Overview
The religious community known until then as the “Bible Students” was renamed the “Jehovah's Witnesses” in 1931. However, the term “International Bible Students Association” (I.B.V.) was retained until the 1950s. The community was banned in the states of the Third Reich a few months after Hitler took power, including in Bavaria on April 13, 1933. Of the 500 Jehovah's Witnesses in Munich, 310 became victims of the Nazi regime. Around 240 were imprisoned, 48 of them in concentration camps. As a result of the persecution, 22 Jehovah's Witnesses died, six of them by execution. In the Third Reich, 10,700 of the 25,000 believers were documented as victims. Of these, around 9,000 were imprisoned, 2,800 in concentration camps. More than 1000 lost their lives, 353 by execution.
The resistance activities of Jehovah's Witnesses are often underestimated. However, with their leaflet campaigns in 1936 and 1937, they actually achieved “propaganda coups that no other illegal group was able to accomplish on this scale” (Mehringer, p. 300). The vast majority of death sentences against conscientious objectors concerned Jehovah's Witnesses. Their death toll was the trigger for the right to conscientious objection to military service enshrined in the (post-war) Basic Law (Hesse, p. 139f). In 1938, Thomas Mann, while in exile in Switzerland, wrote about a book published there by Jehovah's Witnesses relating to their persecution by the Nazis: "Language has long since failed before the abyss of sentiment that opens up in these pages, which tell of the appalling suffering of innocent people firmly adhering to their faith. [...] It seems to me that there can be no stronger appeal to the world's conscience” (ETH Zurich N 38/19).
The beginnings of the persecution
From 1930, in connection with the call to combat the “freethinker and godless movement”, demands for state intervention against the “Bible Students” became louder. The background to this was a growing tendency to leave the mainstream churches. In 1930, the Catholic Cardinal Faulhaber of Munich praised a Nazi Party statement against the “Bible Students”. In a letter to all Bavarian ministers dated May 5, 1933, he praised the fact that “the Bible Students could no longer develop their American-communist activities” (Garbe, p. 80). The measures also met with approval from the Protestant Church: “The swift and massive action against the Jehovah's Witnesses [...] was determined not least by the effort to reach an understanding with the two mainstream churches” (Garbe, 92f.). In its ruling of December 7, 1933, the Bavarian Supreme Court stated that the “Bible Students [...] as a result of their attacks on the state-recognized Christian churches and on the state measures serving to protect these churches, represented a danger to the existence of the state order in the same way as the anti-religious and anti-church efforts of the Communist Party” (Garbe, p. 132).
Resistance
The Jehovah's Witnesses believed that divine law superseded worldly law. They therefore refused to honor the “Führer” with the salute “Heil Hitler”. They also did not accept the ban on assemblies and proselytizing nor the military service that was later introduced. In a letter from the Bavarian Political Police dated February 1, 1936, it said of the “Bible Students”, who were described as “dangerous enemies of the state”: “It is not enough that they reject the German salute, keep away from all National Socialist and state institutions and refuse military service, they also make propaganda against military service [...], whereby they are not deterred even by 'protective custody' and criminal charges” (StAM, StAnW 8180).
In addition to individual resistance, four nationwide protest actions were organized by an underground network:
1) On October 7, 1934, letters of protest addressed to the Reich government were sent, including from Munich by Johann Kölbl. According to these letters, Jehovah's Witnesses wanted to do “good to all people as far as possible”; however, the Reich government and its officials were “urging them to disobey the highest law of the universe” (Eberle, p.207). At the same time, Hitler received thousands of telegrams from abroad. This protest action must have been enormous, because at least 1000 letters were handed over to the Gestapo.
2) With the leaflet campaign of December 12, 1936, the Jehovah's Witnesses protested against their persecution and declared that they would not abide by the ban on their organization. The content of the leaflet had been passed as a “Resolution” at a congress in Lucerne. Of the 2,500 people present, around 300 Germans, including Munich residents, had traveled to Switzerland illegally. Martin Pötzinger was one of the organizers of the distribution in Munich. At his home, he produced 4,000 leaflets; another 10,000 came from abroad.
3) On February 11, 1937, the Resolution was distributed again in Munich and many other places in the Reich (in some places a little later).
4) On June 20, 1937, the leaflet “Open Letter” was successfully distributed with more details on the persecution, although many Jehovah's Witnesses had already been imprisoned in the meantime. Elfriede Löhr, from Munich, organized the campaign for the whole of Bavaria and entrusted Anna Gerig with the coordination for the city.
These four campaigns triggered waves of persecution throughout the Reich. On March 2, 1937, the Münchner Abendblatt newspaper reported on a trial against eleven Jehovah's Witnesses, ten of whom were from Munich: “Many still don't seem to know that this is an i n t e r n a t i o n a l association, behind which stands J e w i s h i n f l u e n c e, and which forbids its flock[...] from engaging in military activity and the defense of the fatherland” (blocked text in original). Depending on their behavior in prison or afterwards, they could be sent to a concentration camp, where Jehovah's Witnesses wearing the purple triangle formed a separate category of prisoners. The Bavarian Political Police stipulated: “If a person again becomes active for the I.B.V. after being released or punished by a judge, they [...] are to be taken into 'protective custody' and, if they are male, transferred to the Dachau Concentration Camp” (StAM, StAnW 8180). Jehovah's Witnesses were the only concentration camp inmates who were released if they submitted to the Nazi regime by signing a declaration. Only a few made use of this.
Jehovah's Witnesses were convicted and executed right up to the end. Therese Kühner from Munich, for example, was sentenced to death by the People's Court on August 30, 1944 for disseminating anti-regime writings and beheaded on October 6, 1944. “Even the intensified efforts of the Gestapo [could] never bring the underground activity of Jehovah's Witnesses [...] to a complete standstill” (Garbe, p. 329). While the court sentences of the last years of the war were harsher and the conditions in the prisons worsened, many Jehovah's Witnesses experienced some respite in the concentration camp, as their status within the prisoner hierarchy had been consolidated over time.
There was also help from courageous citizens during the Third Reich. Munich resident Alois Eibl, for example, was warned about the Gestapo by a neighbor and was able to hide. Conversely, other persecuted people were supported by Jehovah's Witnesses. In Frankfurt am Main, a plaque commemorates a baker who continued to supply Jews with bread, while a plaque at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial commemorates a trustee who secretly brought bread and water to fellow prisoners in their cells. Both were Jehovah's Witnesses. Several Jewish victims of persecution reported in their autobiographies how they were kept in hiding by Jehovah's Witnesses to protect them from the Gestapo. Some Jehovah's Witnesses were honored by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations”. Jehovah's Witnesses as a whole did not participate in the persecution of Jews, Sinti and Roma or others.
Compensation
Under compensation law, Jehovah's Witnesses are among the so-called “victims of group persecution”. To date, no comprehensive study has been conducted on this topic. However, of the 54 Jehovah's Witnesses in Munich who were in a concentration camp or were executed, twenty applications are known to have been filed. These were mostly submitted out of economic hardship, for example because the breadwinner of the family had been executed. The applications were mostly approved, but the amounts of compensation were only small.
(In the GDR, where the community was banned in 1950, applications that had already been approved were withdrawn). Some victims did not submit an application as they rejected material compensation for their adherence to principles as contradictory to their religious beliefs. Some were denied compensation because the judgments of Nazi military justice were only revoked in 1998. For example, the application of the widow of a conscientious objector executed on November 11, 1943 was rejected. On November 14, 1956, the Federal Court of Justice confirmed the refusal ruling due to the general conscription in force during the Third Reich. The widow received no compensation (Herrberger, p. 211ff).
