It is common for Shoah scholars to briefly note that Jehovah’s Witnesses (often known then less precisely as Bible Students) were among the many victims whom the Third Reich targeted for persecution, but it is unusual for anybody to elaborate on the oppression that they suffered. Put simply, Jehovah’s Witnesses have long had (and still have) an aversion to serving any governments directly and see it as incompatible with serving the Almighty. Because of this disloyalty, the Fascists detested them. Quoting Prof. Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, ch. 2:
By far the largest group of religious prisoners in the mid‐1930s was Jehovah’s Witnesses, who, having pledged their allegiance to God, resisted the total claim of [Fascism]. Their persecution had started early in the Third Reich and soon intensified, after they refused to serve in the new German conscript army, continued to proselytize after their religious association was banned, and distributed critical leaflets.
The régime tried to stamp out such defiance, with some paranoid [Fascist] officials picturing the Witnesses as a mass movement in cahoots with Communists (in reality, they only had some twenty‐five thousand members). Several thousand believers were arrested in the mid‐1930s. Most ended up in regular prisons, but others were taken to the KL.
At the height of repression in 1937–38, more than ten percent of all men in Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were Jehovah’s Witnesses. So large was this prisoner group that the Camp SS gave them a special insignia: the purple triangle.³⁰⁵
Prisoners with the purple triangle endured great hardship. “The Jehovah’s Witnesses are the daily targets for every kind of persecution, terror, and brutality,” one of them wrote in 1938, not long after his release. Some abuse was ideologically motivated, with Camp SS men mocking their victims as “heaven clowns” and “paradise birds.” Asked after the war why he had buried one of the prisoners up to the neck, the former report leader in Sachsenhausen replied: “He was a conscientious objector. As such he had no right to life, in my view.”³⁰⁶
What really enraged the SS men, however, was not the prisoners’ religious beliefs but their “obstinate” behavior, as Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to carry out certain orders and even tried to convert other prisoners.³⁰⁷ The leaders of the passive resistance were hit with great venom.
One of them, the miner Johann Ludwig Rachuba, was punished by the Sachsenhausen SS between 1936 and 1938 with more than 120 days strict detention, more than one hundred lashes, four hours hanging from a post, and three months in the punishment company (he later died in the camp).
Such brute tactics rarely worked, however, as many prisoners saw the torture as a test of their faith. Only later in the war did SS officials become shrewder, realizing that many Jehovah’s Witnesses made reliable workers as long as they were not deployed in ways that conflicted directly with their beliefs.³⁰⁸
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Pictured: The uniform for a concentration camp inmate who was a Jehovah’s Witness.
The […] prisoner population in Moringen was more diverse. Jehovah’s Witnesses made up a sizable proportion already in 1935, reflecting the high level of female activists, and during 1937 they became the largest prisoner group; by November, around half of the protective custody prisoners were Jehovah’s Witnesses.³³² […] Upon arrival in Lichtenburg, Erna Ludolph—a thirty‐year‐old Jehovah’s Witness from Lübeck—immediately realized that the premises were much bigger than Moringen.
Soon, Ludolph and the others saw further differences, almost all for the worse. As an SS camp, Lichtenburg was run along far more military lines, with roll calls in the corridors and the yard. Leisure time was cut back and forced labor extended by about two hours. The SS also made far greater use of Kapos.
Above all, the women endured harder punishment and occasional violence. Jehovah’s Witnesses made up the largest prisoner group, and conditions were particularly grim for those, like Erna Ludolph, who were isolated as “incorrigible.” One day in 1938, after these women refused to line up to a radio speech by Hitler, the guards attacked them and sprayed them with high‐pressure water hoses.³³⁶
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“In the middle of May 1939,” Erna Ludolph recalled after the war, “we Jehovah’s Witnesses, all 400 to 450 of us, were brought by truck with the first mass transports to Ravensbrück.” Expecting the number of female prisoners to grow further, SS officials had decided sometime in 1938 to establish an entirely new camp for women.
