Thank you.
This uniform belonged to Helmut Knoller. He was one of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Like him, thousands of Witnesses were thrown into Nazi prisons and camps for what they believed.
A small number compared with the millions exterminated by Nazi terror.
Yet nearly 2,000 Witnesses died, more than 250 by execution.
From the start of the Nazi regime, this small Christian group were brutally assaulted, but not silenced.
They let the world know that the Nazi killing machine was engulfing not only them, but Jews, Poles and others.
The history of Jehovah's Witnesses, how they stood firm in their beliefs and how they spoke out, is a record few have heard about today.
It is a story that must be told.
And I'd like to welcome you to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
It is both a privilege and an honor to have you as our guests today, because your story is an extremely important one.
On September 29th, 1994, historians from Germany, Britain and the United States spoke about Jehovah's Witnesses.
Together with survivors and representatives of the Watchtower Society, they revealed remarkable details.
They wouldn't utter the word Heil Hitler.
It's very intriguing to feel the social dissident character of that when you walk into a room and you hear the words Heil Hitler and somebody says good morning.
Or you walk into a room and the meeting is concluded and you say Heil Hitler and somebody says Ovidersen, and that's an act of singular civic courage and of unimaginable human decency.
Dr. Detlef Gaber and Wolf Brebek are directors of concentration camp memorials in Germany.
They explained why the Stand of Jehovah's Witnesses was unique.
Willy Paul was one of more than 20 survivors present for the seminar.
He and James Bellatia represented the Watchtower Society.
They explained the reasons for the bold stand taken by the Witnesses.
Even before the Nazis took power, Watchtower publications warned of the danger.
In 1929, this bold statement was published in the German edition of the Golden Age.
National Socialism is a movement that is acting directly in the service of man's enemy, the devil.
Professor Christine King, Vice-Chancellor of Sapphire University, analyzed the moral battle waged between the Witnesses and the Nazis.
And stand firm indeed, the Witnesses did, as we know, to death.
And not a simple death, but a horrific death by torture.
One of the SS guards said of Witnesses singing hymns in the death cell, I could run a steamroller over you lot and it wouldn't quiet you.
And it happens again and again.
And it is because the Nazis really do not understand the nature of the enemy they have taken on.
They think that a steamroller will silence faith and integrity and courage and the family belief that Jehovah's Witnesses have.
And of course it cannot under any circumstances.
King interviewed two Austrian Witness survivors and then offered a summary.
I think what we've learned today and what we've learned in the work that the Holocaust Memorial Museum has done in celebrating the story of Jehovah's Witnesses is that Jehovah's Witnesses did speak out.
They spoke out from the beginning, they spoke out with one voice and they spoke out with a tremendous courage.
Germany struggles to recover from its World War I wounds.
Well known as Bible Forger or Bible Students, before 1931 Jehovah's Witnesses offer comfort and hope, but also warn of rising militarism.
They are a familiar sight on streets and doorsteps distributing tremendous amounts of Bible literature.
In Magdeburg at a watchtower plant called Bethel, a million copies of the magazine The Golden Age rolled off the presses each month.
The Hildebrandts were among the 200 volunteers living at Bethel.
He ran a book sewing machine.
She cleaned rooms and worked in the laundry.
Bethel in Magdeburg was, at least for those days, a large and impressive printery with several buildings.
I am now on the roof of our printery in Magdeburg. Here below there were two rotary presses.
The Magdeburg factory turned out two million books and five million booklets each year.
This publishing and preaching did not go unnoticed by the growing Nazi movement.
There was talk about Jehovah's Witnesses because of things that were repulsive to the National Socialists.
They were talked about because they refused military service and because they did not give allegiance to the fatherland as the German ought to according to the National Socialists.
The Nazis falsely branded Jehovah's Witnesses as communists, menaces to the state, conspirators with the Jews to take over the world.
By 1933, the stage was set for battle.
We do not want to be a
A demonstration for a
The seeds that set in motion the rise of Nazism were sown on the battlefields of World War I.
In 1914, the German armies, the French armies, the Russian armies, the English armies all went to war and all of their church people proclaimed that God was on their side.
Nothing did the church more harm than this mutually exclusive claim to have divine support.
By 1918, the cynicism, the skepticism about the church's credibility was so great that the vast majority of those who served in the trenches came back thoroughly disillusioned and no longer willing to accept the moral authority of a church which had misled them so badly.
