Jehovahs Witnesses

The Jehovah’s Witnesses were a small but distinctive victim group of the Nazi regime. Around 35,000 Witnesses were members of the church in Germany and Austria in 1933, of whom approximately 10,000 were imprisoned at some point under the regime, around 2,000 were sent to concentration camps, and between 1,200 and 1,500 were murdered or died in detention. They wore the purple triangle. They are unique among victim groups of the regime in that the persecution they faced was direct and explicit consequence of their refusal to comply with specific demands of the state, demands they could have met by signing a single document, and they refused.

The Witnesses in Germany before 1933

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, known until 1931 as the International Bible Students Association, had been active in Germany since the 1890s. Their European headquarters was in Magdeburg. The membership was working class and lower middle class, geographically dispersed across the country, and organised in small congregations called companies. They were not a politically active body in any conventional sense; they did not vote in Weimar elections (their refusal to vote was a long-standing doctrinal position), did not join political parties, did not run candidates. Their distinctive practices were door-to-door evangelism, refusal of military service, refusal of the Hitler salute, and the distribution of literature published by the Watch Tower Society, which combined biblical exposition with sustained critique of the established Christian churches.

The conflict with the regime

The Nazi regime’s quarrel with the Witnesses was ideological and operational. The Witnesses’ refusal of the Hitler salute was a public refusal that other groups could not match. Their refusal of military service was at first a small problem and became a large one after conscription was reintroduced in 1935. Their literature explicitly named the regime as a satanic power, an analysis the Witnesses had developed before 1933 and refused to soften afterwards. Their international links to American and Swiss headquarters were treated by the regime as evidence of foreign control. The Watch Tower Society was banned in Prussia in April 1933, and the ban was extended to most of Germany by the end of that year.

The regime’s pressure was sustained. Witnesses lost their jobs in the public service, in many private firms, and in their professions. Their children were expelled from schools for refusing to say Heil Hitler at the morning roll-call. Their meetings, which they continued to hold in private homes, were subject to police raids. Their literature, which was now produced clandestinely or smuggled in from Switzerland, exposed those carrying it to immediate arrest.

The decisive break came in 1935 with the reintroduction of conscription. Witnesses of military age refused to serve. Around 270 Witness men were sentenced to death by military courts between 1939 and 1945 for refusing service, of whom around 250 were executed (most by guillotine at the Brandenburg-Görden prison). The first Witness to be executed under the regime, August Dickmann, was shot at Sachsenhausen in front of the assembled prisoners on 15 September 1939, two weeks after the German invasion of Poland.

The camps

Witnesses were sent to concentration camps from 1936 onwards. The largest concentrations were at Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück (the camp for women, where many Witness women were held) and Auschwitz. They were marked with the purple triangle, the only victim group with a triangle of that colour.

The Witnesses’ position in the camps was unique. They could secure their immediate release at any time by signing a recantation document, the so-called Verpflichtungserklärung, in which they would renounce their faith, declare loyalty to the regime, and agree to serve in the Wehrmacht if called. The document was offered to every Witness on arrival and at intervals throughout their detention. The overwhelming majority refused. The historians of the persecution estimate the rate of recantation in the camps at well below 5 per cent. Most Witnesses who were offered the document and refused remained in the camps for the duration of the war.

The treatment of Witnesses by camp guards varied. Many SS officers regarded them with a mixture of contempt and curiosity. Some found their refusal of orders provoking and treated them with particular cruelty. Others found them reliable workers, particularly in trusted positions in officers’ households or as messengers within the camps, because the Witnesses had taken vows against theft and would carry valuables without taking them. A small number of Witness women worked as nannies in the homes of senior camp officers. The historian Christine King has documented the curious bargain: the Witnesses would not steal and could be trusted with private property, while the SS who employed them in their homes would not be present at their executions.

Afterwards

The Witnesses are unique among Nazi victim groups in that their post-war reckoning was relatively immediate. The American military government in occupied Germany officially recognised them as a victim category in 1945, and they were among the first groups to be acknowledged in the post-war German Wiedergutmachung programme. Their persecution had been substantially documented in their own records, which had been smuggled out to Switzerland during the war and were available to the Allies immediately after liberation. The Brooklyn headquarters of the Watch Tower Society had maintained continuous communication with the German Witnesses throughout the war and could provide names, dates and case histories of those persecuted.

The Witnesses’ approach to memorialisation has been distinctive. The Watch Tower Society has produced extensive historical literature on the persecution, including the documentary Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault (1996), which uses extensive original archive material. The German federal government included Witnesses in the official list of recognised victim groups from the late 1940s. The official memorial at the Brandenburg-Görden prison, where most of the executions took place, was established in 1990. The Witnesses’ commitment to their own historical record has produced one of the most thoroughly documented accounts of any victim group’s persecution under the regime.

Around 1,200 to 1,500 Witnesses were murdered by the regime. The numerical scale is small compared to that of the Jews, the Roma and Sinti, or the political prisoners. The historical significance of the case is in what it shows about the regime’s treatment of conscientious refusal: that the regime would imprison and kill members of a small religious group for the consistent application of doctrines that had been established before the regime existed, and that the persecution would continue even when its victims could end it at any moment by signing a document. The Witnesses refused to sign. Most did not survive. The few who did emerged with a community memory of having been right about the nature of the regime, against which their refusal had been the only response their doctrine allowed.

See also

Sources

  • Christine E. King, The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in Non-Conformity, Edwin Mellen Press, 1982
  • Detlef Garbe, Between Resistance and Martyrdom: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008 (the standard English-language history)
  • Hans Hesse (ed), Persecution and Resistance of Jehovah’s Witnesses During the Nazi Regime 1933-1945, Berghahn Books, 2001
  • Sybil Milton, “Jehovah’s Witnesses as Forgotten Victims of National Socialism”, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol 13 no 1, 1999
  • Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Proclaimers of God’s Kingdom, Watch Tower, 1993 (the official Witness historical account)
  • Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Jehovah’s Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault, documentary film, 1996
  • USHMM, “Jehovah’s Witnesses”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org
  • Brandenburg-Görden Memorial, https://www.stiftung-bg.de/gedenkstaetten/zuchthaus-brandenburg-goerden