Thursday, April 5, 2012

Jehovah’s Witnesses: Victims of the nazi era

Even before 1933, despite their small numbers, door-to-door preaching and the identification of Jehovah’s Witnesses as heretics by the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches made them few friends. Individual German states and local authorities periodically sought to limit the group’s proselytizing activities with charges of illegal peddling. There were also outright bans on Jehovah’s Witnesses’ religious literature, which included the booklets The Watch Tower and The Golden Age.



Jehovah's Witnesses: Germany 1933-1945

Jehovah's Witnesses endured intense persecution under the Nazi regime. Actions against the religious group and its individual members spanned the Nazi years 1933 to 1945. Unlike Jews and Sinti and Roma ("Gypsies"), persecuted and killed by virtue of their birth, Jehovah's Witnesses had the opportunity to escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs. The courage the vast majority displayed in refusing to do so, in the face of torture, maltreatment in concentration camps, and sometimes execution, won them the respect of many contemporaries



2012

Propaganda Can Be Deadly

"YOU miserable Jew!" snapped the schoolteacher, as she slapped her seven-year-old student. She then invited the class to file by him and to spit in his face.

Both the teacher and the student—her nephew—knew perfectly well that the boy and his parents were not of Jewish descent. Nor were they Jewish by faith. Rather, they were Jehovah's Witnesses.



JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES: VICTIMS OF THE NAZI ERA

Founded in the United States in the 1870s, the Jehovah's Witnesses organization sent missionaries to Germany to seek converts in the 1890s. By the early 1930s, only 20,000 (of a total population of 65 million) Germans were Jehovah's Witnesses, usually known at the time as "International Bible Students."

In the Nazi years, about 10,000 Witnesses, most of them of German nationality, were imprisoned in concentration camps.

An estimated 2,500 to 5,000 Witnesses died in the camps or prisons.