Jehovah's Witnesses and the Holocaust
Early during their development, the Nazis began to suppress several Christian minorities whom they felt were subversive to their goals. Even before the war, Jehovah's Witnesses had been considered heretics by other Christian denominations and individual German states sought to limit their activities. In the early 1930's, Nazi storm troopers broke up their meetings and beat up individual Witnesses. After the Nazis came to power, the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses intensified.
On July 27, 1933, the Gestapo--the Nazi street police--closed the printing operation of the Watchtower Society, an organization of the Witnesses. The Gestapo ordered all state-police precincts to search regional Witness groups and organizations. The Witnesses, however, defied Nazi prohibitions by continuing to meet and distribute literature smuggled in from Switzerland.
For defying the ban on their activities, many Witnesses were arrested and sent to prisons and concentration camps. They lost their jobs in both private industry and public service and were denied their unemployment, social welfare, and pension benefits.
On April 1, 1935, Jehovah's Witnesses were banned by law. However, they refused to be drafted into the military services or perform war-related work and continued to meet. In 1935, some 400 Witnesses were imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By 1939, an estimated 6,000 Witnesses were detained in prisons and camps. Some were tortured by police to force them to renounce their faith. Few did so. The children of Witnesses also suffered. They were ridiculed by their teachers because they refused to give the "Heil Hitler" salute or sing patriotic songs. They were beaten up by their classmates and expelled from schools. The authorities took children away from their parents and sent them to reform schools and orphanages, or to private homes to be brought up as Nazis.
In the concentration camps, Jehovah's Witnesses were required to wear a purple triangle to distinguish them from other inmates. Many of them died from disease, hunger, exhaustion, brutal treatment, and exposure to the cold. About 10,000 Witnesses were imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi period. An estimated 2,500 to 5,000 died.
Source: Dr. William L. Shulman, A State of Terror: Germany 1933-1939. Bayside, New York: Holocaust Resource Center and Archives.
Resources:
The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in Non-Conformity:
≡ Chapter VI: A Triumph of Will: The Jehovah's Witnesses
≡ Chapter VII: Some Conclusions
≡ Appendices
≡ Notes
Jehovah's Witnesses: Victims Under Two Dictatorships, a book review.
Survival and Resistance: The Netherlands Under Nazi Occupation by Linda M. Woolf, Ph.D.
Jehovah's Witnesses: Victims of the Nazi Era is a booklet published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. View the full booklet in PDF format here.
Read the story of Simone Liebster, a Jehovah's Witness who at the age of twelve was sent to a penitentiary school for Nazi re-education.
Timeline of the Jehovah's Witnesses during the Nazi Era.
John Conway (Newletter Editor of the Association of Church Historians, University of British Columbia) reviews Detlef Garbe's new book Zwischen Widerstand und Martyrium. Die Zeugen Jehovahs im Dritten Reich.
Spiritual Resistance of Christian Conviction in Nazi Germany: The Case of the Jehovah's Witnesses by Gabriele Yonan.
The Fascist Repression of the Jehovah's Witnesses by Matteo Pierro.
Female Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Women’s Concentration Camp in Moringen: Research on the Resistance of Women to Nazism by Jürgen Harder and Hans Hesse
Purple Triangles: A Story of Spiritual Resistance by Jolene Chu
Watchtower Library Archives:
≡ Sustained Through Terrible Trials
≡ Jehovah's Witnesses: Courageous in the Face of Nazi Peril
Jehovah's Witnesses Russia Archives:
≡ What Historians Say About Jehovah's Witnesses and Nazi Germany
≡ Letter from the State Commissioner for the Police System in Hessen, Carmstadt, April 1933
≡ Letter from the Supreme Ecclesiastical Council. Stuttgart, June 20, 1933
≡ Ban of Jehovah's Witnesses by the Prussian Minister of Internal Affairs. Berlin, June 24, 1933
≡ Indictment of the Special Court of Saxony in Freiberg against 39 Jehovah's Witnesses. Freiberg, August 7, 1935
≡ Report from Secret State Police Office. Darmstadt, October 15, 1936
≡ Newspaper National Zeitung, Basel (Switzerland), January 14, 1937: Crime Development in Germany
≡ Newspaper Herner Zeitung, January 14, 1937: "Jehovah's Witnesses" on Special Trial. Religion as cover for anti-state goals. Exemplary punishments
≡ Newspaper Westdeutscher Beobachter, August 21, 1938: Messengers of Jewish Bolshevism. National thinking for them a "sin against Jehovah"
Other Study Links:
≡ Holocaust Teacher Resource Center
≡ A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
≡ United States Holocaust Museum
≡ The Fascist Repression of the Jehovah's Witnesses
≡ Victims of the Nazi Regime
≡ Standfirm
Selected Bibliography:Friedman, Ina R. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews Persecuted by the Nazis (Boston, 1990), pp. 47-59.
