5 If the Lord Needs Me, I’ll Go

Walter Krause has become a legend in his own lifetime. The reason for this will become clear to anyone who reads the stories in this book, where his name appears again and again. A faithful member of the Church his entire life, Brother Krause lives with his wife, Edith Schade Krause (see chapter 1), in Prenzlau and serves as patriarch of the Leipzig Stake. The following material was edited by Manfred Schütze and Norma Davis.

The name Walter Krause always comes up whenever the Saints talk about how they were reunited after the war. Many things would have been different or would not have come about at all, without his influence. As a young man, Walter Krause joined the Church against his parents’ wishes. He was disinherited and had to leave his home. An active member of the Church from that moment on, Brother Krause was a soldier during the war and ended that service as a prisoner of war. He was released on July 2, 1945, from a POW camp near Cottbus, a town on the Polish-German border. The country was in shambles. Two refugee camps, one in the Erz Mountains on the western border of the occupied area and the other in Cottbus on the east, were crowded with people who had been uprooted by the war and had left their homes with little more than what was on their backs. Homeless like the others, Brother Krause and his family lived in the refugee camp in Cottbus and began to attend church there. He was immediately called to lead the Cottbus Branch of the Church.

Walter Krause. Courtesy Manfred Schütze.

Four months later, in November of 1945, District President Richard Ranglack came to Brother Krause and asked him what he would think about going on a mission for the Church. Brother Krause’s answer reflects his commitment to the Church: “I don’t have to think about it at all. If the Lord needs me, I’ll go.” Brother Krause described the beginning of that mission as follows:

I prayed about it and then set out on the first of December 1945, with twenty marks in my pocket, a piece of dry bread, and a bottle of tea. One brother had given me a winter coat left over from a son who had fallen in the war. Another brother, who was a shoemaker, gave me a pair of shoes. So, [with these and] with two shirts, two handkerchiefs, and two pairs of stockings, I left on my mission.

He was sent first to Leipzig, armed only with the information that the branch met on Tauchaer Street and that Elder Alfred Kirchert was serving as branch president. He had been told to go to the house of a member who lived on Kreutz Strasse [Crossing Road]:

When I came out of the train station, there was a policewoman standing at the corner directing the traffic. I went up to her and said, “Could you please tell me where Crossing Road is?” “At the next crossing,” she answered. I liked the humor of her answer and haven’t forgotten it to this day.

He was disappointed when he finally located Crossing Road and found the brother he was supposed to meet. The man was full of advice and instructions, but he apparently had no idea what the duties of a missionary should be. Elder Krause was wise enough to recognize this and to realize that this brother had no authority over him.

So I took my leave of him after asking where other members of the Church lived. He sent me out to Wahren, to the Naegler family. I made my way there and arrived in the late afternoon. The members were happy to see me. There was a cottage meeting set up for that evening, and I was happy to participate. At the meeting, I found the spirit that was absolutely necessary for me to have before I could be fruitful in the work of the Lord. Sister Beyer took me in, so I finally had a place to stay.

However, he had little time to work in Leipzig and to become acquainted with the members there, since within a few days his assignment was changed to Naumburg. This was the branch closest to the one in Leipzig, and it was in the same district under the direction of another full-time missionary who served as district president.

In January 1946, I came back to Leipzig, and Sunday I went to the meetings. The place where they met was unfriendly and cold. The war had just ended, and the members were not in the best condition, physically and emotionally. I sensed that there was a lot of fighting among them. They were accusing one another of things that had happened years ago. So I invited them to come on another day for an open discussion.

Brother Krause had been told to bring order to the branch. Rather than disrupt the spirit that is supposed to attend Sunday worship, he promised them a chance to air their complaints at another time. When the appointed time came, he asked each person to express his or her feelings. He listened patiently to all they had to say, silently pleading with the Lord for his Spirit so he could really help the people.

Just before the close of the meeting, I said something like the following: My dear sisters and brothers, I have just now gotten acquainted with you. If I am to believe everything that I have heard here today, then no one is right, and nothing is in order. But perhaps I can help you out with a few verses from the poet Endrikat. Then I quoted the following poem:

     An oxen went before a wagon
     Loaded with manure and full.
     He complained to all and sundry,
     That it was too much to pull.

     Then the people all around him
     Said he had no right to moan
     If the load seemed double heavy,
     The manure was his own.

     He with patience had to bear it
     When the people did recall,
     If he made so much manure,
     Whose fault was it, after all?

My final words were, “Why are you Leipzigers making so much manure?” This surprised them. A few smiled or snickered, some frowned and cleared their throats and started to grumble, but seeing that they were outnumbered, they kept quiet. As it turned out, they all began to examine themselves, and this little satirical poem helped them see their problem more clearly. It did its job with humor, without attacking anyone personally. With a few exceptions, peace was restored again.