These are the young men who emerged from the trenches who 15 years later are the leading figures in the Nazi party.
On January 30th, 1933, Adolf Hitler comes to power, appointed Chancellor by President von Hindenburg.
Hopes run high for a strong new Germany.
The majority of people are inspired by propaganda or by the people around them. It's perhaps not out of wickedness, but they're just swept along by a river of propaganda.
The Reichstag building, the seat of the German parliament, burns. The Nazis immediately blame the communists and Hitler pressures President von Hindenburg to issue an emergency decree.
The enabling act soon follows.
Hitler, now with dictatorial powers, suspends human rights.
Anyone could be arrested and imprisoned without trial.
The Nazis now have a weapon to silence their enemies. In one German state after another, the police shut down meetings of the witnesses and prohibit their door-to-door preaching.
On April 24th, Nazis swarmed in a Magdeburg to stop the printing operation.
The entire property was searched, but nothing was found that could be used against us. We were active only in the field of religion.
The watchtower property was returned, and the ban in Prussia, Germany's largest state, was lifted. But in other states the bans remained.
So, the witnesses launched a campaign to inform the German government that they were not subversives.
Right from the very beginning, the Jehovah's Witnesses were very clear in their position, their stance, and they kept their position of political neutrality.
And in the early days, there were attempts to explain to the authorities what this means, and that in fact it wasn't a political threat.
Representing the 25,000 witnesses in Germany, delegates from all over the country gathered for a convention in Berlin to adopt a resolution.
In this declaration, we explained that we had absolutely no political goals, that our activity was purely religious,
and that we wished to make use of the freedom of belief and of religion in accordance with the promise made in the party platform, and also by government officials,
and that therefore this matter of partial bans should be investigated, and they should be lifted.
The country was blanketed with more than two million copies of the declaration.
Konrad Franke shared in the distribution he was arrested and sent to the Osthoven labor camp.
There was to be no place in this new Germany for Bible student ideas, for the religious teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Prussia issued a second ban of Jehovah's Witnesses. The police were ordered to shut them down again.
On June 28, here a band of 30 storm troopers, Hitler's brown shirts, forced their way in and occupied the premises.
A ban was declared. No one was allowed to study the Bible or to pray in this house called the Bible House.
When this building was closed, we no longer had a central office, but were forced to go underground.
This is the last German issue of the Watchtower printed in Magdeburg. The press is full silent.
A few weeks later the Nazis return. 25 truckloads of Bible literature are carted off to the Magdeburg city limits and burned.
The vast majority of the churches welcomed the ban on Jehovah's Witnesses in 1933.
Documents show that in the spring of 1933 the churches suggested to the authorities a ban on Jehovah's Witnesses.
Of course, the National Socialist government pricked up its ears at such suggestions.
They were intending to do something against Jehovah's Witnesses anyway.
The fact that the churches assisted them was greatly welcomed by the National Socialist government.
There is also evidence that Jehovah's Witnesses were aided by pastors, but here again one has to say that evidence of such cases is rare.
Put in relative terms, the murder of 6 million Jews as a crime by the state carried out with factory-like precision was certainly an occurrence without equal in the history of mankind.
But there was also something distinctive about the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses. They were persecuted with very great severity and brutality.
The goal was to destroy this religious group. There were to be no more Witnesses in Germany.
From an early date the Witnesses are identified as a key enemy, partly because of their very public stance and their very public refusal to accept even the smallest elements of National Socialism which didn't fit their faith and their beliefs.
Hitler gave the people jobs.
He restored their faith in the fatherland.
He is hailed as their Savior.
But the Witnesses could not give to a man what they believed belonged to God.
Thus, a battle line was drawn over a simple greeting, Heil Hitler.
Jehovah's Witnesses refused to say Heil Hitler because it meant salvation comes from Hitler.
At his job in a steel mill, one Witness faced this test.
I was the only one among 2,000 who did not raise my hand and did not return the German salute.
Every day running the gauntlet since I was required to give the German salute and I simply said, good day.
Whoever did not do so attracted the fury of the National Socialists.
At first there were nasty words, sometimes a beating, but soon enough it led to the first arrests.
In 1934, secret Witness reports smuggled out of Germany revealed disturbing facts.
