President Monson: A Missionary Felt Prompted to Keep Wartime Photos for 40 Years — Then Delivered Them on the Right Plane

Brother Edwin Q. Cannon Jr. served a mission to Germany in 1938. When he returned to Salt Lake City, he kept several missionary photographs he could not identify — images of a family in Stettin, Germany: a mother, a father, a small girl, and a small boy. The surname was Berndt.

Every time he planned to discard them over the following decades, he felt impressed to keep them. He held them for forty years.

Finally, he brought them to President Thomas S. Monson's office. President Monson was about to travel to Berlin, where he expected to meet Dieter Berndt, a Church leader in Germany. He agreed to show the photos and ask if there was any connection.

President Monson later recounted what happened:

'The Lord didn't even let me get to Berlin before His purposes were accomplished. I was in Zurich, Switzerland, boarding the flight to Berlin, when who should also board the plane but Dieter Berndt. He sat next to me, and I told him I had some old photos of people named Berndt from Stettin. I handed them to him and asked if he could identify those shown in the photographs. As he looked at them carefully, he began to weep.

'He said: "Our family lived in Stettin during the war. My father was killed when an Allied bomb struck the plant where he worked. The Russians invaded. My mother took my sister and me and fled, leaving everything behind — including any photographs we had. Brother Monson, I am the little boy pictured in these photographs, and my sister is the little girl. The man and woman are our dear parents. Until today, I had no photographs of our childhood in Stettin or of my father."

'Wiping away my own tears, I told Brother Berndt the photographs were his. He placed them carefully and lovingly in his briefcase.'

At the next General Conference, Dieter Berndt traveled to Salt Lake City and visited the Cannon family personally to express his gratitude for forty years of faithful obedience to a quiet prompting.