Rudolf Vacek (22.9.1907 Munich – 6.2.1942 Mauthausen Concentration Camp)

A married, self-employed tailor, he left the Protestant Church and was baptized as a Jehovah's Witness in 1933, shortly after the Jehovah's Witnesses had been banned. In 1936, Rudolf Vacek was one of 300 German Jehovah's Witnesses who traveled illegally to a congress in Switzerland. To get there, he and Johann Burger rode their bicycles from Munich to Lindau and took a boat to Switzerland. Some 2,500 congress attendees adopted the “Lucerne Resolution”, a strong condemnation of the Nazi regime's criminal attacks on Jehovah's Witnesses. On December 12, 1936, Jehovah's Witnesses distributed leaflets with the content of the Resolution throughout the Third Reich. On December 14, 1936, a man who lived near Vacek wrote to the Gestapo to report that someone had dropped a leaflet in his mailbox (Fig. 1). A local railroad official informed the Gestapo verbally that he had received a leaflet (Fig. 2). Vacek was arrested in January 1937, but refused to make a statement. The Gestapo established that the Jehovah's Witnesses arrested for involvement in the campaign had distributed the leaflets near their respective homes. “Such leaflets were also distributed in the vicinity of Vacek's apartment and there is no doubt that Vacek must have been the perpetrator” (StAM StAnW 8602). The Munich Special Court sentenced him to six months in prison on May 29, 1937, but based its decision primarily on his participation in the Lucerne Congress. “This mass event in particular was intended to strengthen the German brethren in their resistance to the ban” (ibid.). After his imprisonment in Munich, Vacek was probably first sent to the Dachau Concentration Camp. It is documented that Rudolf Vacek was also held in the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and died there on April 2, 1942. It may be assumed that he was imprisoned for more than five years in total.