About 4,000 house searches have been carried out, 1,000 arrests made, of which some 400 have been sent to concentration camps and roughly 200 cases of ill treatment occurred.
Each blow was accompanied by the words, do you still believe in Jehovah?
Nazi intimidation affected not only the Witnesses religious life, but also their livelihood.
Before they were directly arrested and sentenced by the special courts to imprisonment and later to protective custody, they had already suffered under economic and social sanctions.
The loss of their jobs, their businesses were boycotted, or their pensions or unemployment money was confiscated.
A typical letter of dismissal said,
Following your refusal to use the German greeting, your contract of employment is terminated.
Yes, I lost my job and here I was. Now we had a lot of time for preaching.
Children were drawn into the battle. Six-year-old Paul Gerhard Cousereau, like other Witness children, was pressured by students and teachers.
As soon as I entered school, the head teacher and the pupils confronted me and tried to make me say Heil Hitler to salute the flag and to sing Nazi songs.
Going to school was not nice since one never knew what would happen.
More than 800 children were taken away from the Witness parents by the Gestapo.
Paul Gerhard, along with his brother and sister, was placed in a Nazi school.
The educational home in Dosten was virtually a prison. My family could only visit me in secret.
Simone Liebster was only 12 when the Nazis snatched her from her home.
The last night that I spent with my mother was very moving.
It took place in a vineyard outside a castle in Mirsburg, the evening before I entered the Penitentiary House in Constance.
We sang a Kingdom song together, then we prayed and I remember that Mama said to Jehovah,
watch over my little girl, allow her to stay faithful.
Three years under ban and the Witnesses are still active. The Gestapo have to mobilize a special unit to hunt them down.
A confidential Gestapo report boasted that in just one sweep they arrested 120 Witnesses.
Jehovah's Witnesses were amongst the first of the prisoners to go into Dachau,
which was the first, the so-called model concentration camp and into the labor camps.
And I have evidence of that in 1934 and certainly by 1935.
From 1935 onward, very many Jehovah's Witnesses were in National Socialist prisons and camps.
And in the pre-war concentration camps, Jehovah's Witnesses comprised a relatively large group when compared with the total number of prisoners.
Pre-war, about 5 to 10 percent of concentration camp inmates were Jehovah's Witnesses.
Apart from the concentration camps, there were Jehovah's Witnesses in almost all prisons.
Of my family of eight persons, six were in detention. Four brothers, one sister and my mother.
Together we spent about 43 years in detention.
I was in three concentration camps and I once counted 30 prisons.
From 1937 on, Witnesses released from prison were sent directly to concentration camps.
By the end of that year, 6,000 Witnesses were in Nazi prisons and camps.
Starting in 1937, Jehovah's Witnesses were given a purple triangle as a sign.
Jehovah's Witnesses were the only religious group that made up a separate category of inmates.
That was not the case with prisoners of other religions who were not very numerous anyway.
And the triangle was relatively big so that a person must have been able to see it from quite a distance and the color also, this stigma of the prisoners category.
Whenever I saw a prisoner with a purple triangle, then I knew for sure this is a sister.
It helped me to recognize that this is one of Jehovah's Witnesses.
The Jehovah's Witnesses received especially severe treatment from the SS
because they put up such great resistance because in their conduct they displayed much resistance.
Drawing a comparison with other groups as a whole, one can say that with exception of the Jews, no other group had to suffer so much under the National Socialists.
Upon arrival, I was beaten into unconsciousness in the political section.
When I came to, I could spit out my teeth.
I would not even have survived the first night if Brother Erich Nikolajczyk, who was next to me in bed, had not taken me into his arms and warmed me with his own body so that I recovered somewhat.
You see, in the camp you got just a slice of bread in the morning, nothing at noon, and in the evening a bowl of watery soup.
I lost 25 kilograms in a month.
The Bible students were the very first among the very first women who came here from other camps,
from the concentration camp Moringen am Soling and especially from Lichtenburg near Thurgau.
The first arrivals here at Ravensbrück in May 1939 were contrary to what was believed until now, not mainly political prisoners, but as we now know, mostly Bible students.
The Nazis, obsessed with breaking the witnesses stubborn commitment, stepped up the psychological assault and made them an extraordinary offer.
Each witness could buy his freedom for a price, his signature and his faith.
Witnesses in prisons and camps were repeatedly handed a piece of paper and a pen.