After plans to build it near Dachau fell through, attention soon turned to a secluded site by the town of Fürstenberg, some fifty miles or so north of Berlin. Once a small detachment of men from Sachsenhausen had erected the first barracks and buildings in the early months of 1939, the new camp, called Ravensbrück, was ready.³³⁸
The prisoners’ living conditions deteriorated after the move from Lichtenburg, just as they had done after the prior move from Moringen. “Everything escalated to an unbelievable degree,” Erna Ludolph recalled. Roll calls in Ravensbrück were more torturous, forced labor more exhausting, punishment more severe, and life more rigid, with women now wearing identical dresses with blue and gray stripes, as well as an apron and headscarf.³³⁹
Still, terror remained gender‐specific, as the Camp SS continued to reserve its most violent abuse for men. Although flogging was introduced as an official punishment in Ravensbrück, some other excesses, including hanging from a post, were still absent. Instead of brutal assaults, the local SS relied more heavily on guard dogs, because Himmler believed that women would be particularly scared of them.³⁴⁰
Jeohvah’s Witnesses behaved differently from their fellow inmates. Chapter 10:
Many inmates drew strength from religious devotion. Some groups formed close communities of faith, dividing almost everything; in some camps, for example, Jehovah’s Witnesses evenly split all the money and provisions sent by relatives. What is more, religious practices provided a lasting link to their pre‐camp lives. And it helped them to find meaning in their suffering, seeing the camp as the culmination of centuries of persecution, or as a divine test of faith, or as penance for the sins of mankind.⁵⁰
[…]
A hard core among the Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, remained firm in their refusal to carry out any work related to the [Axis] war effort. The SS fury about their obstinacy, which reached all the way to Himmler, hit these prisoners hard and several lost their lives.²³¹
Of especial interest to me are Jehovah’s Witnesses who were legally ‘Jewish’. From what I can tell, these people were rare. For example, Kim Wünschmann’s Before Auschwitz says on page 208 that of Buchenwald’s 1,963 Jewish prisoners on April 19, 1939, only one (yes, one) was a Bible Student, but I found a few more examples.
As implied in this next quotation, Jehovah’s Witnesses who were legally ‘Jewish’ had to wear a yellow upwards triangle with a purple (or violet) downwards triangle superimposed on it. From Michel Reynaud and Sylvie Graffard’s The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nazis: Persecution, Deportation, and Murder, 1933–1945, pages 211–2:
Rachel Sacksini, a Dutch Witness who was of Jewish extraction, was arrested in the Netherlands. She was first interned in the Dutch concentration camp at Westerbork (where many Jewish prisoners were being herded) and was scheduled to leave in a cattle car, but at the last moment she was put in a convoy to Bergen‐Belsen. Later evacuated to Beendorff and Malmö, Sweden, she returned to the Netherlands after the war, where she converted the wife and three daughters of a [Fascist] serving a prison term.
The authors questioned the Dutch Bethel to learn which type of triangle Jewish Jehovah’s Witnesses were assigned at the camps. After obtaining information from Jehovah’s Witnesses of Jewish origin who were imprisoned for years, he responded, “A Jewish woman I questioned said, ‘I was locked up with the Jews and wore a yellow triangle during my stay in the concentration camp.’ The Germans called her die jüdische Bibelforscherin (the Jewish Bible Student). A Jewish Witness said he wore the violet triangle during his internment at Sachsenhausen camp. On the other hand, he noted that the [Axis was] unaware of his Jewish origins, as he was arrested for being a Jehovah’s Witness.”
The scarcity of legally ‘Jewish’ Jehovah’s Witnesses had a good deal to do with the general infrequency of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Fascist concentration camps: of the approximately twenty thousand German Jehovah’s Witnesses who stayed active during the Fascist era, it may be surprising that only three thousand or so ever suffered imprisonment in the camps, over one thousand of whom perished therein… sigh… and that makes the rest of this entry even harder to write.
