Friesen, George P. Fangs of Bolshevism or Friesen-Braun Trials in Saskatchewan.
Self-published by the author in 1930
There were five of us at coffee in the Sixth and Railway
Grill in Rosthern the other morning. I don’t remember every bit of trivia that
passed across the table, but when we got to the myriad ways in which fraud can
be attempted against us via the internet, mail and phone, my thoughts went back
to a book I’d just happened to find in the Mennonite Heritage Museum recently,
the subject being a fraud performed by one Mennonite immigrant living in
Rosthern against another Mennonite residing in Hague and Saskatoon. The suits
and counter suits ended up taking three years, seven trials and two appeals to
resolve.
In phase one, Isaac Braun won a
lawsuit against businessman Henry P. Friesen for $5,000 that Braun claimed to
have lent the defendant. This judgment was set aside by appellate court later but
there followed hearings and trials that saw two young men from the Rosthern
area serve eight-month and nine-month sentences respectively in the Prince
Albert Penitentiary for perjury, saw reputations of several prominent members
of the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization jeopardized (primarily David
Toews and A. A. Friesen, as well as Gerhard Ens) and according to Dr. J. Glenn
Friesen—grandnephew of the defrauded H.P. Friesen, the fallout from the series
of trials so shocked the Saskatchewan government that the flow of immigration
of Mennonite refugees was curtailed.
Isaac Braun finally served five years in
the Prince Albert Penitentiary after which he was deported to Russia. Although
never proven, speculation circulated at the time that David Toews’ house fire
in December, 1925—in which his young daughter was killed—was started by
principals in the trials. Toews was seen to be defending Braun throughout the
ordeal, possibly because Braun was a recently-arrived client of the Canadian
Mennonite Board of Colonization. In any case, the commotion caused in the
Rosthern-Hague Mennonite communities—and indeed to the legal communities in
Saskatoon, Rosthern and Prince Albert—was unprecedented.
George P. Friesen, author of Fangs of Bolshevism, was brother to the
defrauded H.P. Friesen. Another brother—I.P. Friesen—was a prominent
businessman and Mennonite minister in Rosthern. Although the text contains repeated
protestations that this long chronicle (255 pp.) is unbiased, the disclaimer
should probably be taken with a few grains of salt; the writing is heavily slanted
throughout toward Friesen and against Braun.
George P. Friesen begins with the
assumptions that Braun was attempting to establish a Bolshevik beachhead in
Canada and that the defrauding of people to obtain funds for this lay behind
the subsequent attack on his brother. The author conveys by direct quote a
statement made by Braun to H.P. Friesen (in the CN depot in Saskatoon at 9:30
P.M. on March 30th, 1925, no less) as follows:
“Your $5,000 are required by us
right now, for organization of Bolshevism in this country. Much more money will
be needed, and if you will consent to pay me an additional $3,000, making
$8,000 altogether, I will see that you are placed on a list for protection. Two
years from now your money will be of no use to you anyway, for by that time we
hope to be fully organized and no money will be of any value, just like in
Russia. Your brother will be required to contribute $10,000 and it will be for
his own good if he pays this sum promptly when demanded.” (p. 3)
Obviously this supposed
conversation took place in German and wasn’t recorded, so we can assume that the
author patched this version together from H.P. Friesen’s recollections.
Nevertheless,
a reading of the book clearly indicates that whatever Braun’s motivation, his
behaviour was brazenly criminal and his demeanour that of a smooth-talking megalomaniac.
That evaluation is supported by the court decisions that unequivocally absolved
Friesen of all blame and punished Braun severely for his crimes.
In the end, it
wasn’t only reputations that were soiled; H.P. Friesen’s family was devastated
by these events and the man himself rendered abjectly disillusioned by three
years of unjustified attack and the loss of a great deal of the money and
resources on which the family depended. J. Glenn Friesen writes about his great
uncle in the years after the fraud:
He became known in the family as a kind of scoffer.
And he never forgave Braun or A.A. Friesen. H.P. Friesen had been a successful
businessman before the trials. But afterwards, he lived a rather sad and bitter
life. He spent his days sitting in the train station, or by the escalator at
Eaton’s Department store, just being idle. I remember meeting him there when I
was a child. And up to the time of his death, some Mennonites continued to
disbelieve his story despite the verdict given by the courts.
A succinct summary of these events
can be found on Dr.
J. Glenn Friesen’s website. Advantages of reading the 1930 version, though,
have to be the numerous pages of court transcripts and articles from the
Saskatoon Phoenix and Prince Albert Herald, the images of the numerous letters
Braun painstakingly forged to discredit Friesen and more generally, the sensation
of being close to the events—the style of George P. Friesen’s writing is
definitely reminiscent of another time!
So
how does one commit fraud these days? It appears there are numerous ways, but
the low-tech methods of Isaac Braun would never pass forensic analysis in our
nano-tech age: His tools were basic; scissors and mucilage and stolen and
misappropriated documents. The original promissory note was part connivance and
part windfall: Friesen was helping Braun find and purchase property, a service
he performed for many new immigrants of the time. Friesen wrote his name and
address at the bottom of a page with letterhead in a lawyer’s office so that
Braun could contact him about an orchard he was going to see in Renata, B.C. Turns
out, Friesen’s signature and address appeared below a blank space in the page
so that Braun was able to fill in a fake but authentic-looking promissory note
above Friesen’s signature and cut off the letterhead and any remaining text.
How the legal
system failed to see through this earlier is a mystery.
Much is made in
Fangs of Bolshevism of the Mennonite
angle. In a sense, the episode tested the commitment of the Mennonite community
to hold to New Testament principles and Anabaptist doctrine when doing so
competed with attempts to establish in Canada a home and some status after
centuries of the internal exile they’d endured in Europe. The impulse to “wash
your dirty laundry privately” was ever-present, obviously, but the involvement
of the courts and the media threw the matter into confusion, even for
leadership who in attempting to force it to early and quiet resolution ended up
participating in a chain of events that only made it worse.
Was Braun really
a “Mennonite?” Was Friesen? Were the actions of the Canadian Mennonite Board of
Colonization Mennonite actions? Rescuing “Mennonites” from refugee
holding places around Moscow was an extremely difficult political and
logistical undertaking, the problems compounded in this case by the reality
that one can live under the ethnic Mennonite umbrella and have only a very
thin connection to the living of a life consistent with dedicated Mennonite,
Anabaptist faith. Ethnic identification inevitably carries with it certain
risks, in this case the broad-brush labelling of many faithful, sincere people
occurred because of their ethnic association with the betrayal of a very few.
A copy of
George P. Friesen’s book is permanently housed in the Mennonite Heritage Museum
in Rosthern. Some reproductions of the book are available from dealers in used
books. See here,
for instance.