Very few signed.
When I was to be released from prison, I was given a paper to sign.
It required that I give up my faith and recognize the German government as the highest authority,
place myself under the Hitler government and consider the Bible as a false doctrine.
I said, that's out of the question.
The commander said I could think about it during the night.
And I said, I don't need to think about it.
You can take note of that right now.
The matter was settled as far as I was concerned.
So he said, then you will be sent to a concentration camp.
Madame Genevieve de Gaulle, a niece of General Charles de Gaulle, was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1944 as a member of the French resistance.
In Ravensbrück, she met Jehovah's Witnesses.
By the time she arrived at the camp, many had been captive for 10 years.
What I admired a lot in them was they could have left at any time just by signing a renunciation of their faith.
Ultimately, these women, who appeared to be so weak and worn out, were stronger than the SS,
who had power and all the means at their disposal.
They had their strength and it was their willpower that no one could beat.
Communication with loved ones back home became subject to SS interference.
In the concentration camps Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, Bible students, as they were then called, were not allowed the normal correspondence.
Just three or four lines. They were allowed to write, I'm well, greetings and so forth.
The frustrated SS stamped on the letters, the prisoner remains, as before, a stubborn Bible student.
To those receiving such a letter, it meant that the loved one was holding true to his faith.
Many Witness couples were separated for years, like Heinrich and Enner Dickmann.
When they discovered that they were both in the Ravensbrück camp, they risked their lives just to see each other.
From Buchenwald I was put in the camp where Enner was.
And there is where I had the chance to see my wife again after seven years.
She had to bring laundry for the SS to the main gate and I had to pick it up there.
And so we had the chance to see each other after seven years.
But without a word, since they were standing in the guard tower watching, they would have hanged us both.
The position of the Jehovah's Witnesses is a unique position of Christians, of all Christians of all kinds in Nazi Germany.
It stands by itself.
People living in Germany knew who the Jehovah's Witnesses were and knew what they stood for.
From the beginning, Jehovah's Witnesses and their publications spoke out against Nazi aggression.
In the English language Golden Age, blunt editorial cartoons exposed the spreading cancer of Nazism.
In 1934, the Golden Age carried a stinging exposé of the Nazi crackdown on the Witnesses,
including raids, arrests and sentences to concentration camps.
Eyewitness Otto Hartstang wrote an inside report on Esther Wegen concentration camp.
We were put into penal block 9, a barrack that housed brothers only.
The 1934 Basel Convention marked a turning point for the Witnesses.
Plans were set for a worldwide protest directly to Hitler on October 7.
German Witnesses made in secret.
On that day at 9 o'clock in the morning, all of Jehovah's Witnesses congregated together in small groups.
Jehovah's Witnesses all over the world would send a telegram to the Hitler government.
Your ill treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses shocks all good people of earth and dishonors God's name.
Refrain from further persecuting Jehovah's Witnesses, otherwise God will destroy you and your national party.
Hitler did not budge, but he did react.
In a sworn statement, government official Carl Wittig described Hitler's rage.
He screamed, this brood will be exterminated in Germany.
A steady stream of watched our literature continue to flow into Germany.
The Gestapo tightened the net, making more arrests.
It did little to stop the Witnesses.
After release from camps and prisons, many Witnesses went underground and continued to speak out.
They found ingenious ways to reach the public.
We applied to a company reshaping old hats and hence we went from house to house.
And since we went from house to house, of course, we sought opportunities to witness to the people.
And at the bottom of the bag, underneath the old hats, we had a second layer containing booklets.
So if anyone caught us, they would only have found the old hats first.
Nazi newspapers complained about another Witness tool for preaching, specially built gramophones that boldly spoke out their message.
Some records were sneaked in from Switzerland.
Others were produced within Nazi Germany by Georg Clohey, one of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Gestapo Chief Himmler ordered the gramophone problem stopped.
The 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin.
Nazi Germany is on display at its best.
But it is only a front. Right on the heels of the Olympic Games, the Witnesses launch a campaign to reveal the ugly face of the Nazi regime.
Nazi persecution is exposed in a convention resolution adopted at Lucerne, Switzerland.
Two hundred thousand copies of the Lucerne resolution are distributed in Germany on one December night in 1936.
Dr. Elke Himberger calls the campaign a particularly spectacular form of public proclamation.
