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Goshen, Ind.
Fate of MCC worker still a mystery


The search for the fate of Clayton Kratz, one of the original Mennonite Central Committee workers, will have to continue after a report of his execution could not be confirmed, says a historian investigating the 80-year-old mystery.

The 24-year-old Kratz, a native of Blooming Glen, Pa., and a Goshen (Ind.) College student, was one of three workers sent by the fledgling MCC to do relief work in strife-torn Russia in 1920. He disappeared in Ukraine in November 1920, two months after his arrival.

Since then, Kratz has become one of 20th-century Mennonitism’s great martyrs, as repeated attempts to determine his whereabouts have been fruitless.

Observers hoped for a breakthrough last year with the discovery of information in a diary of C.E. Krehbiel, a long-time General Conference Mennonite Church leader who served as a relief worker in Russia 1922-23.

Missing In Action: The price of service Clayton Kratz was not the only MCC worker to be reported missing in action. Sixty-two years after Kratz’s disappearance in the Ukraine, a second MCC volunteer was lost through wartime violence. On the night of May 31, 1962, during the early stages of the Vietnam War, Daniel Gerber, a 22-year-old native of Kidron, Ohio, was walking the grounds of the leprosarium in Vietnam, where he was working when he was abducted. He was never heard from again.  – Rich Preheim

While in Russia, Krehbiel inquired about Kratz and, according to his diary, was told that Kratz had been taken to Alexandrowsk (now the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhzhia), where he was shot as a spy. Krehbiel’s diary is in the Mennonite Library and Archives in North Newton, Kan.

Paul Toews, director of the Center for MB Studies in Fresno, Calif., investigated the diary’s report while in Zaporozhzhia this summer. But inquiries to several archives in the city produced nothing on Kratz. “What this information does is discount that he was taken to Zaporozhzhia, seen in Zaporozhzhia and incarcerated in Zaporozhzhia,” says Toews, who makes regular trips to the former Soviet Union to research Mennonite-related holdings in archives and libraries there.

Toews says the next location to check would be the city of Kharkov, the Ukrainian capital at the time of Kratz’s disappearance. Krehbiel’s diary makes reference to a Kratz-related document in Kharkov.

Toews notes that Kratz was last reported seen being taken from the Mennonite colony of Molotschna and headed northeast, which is more in the direction of Kharkov than Zaporozhzhia, which is northwest of Molotschna.

Toews says he does not have any current plans to go to Kharkov.

In the meantime, MCC will draft a letter to archive authorities, requesting whatever pertinent information they may have in their files.

Among those people following the latest developments in the Kratz mystery is a group of one current and three former Goshen College students, who are making a video on Kratz. They travelled in Europe this summer to research the video and shoot footage.

The group followed Kratz’s route to Ukraine, travelling from Athens to Istanbul then to Molotschna. The four met Toews in Zaporozhzhia.

“We all wanted to see some of the same things and travel the same ground [as Kratz],” says group member Sidney King of Hickory, N.C.

 – Rich Preheim

Editor’s note: This story uses the English translation of the Ukrainian spelling of the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhzhia. The city has traditionally been known as Zaporozhye, which is the English translation of the Russian spelling of the name.

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Last modified October 20, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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