King, Christine E. "Jehovah's Witnesses under Nazism," in Michael Berenbaum. ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York, 1990), 188-193.
King, Christine E. The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in Non-Conformity (New York, 1982).
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York. Jehovah's Witnesses: Proclaimers of God's Kingdom (Pennsylvania, 1993).
Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York. 1974 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses (Pennsylvania, 1973).
On Video: Purple Triangles, the story of the Kusserow family. A Starlock Pictures Production for TVS, 1991. English version distribution by Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., 25 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Bibliography source: Jehovah's Witnesses: Victims of the Nazi Era, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Used with permission.
posted by wen Kroywen at 7:24 AM
1 Comments:
In the late 1960s, the WatchTower Society commissioned an exact and comprehensive history of Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany, which was to include exact and precise statistics for the Holocaust period, which were to be extracted from not only government archives, but, more importantly, from the WatchTower Cult's own METICULOUS RECORDS in Germany and other European countries. That report was published by the WatchTower Cult in 1973.
Apparently, the WatchTower Cult was greatly disappointed in the Holocaust statistics uncovered by its own legal researchers, because that report has rarely been cited by the WatchTower Cult in its' own Holocaust-related articles published subsequent to the 1973 report. Instead of using its' own documented exact statistics, both the WatchTower Cult and individual Jehovah's Witnesses routinely cite inflated statistics from non-WatchTower sources whose numbers are inflated "guestimates", or are inflated numbers from unreliable and inaccurate records.
Accordingly to the WatchTower Cult's own 1973 report, only 6019 Jehovah's Witnesses were arrested in Germany during the 12 year Nazi period of 1933 through 1945. Only 2000 German JWs were ever sent to concentration camps. Only 203 were executed. Another 432 German JWs died while in custody in all German jails, prisons, and camps.
Exact numbers for other Nazi-occupied countries are unknown. Even Holocaust experts who inflate German JW statistics guestimate that only
600-800 non-German JWs from Nazi-occupied countries were ever sent to concentration camps. Mortality figures are not known.
Thus, only 2600-2800 Jehovah's Witnesses were ever sent to Nazi concentration camps. Death statistics are not known, but can be reasonably estimated to be in the 500-700 range. The JW TOTAL for 1933-1945 is about HALF the DAILY AVERAGE of Jewish deaths -- 1370 every single day for the 12 year Nazi period.
During this same 1933-1945 time period, there were more Jehovah's Witnesses arrested and jailed in the United States than in Germany. In fact, just during 1941-1945, approximately 4500 American Jehovah's Witnesses men "elected" to go to prison rather than serve in the U.S. Military and help stop Nazis atrocities against their fellow JWs.
Approximately 3000 of those 4500 American JWs were even offered "conscientious objector" status, in which they were offered "non-combatant" work as a substitute for military service, but 99% of those 3000 American JWs refused to help out even that much.
It is an insult to memorialize the small handful of anti-societal, trouble-seeking Jehovah's Witnesses alongside the 6,000,000+ Jewish Holocaust victims given that Jehovah's Witnesses view the Jewish people much as did the Nazis.
The WatchTower Cult preaches its own version of "replacement theology", which teaches that YHWH rejected the Jews as His "chosen people", and
replaced the Jewish people with today's "Jehovah's Witnesses". The WatchTower Cult teaches that modern-day Jews are YHWH's enemies, and that all of the YHWH's promises of restoration for the Jewish people now belong to the followers of the WatchTower Cult.
In fact, the title "Jehovah's Witnesses" was originally applied to the Jewish people by the Prophet Isaiah, and that scripture is even memorialized on the wall inside the front entrance of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.
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