And thus the whole populace was pointed to Hitler's unjust treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Outraged Nazi officials claim that the charges were false.
So on June 30th, 1937, the Witnesses answered back in an open letter, full of details of beatings and murders by the Gestapo, complete with names, places and dates.
Marks Holweg took special precautions when preparing to send the letter to the leading officials in the district of Koblenz.
I did it in Mühlbachtal, sitting beneath trees and bushes, wearing rubber gloves so as not to leave fingerprints.
According to Dr. Wolfgang Bentz, these two campaigns made clear to the population the criminal character of the Nazi state.
That made the Gestapo, or the secret state police of the Hitler government, furious,
because they saw that a strong organization was active in the country which tore off their mask.
So there were a lot of arrests in many places.
Wille and Edita Pohl were caught in the Gestapo net.
They spent eight months in the Hamburg Fuhlsbrutal Prison Camp.
Whenever the Nazis smashed an underground organization, another quickly filled the breach.
The Gestapo reckoned that every time they arrested a group, we were completely finished.
They were utterly mistaken.
But right up until the end of the war, the watchtower was being distributed all over Germany.
Harry Dowdy, an Englishman, was one link in the network.
Because he headed the Hamburg office of a large American meat company, he could receive the watchtower by uncensored mail.
As soon as he received his magazines, he passed them along to the Central European Office in Switzerland,
where the latest information was translated and conveyed to the brothers.
March 1938, Hitler's troops crossed the Austrian border.
Soon, the witnesses would be forced underground in country after country.
Key organizers, Erich Frost, Artur Winkler, and others put their lives on the line for their fellow believers,
as they tried to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo.
In the underground work in Austria, my responsibility was to
memorize the magazines, then print them, and then bring them to several congregations, right down to the Swiss border.
At night, in a small apartment, we shut off the windows with blankets, put quilts on the table, and the machines on the quilts,
so that the noise would not be heard.
It was here that the watchtowers were translated and reproduced.
Afterwards, we had to dismantle and hide everything, because if the Germans had found any of the equipment,
it would have meant the death of whoever the material belonged to.
Another conduit for smuggling literature into Germany was a Finnish doctor, Felix Kersten, Himmler's personal physician.
Kersten's estate, Harzvalda, was near Ravensbruck.
He used these connections with Himmler to get prisoners to work on his farm.
Then, through Himmler, Dr. Kersten tried to obtain some Jehovah's Witnesses,
and he was able to, because Himmler did a lot for Kersten.
Kersten took prisoner Annie Gustafsson to his home in Sweden as a maid.
There, she could obtain the watchtower freely.
Kersten offered to carry literature secretly to his witness workers at Harzvalda.
So, whenever he left for Germany, he would come to Annie first with a question.
Do you have something? Are we glad you take it with me?
I put it in my bag, my coat pocket, because I won't be checked.
And he did it willingly.
The magazines were smuggled between Harzvalda and the nearby camps, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck.
Thus, the birth of another communication network.
The book, Crusade Against Christianity, was published in German, French and Polish.
This 1938 witness expose included diagrams of concentration camps
and first-hand reports of cruel mistreatment of the witnesses in Germany,
as documented by the Swiss watchtower office.
Nobel Prize winner Dr. Thomas Mann wrote,
I have read your book and its terrible documentation with deepest emotion.
You have done your duty in publishing this book and bringing these facts to light.
It seems to me that there is no greater appeal to the world's conscience.
On October 2nd, 1938, 50 radio stations around the world carried watchtower President Rutherford's lecture,
Fascism Our Freedom.
He spoke out against the vicious attacks on the Jews.
In Germany, the common people are peace loving.
The devil has put his representative Hitler in control.
A man who is of unsound mind, cruel, malicious and ruthless.
And who acts in utter disregard of the liberties of the people.
Together with his backers, he rules with an iron hand.
He cruelly persecutes the Jews because they were once Jehovah's covenant people,
and bore the name of Jehovah, and because Christ Jesus was a Jew.
Just one month later, Nazi hatred for the Jews would explode in all its ugliness.
On November 10th, 1938, I came to work here early in the morning, and we were surprised.
All of the shops had been destroyed, the windows had been smashed, glass was scattered all over the street.
Everyone was walking on glass.
It was the morning after Kristallnacht.
