Jehovah's Witnesses suffered religious persecution in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 after refusing to perform military service, join Nazi organizations, or give allegiance to the Hitler regime. An estimated 10,000 Witnesses were sent to Nazi concentration camps. It is estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 died in custody, including 250 who were executed. They were the first Christian denomination banned by the Nazi government and the most extensively and intensively persecuted.
Unlike Jews and Romani, who were persecuted on the basis of their race, Jehovah's Witnesses could escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs by signing a document indicating renunciation of their faith, submission to state authority, and support of the German military. Historian Sybil Milton concludes that "their courage and defiance in the face of torture and death punctures the myth of a monolithic Nazi state ruling over docile and submissive subjects."
Despite early attempts to demonstrate shared goals with the National Socialist regime,Watch Tower Society. "Declaration of Facts" (June 1933) as quoted in Awake!, July 8, 1998, p. 14: "A careful examination of our books and literature will disclose the fact that the very high ideals held and promulgated by the present national government are set forth in and endorsed and strongly emphasized in our publications, and show that Jehovah God will see to it that these high ideals in due time will be attained by all persons who love righteousness." the group came under increasing public and governmental persecution from 1933, with many expelled from jobs and schools, deprived of income, and suffering beatings and imprisonment. Historians are divided over whether the Nazis intended to exterminate them, but several authors have claimed the Witnesses' outspoken condemnation of the Nazis contributed to their level of suffering.
Pre-Nazi era Jehovah's Witnesses were an outgrowth of the United States–based International Bible Students, who began missionary work in Europe in the 1890s. A German branch office of the Watch Tower Society opened in Elberfeld in 1902. By 1933, almost 20,000 Witnesses were counted as active door-to-door preachers, and their annual Memorial service was attracting almost 25,000 people. In Dresden, there were more Bible Students than in New York, where the Watch Tower Society was headquartered.
Members of the movement, who were known as , or Earnest Bible Students, had attracted opposition since the end of World War I, with accusations that they were Bolsheviks, communists and covertly Jewish. From 1920, the German Evangelical Church called for a ban on Watch Tower Society publications, which were engaging in increasing amounts of antichurch polemic. Through the remainder of the 1920s, opposition mounted from a combination of church and Völkisch movement agitation and pamphlet campaigns. Nazis began to harass Bible Students, with SA members also disrupting meetings.
In 1922, German Bible Students were arrested on charges of illegal peddling as they publicly distributed Watch Tower Society literature. Between 1927 and 1930, almost 5,000 charges were brought against members of the movement and although most ended in acquittalsSaarbrücker Landes Zeitung, December 16, 1929, as cited in 1974 Yearbook, Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society, 1974, p. 102: "Unfortunately the police have been powerless in doing anything about the work of the Bible Students. Arrests made up until now ... have all ended up in acquittal." some severe sentences were also handed down.1974 Yearbook, Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society, 1974, pp. 102–111.
In 1930, calls for state intervention against the Bible Students increased, and on 28 March 1931, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg issued the Decree for the Resistance of Political Acts of Violence, which provided for action to be taken in cases in which religious organizations, institutions or customs were "abused or maliciously disparaged". Bavaria became the first German state where the decree was used against the Bible Students, with a police order issued on November 18 to prohibit and confiscate all Bible Student publications throughout the state. A second decree in 1932 widened the ban in other German states. By the end of 1932, more than 2,300 charges against Bible Students were pending.
Legislative developments Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, and from that point forward, persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses intensified. Witnesses, being politically neutral, refused to swear loyalty to the Nazi regime. Initially, Witness indifference to the Nazi state manifested itself in the refusal to raise their arms in the Nazi salute, join the German Labor Front (DAF), participate in Nazi welfare collections, perform air raid duties, or participate in Nazi rallies and parades. Nazi Party SA stormtroopers raided the homes of Witnesses who failed to vote in a November 1933 plebiscite over German withdrawal from the League of Nations and marched them to the polling booths. Some were beaten or forced to walk holding placards declaring their "betrayal" of the fatherland; in one town, a billboard was displayed in the marketplace listing Bible Student "traitors" who had not voted, and mobs also gathered outside Witnesses' homes to throw stones or chant. Similar action was taken at subsequent elections in the one-party state.