Within a few months after he came to Leipzig, Brother Krause was transferred to the north, to the province of Mecklenburg. He began to gather the Saints together into branches in Demmin, Wolgast, Neubrandenburg, and Prenzlau. Few railroad lines were left undamaged, so he had to walk from one town to the next, depending on the Lord to lead him to the homes of the members. The distance between the meeting places of the Saints was often as much as fifty kilometers. He often had to walk twelve or thirteen hours to reach them. He would start early in the morning from Demmin and wouldn’t get to his destination in Wolgast until three o’clock the next morning. For over a year, he traveled and worked alone without a missionary companion. He now looks back on the time as one of pure blessings:

Once, in the middle of the winter, I walked from Prenzlau to Kamin (a little village in Mecklenburg), where we had up to forty-six members at our meetings. I arrived long after dark that night after a six-hour march over roads, paths, and finally across plowed fields. Just before I reached the village, I came to a large, white, flat area which made easy walking, and I soon arrived. The next morning the game warden came to the house of the member where I had spent the night. “Do you have a guest?” “Yes.” “Then come and take a look at his tracks.” Some time earlier, the warden had chopped a large hole in the middle of the lake for fishing. [The large flat area Brother Krause had crossed was actually a frozen lake.] The wind had driven snow over the hole and covered it so that I could not have seen my danger. My tracks went right across the edge of the hole and straight to the house of this brother, without my knowing anything about it. Weighed down by my backpack and my rubber boots, I would certainly have drowned. This event caused quite a little stir in the village at that time.

Few can imagine the difficulties the Saints faced. The Russians were struggling to gain control of a country that had been left in ruins. There weren’t enough buildings left standing to shelter those who had survived the war or the soldiers returning from prisoner-of-war camps and from the battlefields. In addition, refugees from Poland were flooding westward in hopes of finding conditions better in Germany. Transportation was nearly nonexistent; food and clothing were scarce. Few people had work. Often they would be conscripted to clean and rebuild without receiving pay.

Within a relatively short period of time, Brother Krause organized eight branches in the Mecklenburg area. He helped the members purchase land for buildings, often supervising more than one building project at a time. He organized the youth and planned youth conferences so they could come together and strengthen one another’s faith through friendship and testimony. More than one hundred young people gathered at those first conferences.

While he was away, his family lived in the refugee camp, and he had no source of financial support. He had to rely on the members he found to take him in and share their meager supplies with him. “I just lived from what the members had to offer me.” Still he considers this time spiritually rewarding:

My testimony was greatly strengthened at the baptism of a sister who now lives in West Germany. She had instructions from a doctor that because of her ears she was never to go into cold water. The day of her baptism was cold—ice and snow. I was in the water six times to baptize people, including this sister. There were no health problems; no one even got the sniffles.

Eventually, Elder Walter Krause was released, and he went home to build up his own family and the Church. In the 1960s, he was made a counselor in the mission presidency, and in 1973 the GDR government allowed him to attend general conference in Salt Lake City. There he was set apart by President Spencer W. Kimball to serve as patriarch to the mission.

June 15, 1969, in Dresden founding the Dresden Mission with GDR brethren as mission leaders. Back row: Elder Thomas S. Monson, Stanley Rees (former Hamburg Mission president), Henry Burkhardt (new mission president), Percy R. Fetzer (patriarch), Gottfried Richter (second counselor), and Walter Krause (first counselor). Front row: Helen Rees, Inge Burkhardt, Thelma Fetzer, and Edith Krause. Courtesy Edith Krause.

After all he had experienced—the war, the prison camp, the refugee camp, the long and strenuous mission, and his continued efforts over the following thirty years or more—his health was failing, and he felt such a calling to be nearly impossible. He told President Kimball, “You are ordaining a deathly ill man.” President Kimball answered, “You will yet give blessings to thousands.” This statement was truly prophetic. By 1989, at the age of eighty-one, Brother Krause was within two dozen blessings of reaching his first thousand. Undoubtedly he has passed that goal by now [1994]. He has enjoyed good health, continued to serve the Lord wherever he has been called, and has often been across the Atlantic to attend conferences and speak to members of the Church in Utah. He was among those who stood with President Thomas S. Monson on the hill outside Dresden to rededicate the GDR to the work of the Lord, and he was present when the government gave the Church permission to build a temple in what was then East Germany.

Walter Krause writes:

When I look back, I have to say over and over again, it is a good thing we have a kind, merciful, and just God. His kindness and mercy is closest to my heart, because if I were to be judged according to the strictness of every work, then I would be in trouble.

Manfred Schütze summarizes Brother Krause’s life in these words:

For many decades, Brother Krause has been an example of faith and strength to all the members. Today he is still a man of God to whom many turn for help with their problems or when they need counsel. They are certain to find understanding and to receive an inspired answer.