Kristallnacht was a Nazi campaign, whereby all Jewish businesses throughout Germany were destroyed,
also Jewish offices. Everything was ruined.
November 9th, 1938, came the massive destruction of Judaism, an end to German Judaism,
when almost all the synagogues in Germany were burned down overnight.
On the night of Kristallnacht, 20,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany.
As the sinister Nazi intent toward the Jews became clear,
how would the religious community react, as churches and as individuals?
The fact of the matter is that the middle-of-the-road Christians were deeply influenced by the waves of Nazi propaganda.
So when the Kristallnacht pogrom takes place in November 1938,
that shocking and very visible evidence of Nazi antisemitism,
the churches were totally silent.
Not a few representatives of the churches called publicly for hatred of the Jews.
Such a situation was definitely not the case among Jehovah's Witnesses.
Antisemitism carries characteristics of racism,
and the last thing Jehovah's Witnesses would do was to regard the Jews as being of less merit,
simply because of their origin.
For them, all persons were of the same merit, were equal.
What if the Lutheran Church had acted the way the Witnesses had acted?
What if the Catholics had?
In my opinion, the whole history would have been very different.
The hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses in the camps began to see a large influx of Jewish prisoners.
The magazine Consolation asked, how can one remain silent?
I would say that the support that people felt, not only Jews,
but anyone who was a prisoner in a concentration camp would feel from Jehovah's Witnesses would be on the level of,
first, spiritual integrity, and second, there's also evidence that Witnesses were helpful to people
on a more physical level of nurturance, with food, with medical help, and so on.
I've never met or heard a survivor who does not remember the Witnesses, and they all say similar things.
Very small group of people, very clearly identified.
They'll talk about the purple triangle that they wore on their prison uniform.
They will talk about the way they shared food and care for each other,
and they will talk about how they were willing to talk with, help, and support other prisoners.
It really appears to have stuck in people's minds.
Jehovah's Witnesses established networks of support for one another and for others also,
and in fact, even in concentration camps, there was a kind of sense of community among Jehovah's Witnesses.
Witnesses in many camps held secret meetings with a lookout posted at the barracks door.
They dared to read, pray, and even sang softly together.
Bibles and literature were smuggled in by Witnesses transferred from other camps.
Brothers from Buchenwald, who were also put in this work unit, had some food, or literature, watchtower articles.
We studied these articles secretly in the dormitory. That strengthened us very much.
Naturally, we took every opportunity to speak with our fellow prisoners about the biblical hope.
They could punish them when they observed that Bible students attempted to witness to other inmates.
Then they were punished, but the SS could not stop their activity, could do nothing about it.
Individual fellow inmates in camp even went so far as to take on the faith of the Witnesses,
and there were even cases where baptisms were carried out secretly in concentration camps.
It was a beautiful warm Sunday in May, and the prisoners were lying on the grass, and next to me was also one with a purple triangle.
I asked him, tell me, what does it mean, Bibliforcia? That was my first contact.
Marks Liebster was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen for being a Jew.
He and the other prisoners were warned repeatedly not to speak to Jehovah's Witnesses.
There were around 400 Jehovah's Witnesses in Sachsenhausen.
As soon as young German Witnesses arrived, they were given 25 strokes.
They were locked away, surrounded by barbed wire, and the camp commander often announced that anyone speaking to Jehovah's Witnesses would be punished with 25 strokes.
The main reason why the SS isolated the Witnesses from other inmates was so that they should have no opportunity to influence their fellow prisoners by spreading their faith.
Literature was also miniaturized to make it easy to hide.
For instance, there was a matchbook-sized edition of the 1934 publication, Jehovah.
This miniature Bible, that is the entire Bible, that was the most precious thing that I had.
Josef Rehwoldt and Gottfried Mehlorn were left alone in a camp workshop.
They seized the opportunity to make handwritten copies of a smuggled watchtower.
While he was writing, we suddenly heard a noise on the steps, and an SS officer came upstairs.
His first glance naturally fell on the manuscript that the brother was writing.
He took it out of his hand.
He gave me a piercing look and said,
Do you not know that this is forbidden here? I said, Yes, sir, but that is why we are here.
Amazingly, Wiewelsberg camp itself becomes a source of Bible literature after a major underground printing operation is finally discovered and shut down by the Nazis in April 1943.
Its organizer, Ulias Hengelhardt, is arrested and beheaded.