Nazi authorities denounced Jehovah's Witnesses for their ties to the United States and derided the apparent revolutionary millennialism of their preaching that a battle of Armageddon would precede the rule of Christ on earth. They linked Jehovah's Witnesses to "international Jewry" by pointing to Witness reliance on certain Old Testament texts. The Nazis had grievances with many of the smaller Protestant groups on these issues, but only Jehovah's Witnesses and the Christadelphian Church refused to bear arms or swear loyalty to the state.
Activities of the Bible Students Association were banned in the states of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Bavaria on 10 April 1933 and 13 April 1933, respectively. When Witnesses responded with a nationwide house-to-house booklet distribution campaign, many were arrested, and within a week bans were extended to the states of Saxony and Hessen. Publications were also confiscated in some states. On 24 April, police seized the Bible Student headquarters at Magdeburg, withdrawing five days later after US diplomatic efforts. From mid-May, other states issued decrees outlawing the Bible Students, and by the middle of June they were banned in almost every state. In one state's decree, the rationale for the ban was said to be that Bible Students were "imposing" Watch Tower Society journals on householders, "which contain malicious attacks on the major Christian churches and their institutions".
Prussia, Germany's biggest state, imposed a ban on 24 June, explaining that the Bible Students were attracting and harboring subversive former members of the Communist and Marxist parties. Its decree added that the Bible Students:
On 25 June 1933, about 7000 Witnesses assembled at the Wilmersdorfer Tennishallen in Berlin, where a 3800-word "Declaration of Facts" was issued. The document, written by Watch Tower Society president Joseph Franklin Rutherford, asserted the group's political neutrality, appealed for the right to publicly preach, and claimed it was the victim of a misinformation campaign by other churches.Declaration of Facts English translation The Declaration also stated, "A careful examination of our books and literature will disclose the fact that the very high ideals held and promulgated by the present national government are set forth in and endorsed and strongly emphasized in our publications, and show that Jehovah God will see to it that these high ideals in due time will be attained by all persons who love righteousness." Some 2.1 million copies of the declaration, reproduced as a four-page pamphlet, were distributed publicly throughout Germany, with a copy also sent to Hitler, accompanied by a seven-page cover letter assuring the Chancellor that the International Bible Students Association (IBSA) "was not in opposition to the national government of the German Reich", but that, to the contrary, "the entirely religious, nonpolitical objectives and efforts of the Bible Students" were "completely in agreement with the corresponding goals of the national government". German historian Detlef Garbe described the declaration as part of the group's efforts to adapt at a time of increasing persecution, while Canadian historian Professor James Penton, a former Jehovah's Witness and critic of the denomination, claimed the declaration was a compromising document that proves "that Watch Tower leaders were attempting to pander to the Nazis"—an allegation the Watch Tower Society rejected in a 1998 magazine article."Jehovah's Witnesses – Courageous in the Face of Nazi Peril", Awake!, July 8, 1998, pp. 10–14.
The distribution of the declaration prompted a new wave of persecution against German Witnesses. On 28 June, thirty stormtroopers occupied the branch office for a second time, closing the factory, sealing the printing presses, and hoisting a swastika over the building. In late August, authorities used 25 trucks to transport about 70 tonnes of Watch Tower literature and Bibles to the city's outskirts and publicly burned them. Preaching activities and meetings in private homes continued, though the threat of Gestapo raids caused many believers to withdraw association and activity in some places ceased. When authorities discovered banned literature was being smuggled into Germany from abroad, Bavarian police ordered the confiscation of mail of all known Bible Students and expressed irritation that their activity was increasing rather than ceasing.
By early 1934, Rutherford had concluded that an improvement in conditions within Germany was unlikely. On 9 February 1934, the Watch Tower Society president sent a strongly worded letter to Hitler, asking the chancellor to allow the Witnesses to assemble and worship without hindrance, warning that if he failed to do so by 24 March, the organization would publicise their "unjust treatment" throughout the world. He threatened that Jehovah God would also punish Hitler and destroy him at Armageddon. The society's German branch president Paul Balzereit directed members that they should continue to distribute The Watchtower, but that meetings be kept to about three to five people in size and public preaching be discontinued. But in September 1934, at an international convention of 3,500 Witnesses in Basel, Switzerland, under the theme "Fear Them Not", Rutherford reversed the instruction. He urged the 1,000 German Witnesses present to resume completely their preaching activity, starting with a collective witnessing effort on 7 October. The convention also passed a resolution of protest, a copy of which was sent to Hitler with the warning: "Refrain from further persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses; otherwise God will destroy you and your national party."