expressly forbids ex post facto laws – was made retroactive: anyone who had held foreign currency or sold it outside the banks in the previous six months was guilty of violating the law.

Mormon elders were accustomed to exchanging their dollars by selling them to private citizens – they could quite often get a higher rate of exchange than the banks offered. This was particularly true when the elders sold their dollars to Czech Jews anxious to leave the country. In a brief account penned in 1939, without our hindsight, President Toronto wrote:

The Jews, who were trying to leave the country, and whose Czech crowns had little value outside the Republic, were anxious to buy foreign money. Several of our brethren, including myself, assisted some of our Jewish friends to place deposits outside of the country in exchange for Czech crowns. This practice was not seriously objected to by the Czechs, who are friendly towards the Jewish people. Several of these Jews, whom we thus assisted, were able to get out of the country before the German invasion. I personally am thankful that we could help them escape the blood-wringing German octopus, which later seized the Czech Republic.

But with the annexation on March 15, President Toronto cautioned his elders to make their exchanges only with banks. They couldn’t – or wouldn’t – comply with the full law, which required any resident of Czechoslovakia, even foreigners like the missionaries, who had deposits in any country outside Czechoslovakia to transfer those deposits to Czech banks and convert them to Czech crowns. President Toronto had heard of a naturalized American citizen, visiting his birth country of Czechoslovakia for six months, who was arrested and held in prison for a month until he had transferred his American accounts to Czechoslovakia and paid a heavy fine. The American Consulate, President Toronto learned, had been unable to help the American citizen; he feared for the safety of his own elders.

President Toronto and the other elders also violated the German law in another respect: Knowing that in all likelihood they would have to soon leave the country under chaotic conditions, all of the elders kept some funds in American cash to use during their evacuation. Expecting to be released soon even without regard to the war, President Toronto brought some English pounds home to Prague after a meeting in Switzerland, and kept the money in the mission office cash box. He also notified the mission secretary in Salt Lake City not to send the mission’s monthly checks for mission expenses to Prague – he would make do, for the time being, with whatever Czech crowns he had on hand.

President Toronto’s warnings to his elders were not adequate: On July 10, one of the elders, Robert E. Lee, was offered a high rate of exchange,p for hus dollard, and he went to meet his contact to complete the transaction. The contact was a Gestapo agent, who arrested Elder Lee. When the missionary was searched, the agent found a check belonging to another elder, Asael Moulton – evidence that Elder Moulton had not converted his dollars to crowns. The Gestapo visited the room of Elder Lee and found Elder Rulon S. Payne. Elder Payne had no illegal money, but not realizing the retroactive nature of the law, he did admit under questioning that he had sold American checks in earlier months in the city of Brno. While the agents were still at the elders’ room, a fourth elder, Verdell R. Bishop, came to visit and was also arrested. By the evening of July 10, all four were in prison.

The Gestapo agents searched the elders’ room, finding a few additional checks; these were confiscated, along with cameras belonging to the elders. Among Elder Payne’s possessions the agents also found three “suspicious” books – biographies of Presidents Benes and Masaryk (present and past presidents of the Czech Republic), and a small book of Czech poems, one of which was condemned as having “communistic tendencies.”

President Toronto did not learn of the arrests until the next day, July 11, when Gestapo agents brought Elder Moulton to the Mission Home – under questioning, he had said that he owned additional funds that were kept at the Mission Home. Elder Moulton managed to tell President Toronto of the arrests, and said that the elders were being held in separate cells. The Gestapo searched the office, opened the cash box, and found the British pounds President Toronto had brought back from Basel, and confiscated them. At some point in the following weeks, the money – minus a ten percent fine for not having immediately turned the pounds into crowns – was eventually returned to President Toronto – in crowns.

After consulting with the American Consulate, President Toronto called at the Gestapo office the next day, July 12, and learned that the elders could be released upon payment of 50,000 crowns (about $2000). He tried unsuccessful to have that bail reduced, and was equally unsuccessful in learning more about the charges against the elders than that “they had sold money to Jews on the streets.”

President Toronto wired Church headquarters in Salt Lake, asking to have $2000 wired to him immediately. He reported to the Consulate. He contacted Alfred C. Rees, president of the German mission with headquarters in Berlin to ask if he had any useful contacts there. The money requested from Salt Lake was delayed, so that even when the American Consul succeeded in having the bail reduced by half, President Toronto could not immediately raise that much. The morning after the bail reduction he succeeded in borrowing the money from a friend at the Consulate (with the private agreement that the friend’s loan would be repaid by deposit of American dollars in an American bank), the Gestapo refused to release the elders – it was too late, they said; the American elders were more deeply implicated in crime than had at first been known – although they would not detail for President Toronto or the Consulate official what those crimes were. Fearing that the money would be confiscated without the release of the elders, President Toronto returned the $2000 which eventually arrived from Salt Lake, with the request that it be placed in a London bank where he could access it quickly if conditions changed.