The witness prisoners in Wiewelsberg camp picked up the slack by setting up a secret printery right under the noses of the SS guards.
Had they been discovered, they would have been sentenced to death straight away.
We know that they procured a typewriter. Where they got it from, we unfortunately do not know.
Marx reveals the details publicly for the first time.
Part of the industrial premises caught fire, and we were able to save a typewriter from the flames and put it aside for ourselves.
With the typewriter, they made stencils to use on a duplicating machine built with smuggled parts.
We did the duplicating in the dormitory.
Work on the typewriter was done using a silencer.
Marx, who was the camp electrician, rigged up a warning light to alert them if the guards approached.
The prisoners printed enough literature to supply witnesses in northwest Germany.
How was it smuggled out of the camp?
Marx found a way.
Getting the material outside was not difficult.
We could pass through the electrically charged barbed wire fence,
as I constructed the insulators in such a way that one could pull the wires apart.
There was a song that also made its way out of a camp.
It got to Switzerland and soon spread to the witnesses across Europe.
We received a song via Switzerland written by Brother Frost in Sachsenhausen entitled,
Forward Your Witnesses.
I often hummed this song during my internment, and this song encouraged me a lot.
September 1st, 1939. German army forces invade Poland.
The world begins its bloody plunge into total war.
The Nazi government has no tolerance for conscientious objectors.
Heinrich Dikmann and his brother August were in Sachsenhausen.
The SS tried a new pressure tactic on the witnesses.
But soon after the war broke out on September 1st,
we Jehovah's Witnesses had to assemble at the entrance.
August Dikmann had refused to perform military service, and Baranowski,
the commander whose nickname was Foursquare, asked Himmler to confirm the death sentence.
That came through, and the prisoners built a huge wall for the bullets.
The whole camp was assembled.
I just want to mention that the commander delivered a talk before the shooting.
His microphone was standing about there.
I can clearly remember one sentence when he said,
The prisoner August Dikmann does not regard himself a citizen of the German Reich, but rather a citizen of the Kingdom of God.
Suddenly, a member of the SS came from between the barracks with August Dikmann and led him to the wall.
August was standing at the front, and we three hundred, about three hundred brothers, were standing at the most eight or ten paces away from him.
He had to stand with his face to the wall, and there were seven members of the SS.
An officer with the rank of Sturmbannführer, that is, with four stars, gave the order to shoot.
When the shots were fired, he fell straight to the ground, and the SS officer drew his pistol and gave him the Kuhde Gras, as was the custom.
August was lying there, and the commander comes.
Okay, he says, whoever signs can go home immediately, and whoever does not sign will soon be lying next to him.
Two brothers suddenly stepped forward.
No, they said, we don't want to sign.
We already signed.
Now we want to withdraw our signatures.
Then I had to go to foursquare.
So, he says, what have you learned?
I said, I am and I remain one of Jehovah's Witnesses.
You'll be the next one to be shot, he said.
Well, five months later he was dead, and I am still alive.
Pressure was also put on female witness prisoners to support the war effort.
A large number of witness women worked in a sewing room in Ravensbruck.
One day during the severe winter of 1939, 400 witnesses were confronted with a choice.
We went outside, and the commander came, held up his hand and said,
whoever will not sew these bags for our soldiers, step aside.
He had hardly finished speaking when the whole column stepped aside.
The punishment, five days standing in the cold without moving.
At night the 400 slept on the frigid floor of the punishment block.
At the end of the fifth day they were locked up and put on starvation rations.
Yes, we sang through it all.
We quoted Bible texts to each other until we grew so weak that we just lay on the floor.
No straw, no blankets.
And then Himmler came to take a look at his victims.
You're having a bad time, but we are fine.
Can't you see yet your God has abandoned you?
We could do whatever we want to.
And then we answered him, the God whom we are serving can save us,
and even if he doesn't, we will still not serve you.
Then the door was closed and he personally introduced beating as a punishment.
Valtrad Kusserow was taken to a factory near the Oberheims camp.
She was shown a huge drawing board for designing bombs.
I said, no, I can draw flowers and landscapes, but nothing of the sort.
I went on to explain to them that two of my brothers had been executed
because they refused to take up arms.
And now I should make these arms?
No, I cannot do that.
At Vivesburg, the solidarity of the witnesses made the difference
for 26 of them who were doomed to death by hard labor.
