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Auerbach Branch, Zwickau District
Roger P. Minert, In Harm’s Way: East German Latter-day Saints in World War II (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2009), 481.
Nine miles from the border of Czechoslovakia, the town of Auerbach was home to a tiny branch of Latter-day Saints in 1939. Amidst the beautiful Erzgebirge Mountains of Saxony, the town is just seventeen miles south-southeast of the city of Zwickau. When the war began, there were about fifteen thousand inhabitants in Auerbach. Only sixteen were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
| Auerbach Branch[1] | 1939 |
| Elders | 1 |
| Priests | 0 |
| Teachers | 0 |
| Deacons | 1 |
| Other Adult Males | 1 |
| Adult Females | 12 |
| Male Children | 0 |
| Female Children | 1 |
| Total | 16 |
At the end of the year 1938, the Auerbach Branch was holding meetings at Kreuzstrasse 8B, apparently the home of a family named Seifert. That location is not in Auerbach itself, but rather in the neighboring community of Rodewisch, one mile to the north.
The adult female members constituted three-quarters of the branch population. The one elder may have been Brother Seifert.
By 1943, the location of the meetings was listed as Ottostrasse 17. This address in Auerbach was likely the home of some of the members of the branch.
As of this writing, there were no eyewitnesses to describe life in the Auerbach Branch during the war or the fate of the Latter-day Saints there.
No members of the Auerbach Branch are known to have lost their lives in World War II.
Notes
[1] Presiding Bishopric, “Financial, Statistical, and Historical Reports of Wards, Stakes, and Missions, 1884–1955,” CR 4 12, 257.