You see, there was another reason that many Jews (and supposed ‘Jews’) would have hesitated to become Jehovah’s Witnesses. A great deal of upper‐class Christians continued promoting anti‐Judaism throughout the 1930s, and the JW authorities were unexceptional. Quoting Prof. M. James Penton’s Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Third Reich: Sectarian Politics under Persecution, pages 87–8:
Jehovah’s Witnesses — who are perhaps the most active proselytizers in Christendom — have always shown particular kindness to anyone who is a prospective convert. Only after someone has rejected their message do they become cold to that person. So it is quite possible that there were many instances of kindness to Jews by Jehovah’s Witnesses both outside and inside the concentration camps based on the assumption that they might become converts. Chu herself points out that the main concern of the Witnesses seems to have been to proselytize:
The Witnesses were known for sharing their Bible message with other prisoners. ‘Though gentile prisoners were forbidden to talk to us,’ said a Jewish woman in Lichtenburg, ‘these women never observed this regulation. They prayed for us as if we belonged to their family, and begged us to hold out.’ BBC reporter Bjorn Hallstrom said that in Buchenwald, Witnesses were punished for eight days because they ‘had not avoided the forbidden paths between the Jewish blocks:’ Frustrated by the Witnesses’ persistent resistance, the SS regularly announced in Sachsenhausen that prisoners caught talking to Witnesses would receive 25 strokes. Survivor Max Liebster recalls that the SS there isolated the Witnesses and declared their barracks off limits to other prisoners. In Melk, Polish survivor Joseph Kempler says he saw ‘a camp within a camp’ and was told that the SS kept the ‘purple triangles’ in it, dangerous prisoners because they taught the Bible.⁵⁹
Perhaps the best analysis of this subject was done in the early 1940s by Hebert Stroup,⁶⁰ who carried out his study mainly by associating with ordinary Jehovah’s Witnesses and participating in their activities. He carefully dissected the Witnesses’ thinking on many subjects, including their attitude toward Jews.
He said bluntly: ‘The Jews also are hated by the Witnesses. Although this feeling is common among them, it appears strange at first glance, inasmuch as the movement appeals to many Jews. But all who have joined “the Lord's organization” are precious in the sight of Jehovah and are fellow members of a special human group; thus, converted Jews are made welcome, often with the idea that they are “the chosen people.” The official literature terms the Jews outside the movement “blind” because they do not accept “the truth.”’
Regarding those Jews who did not become Witness converts, however, Stroup remarked: ‘Prevalent among the Witnesses is the notion that all Jews are rich. Even refugees who have escaped to this country from persecution abroad are believed to have brought “scads of money” with them. One Witness told me fantastic tales about the apparent luxury within some of the homes of Jewish refugees that he had visited. The affluence of the refugees, according to this Witness, is hidden from most people because they do not have the opportunity which he and his fellow workers have of visiting all kinds of homes.’
Because the Witnesses’ anti‐Semitism was based more on religious prejudice than racism, Stroup noted: ‘In spite of this generally unfavorable attitude [toward Jews], which is, indeed, sometimes shared by Jewish Witnesses themselves, the movement is able to satisfy its Jewish members, who find in its theology the natural, developed expression of essential Judaism.[’]⁶¹
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
Hopefully it goes without saying that none of this justifies the Fascist abuse of thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses, some of whom no doubt still helped Jews (even if only for the wrong reasons), and credit where it is due, J.F. Rutherford backpedalled on his sympathies for the Third Reich in 1934, but his recommendation that German JWs continue working out in the open anyway did nothing to protect them from further oppression.
This has to have been the toughest article for me to write, because I’ll be honest, there are many Jehovah’s Witness practices and beliefs that I despise, and mentioning some of those in the 1930s is almost inevitably going to provoke somebody into accusing me of justifying the many torments and over one thousand deaths that JWs suffered under Fascism, but I did not want to put off the subject forever and I felt like I’d only be misleading you if I gave you an incomplete picture of the JW community’s relationship with Fascism, which was anything but straightforward.
Click here for other events that happened today (August 28).
1934: Stockholm signed the Agreement concerning Payments in connection with Goods Transactions between the Two Countries, and Protocol, Agreement concerning the Execution of the German Transfer Moratorium in relation to Swedish Creditors, and Agreement concerning the Payment of Interest on Swedish Bonds of the Dawes, Young and Kreuger Loans at Berlin.
1936: Spanish Nationalist aircraft bombed Madrid for the first time.
1943: Reich authorities demanded that Danish authorities crack down on acts of resistance; they imposed martial law imposed on Denmark the next day. Meanwhile, Boris III of Bulgaria dropped dead.
1944: The Axis lost Marseille and Toulon to the Allies.