Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany
[3] 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."[4] Despite early attempts to demonstrate shared goals with the National Socialist regime,[5][6] 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.[8] Members of the movement, who were known as Ernste Bibelforscher, or Earnest Bible Students, had attracted opposition since the end of World War I, with accusations that they were Bolsheviks, communists and covertly Jewish.[11] 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".[4] 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.[13] 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.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".[14][15] 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.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."[6] 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".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.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.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.[31] From early 1935, Gestapo officers began widening their use of "protective detention", usually when judges failed to convict Witnesses on charges of defying the Bible Student ban.Bible Students deemed to "present an imminent danger to the National Socialist state because of their activities" were from that point not handed to courts for punishment but sent directly to concentration camps for incarceration for several months.Following an assembly in Lucerne, Switzerland, in early September 1936, up to 3000 copies of a resolution of protest were sent to government, public and clerical leaders, stepping up the Watch Tower Society's anti-Catholic polemic.No exemptions were provided for religious or conscientious reasons, and Witnesses who refused to serve or take the oath of allegiance to Hitler were sent to prison or concentration camp, generally for terms of one or two years.[36][37] Garbe claims members of the group were special objects of hatred by the SS, receiving beatings, whippings and public humiliation and given the dirtiest and most laborious work details for refusing to salute, stand at attention or sing Nazi songs.[41] In July 1944, Himmler ordered Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), to begin sending Jehovah's Witnesses to the occupied east.[43] Historians, including Canadian Michael H. Kater, Christine Elizabeth King from England and Austrian Wolfgang Neugebauer, have suggested the extraordinary animosity between National Socialism and Bible Student teachings was rooted in the similarity in structure of both ideologies, which were based on authoritarianism and totalitarianism and which each believed had a monopoly on the "truth".[47] German writer Falk Pingel argued that the source of controversy between the Bible Students and the Nazi party was their determination to continue their religious activities despite restrictions[48] and Garbe, noting that the increasing repression by authorities simply provoked the group's determination to go underground and maintain their activity, concludes that "the extraordinary severity with which Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted resulted from a conflict that gradually escalated in an interaction of action and reaction ... the authorities responsible for the persecution always responded with increasing severity to the continuous stubbornness of the IBSA members".Hitler, Penton argued, had become highly popular with the German populace by 1936, yet Witnesses persisted in distributing a Rutherford booklet that described the chancellor as "of unsound mind, cruel, malicious and ruthless".
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