Martin Pötzinger, an orthopedic shoemaker, left the Catholic Church in 1926 and in 1928 was baptized as member of the Bible Students (which became the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1931). From 1933, he worked as a missionary in Eastern Europe, where he met Gertrud Mende, who had been baptized in 1927. They married in 1936 and lived in Munich. In the same year, Martin Pötzinger organized the distribution of the “Lucerne Resolution” of the Jehovah's Witnesses against the persecution of their religious community in Germany. He was arrested while distributing these leaflets, and his wife was arrested two days later. Gertrud Pötzinger was declared unfit for detention because she vomited during the interrogations. However, she was later arrested again in Dresden. The Munich Special Court sentenced Martin Pötzinger to one year and six months in prison on April 29, 1937. At the end of his sentence, he refused to swear allegiance to the Nazi regime. He was therefore sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, where attempts were made to break his faith with indescribable brutality. In 1939, he was transferred to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp and tortured again. It was not until 1945, after the end of Nazi rule, that he saw his wife again, who had also suffered for years in prison and concentration camps. She had been sentenced to three years and six months in prison by the Breslau Special Court in 1937 and, after serving her sentence, was imprisoned in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.
After 1945, Martin Pötzinger played a central role in the reorganization of the religious community in Bavaria. In the 1970s, the couple moved to New York, where Martin Pötzinger was appointed to the worldwide governing body of the Jehovah's Witnesses. After the death of her husband in 1988, Gertrud Pötzinger returned to Germany and appeared at numerous events to recount her experiences of the time.