President Toronto, the American Consul, the American Legate in Berlin, President Rees, and others continued to petition for the release, or at least more information, of the imprisoned elders. A representative of the Consul had been able to visit the elders on July 25, but President Toronto was denied a visit until August 18, when he was permitted to enter the jail with some fruit and candy for the prisoners. “We were happy to find the brethren well and happy,” he recorded. “Although many in this over-crowded prison were maltreated and sometimes tortured, yet our missionaries were not man-handled and seemed to be getting along all right.”

Finally, on August 21, at wit’s end over what else to try, President Toronto called – not for the first time – on Dr. Baumelburg ((I have been unable to locate his first name.)) who was head of the Gestapo in Prague. When he arrived at the office, he saw staffers turning away others who were trying to call, but within 20 minutes Elder Toronto was shown into the oak-finished office of the chief. “The Lord was with me on this day,” he recalled. “A copy of the Deseret News had arrived that morning with a picture of two German officers, young men, who had visited Salt Lake and who had stated something of their delight at being there. I told Dr. Baumelburg of our missionary system, and said that the article about the German boys in our paper had probably been written up by one of our former missionaries.”

He asked the German to reduce the bail and fine imposed on the imprisoned elders. Dr. Baumelburg scolded him: “Why, your church is a rich one, and could easily pay any amount.” But missionaries were not paid by the Church, President Toronto explained. “The burden of such a fine would probably fall upon the parents of these boys, who were ordinary, hard-working people.” Knowing that Germany needed foreign currency, President Toronto felt inspired to tell him that “there were some two hundred missionaries in Germany, who were sending them some ten thousand dollars a month for their support, and that Germany was enjoying the benefit of this income.”

“This startled him. He took the telephone, called the head of the Currency Protection Department, and ordered him to consider my offer of one thousand dollars for the release of our elders. When he hung up, he turned sand said, ‘Herr Toronto, you have good fortune today.’”

Two days later, on August 23rd, officials accepted President Toronto’s payment of 30,000 crowns (about $1.025), and the four elders were released. “Needless to say,” – but President Toronto said it anyway – “we rejoiced to see them again.”

For the first time, President Toronto was able to learn details of the elders’ arrest. Elder Bishop, who had not confessed to selling any currency, had been held for 44 days because he had in his pocket a $10 American Express traveler’s check. Elder Moulton had sold $30 in traveler’s checks. About $260 had been sold by Elders Payne and Lee, most, but not all, before the law against it had even been passed.

It became clear to us [wrote President Toronto] hat the delay on the case was simply a means of extracting a goodly sum of money from the church. Most of the excuses given us by the Gestapo agents for the delay, we found to be false. They had hoped that we would be willing to offer any price for the release of our men, and that the Church would be happy to put up ten thousand dollars as a bond, which after they once got their fingers on it would never be returned, even in part. Other Americans and Englishmen were seized and held for the same thing. The American and English Consulates were helpless to act, since neither country had recognized the seizure of Czechoslovakia. Many foreigners found themselves in this situation, and paid a high money price for release.

Two days after the elders’ release, the mission received word from Thomas E. McKay, acting as president of the European Missions, that all elders should evacuate immediately. The elders in Czechoslovakia, all of whom had been called earlier into Prague so that President Toronto could reach them at a moment’s notice, secured permits to cross the border into Germany, with the goal of reaching Denmark.

Just as they were to leave, Elder Payne was again arrested and thrown into prison. Fortunately, a representative of the American Consulate was with him when he was arrested and quickly sorted out the problem – an Englishman by the name of Payne was wanted for espionage, and it was an easily cleared case of mistaken identity.

While Elder Payne was being cleared and released, President Toronto sent his family and the rest of the elders to Berlin; he and Elder Payne followed the next day. They were all in Berlin on the day Germany began to bomb Poland, but they had no trouble reaching Copenhagen.

Once in safety, the elders consulted with each other and sent a message to Salt Lake, saying they all felt equally guilty of having made unlawful currency exchanges, and together they would repay the $1,025 that the Church had spent on their fine. “It may require a little time to complete the payment. Under the circumstances we felt that this was the only thing to do.”

But Joseph Fielding Smith, who had been visiting Europe on mission business and found himself unexpectedly coordinating the evacuation of missionaries from the Continent and arranging for their return to the United States, had a different opinion. “On my own responsibility,” he wrote, “I am suggesting that the offer of the missionaries to meet this fine be set aside, and the Church assume it and charge it against the German nation. Some day they will pay.”

Note: The politics and motives expressed in this post come from the elders immediately after their escape from Czechoslovakia. They may not be entirely accurate, or even represent the elders’ understanding after they had had time to reflect. These ideas, however, are what governed President Toronto’s actions as they happened.