The 26 had refused military service.
The SS wanted them dead.
They were beaten and driven by the kapos, as well as by SS personnel
who were sent there, and by other prisoners who allowed themselves
to be used for that purpose.
During the work, some collapsed under the load of heavy stones,
only to be forced to get back up again.
If you were to relate this martyrdom in detail, you could fill volumes.
The weakest of the 26 now became the sole target.
He had to push a wheelbarrow full of stones, very heavy,
in a circle around the courtyard until he collapsed.
The other prisoners were made to pour water over him until he revived.
Then the ordeal was repeated.
After the third time, the prisoner did not get up.
The commander, assuming he was near death, kicked him up against the barracks wall.
As soon as the lights went out during the night, we were able to pull him
by his legs out of sight of the guards, rubbed him until he was warm,
and gave him something to eat.
The next morning, he was standing in line again.
Not one of them died.
Jehovah's Witnesses earned the high esteem of other inmates
by their unconditional steadfastness toward their principles and conviction.
Protestant church leader Martin Nehmüller, once a prisoner himself,
paid tribute to the Witnesses in a sermon.
The Bibliforscher by the hundreds and thousands have gone into concentration camps
and died because they refused to serve in war and declined to fire on human beings.
From 1939 to 1941, the SS raged against Jehovah's Witnesses with unimaginable cruelty.
They employed every form of torture and torment against them,
so as to break Jehovah's Witnesses.
Often during the winter of 1940 to 1941, they were put soaking wet out in the cold
at 10 to 15 degrees below freezing.
Many Jehovah's Witnesses in concentration camps did not survive this misery.
To take just one example of this, within a six-month period,
in 1939 through 1940, in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp,
every third Bible student inmate, every third Jehovah's Witness lost his life.
Another SS torture method was the hanging stake.
Gertrude's husband Martin had experienced it and described it to her.
His hands were tied behind his back and the person stood on a platform
until he was fastened backwards onto the stake.
And then the platform was taken away so that the whole body fell forward,
hands folded behind the back, and that for a whole hour.
If the prisoner didn't cry out, the guard had his fun by making him swing.
He pushed him to make his body swing.
Since we slept directly next to here in the so-called isolation ward,
where we were a penal colony, I heard persons whimpering who had been hanged.
I would like to imitate what I heard.
That is roughly what it sounded like. It was awful.
Outside the camps, witnesses were put under intense pressure to betray their fellow believers.
At age 17, Hermine Schmidt was threatened by a judge with a gun.
She would not back down.
And this magistrate said to me, you cannot refuse to testify here with me.
And then he screamed at me as loud as he could and said, we are a total war.
Do you know what that means? Are you going to continue to refuse to testify about your brothers?
He took the revolver, released the safety catch in front of my eyes,
put up his hand and said, are you willing to lose your life for your faith?
I looked at my father and then at the other brothers behind.
Auf Wiedersehen. Farewells. If it has to be, yes.
Throughout all the interrogations, they wanted to know the names of those whom we had dealings with,
who accepted our literature and our main addresses.
But I refused. It was all dreadfully nerve-racking and it led to my having a nervous breakdown.
With the nation at war, the death sentence became official Nazi policy in military courts.
What became especially dangerous for them was that they refused military service,
because after the war began in 1939, that meant they could be condemned to death.
Based on the article of faith that Jehovah's Witnesses want to obey God more than men,
they follow the command of neutrality.
My father was executed in 1939 after he had been called up for military service
and explained his standpoint on December 7, 1939.
Later, in March 1942, my brother, he was 21 years old, also was executed for refusing military service.
At Brandenburg prison, the lives of 2,743 men were cut short.
Passing through a metal door, they came face to face with a guillotine's blade or a hanging hook.
There were 32 Jehovah's Witnesses among these.
The names of all 32 Jehovah's Witnesses who were executed are known.
I'll name just one, for instance Wolfgang Kusserow.
Wolfgang Kusserow, a young man who stuck resolutely to his convictions and did not give in.
He met his death here fearlessly, in the absolute conviction of having behaved properly in this life.
A prison guard told Josef Niklasch that there was something different about the way Witnesses face death.
Well, other prisoners resist. Some even screamed. You could hear them screaming.
But, he said, your people go to the gallows, talking about God's Kingdom, up to their last moment.
Horst Schmidt was among more than 250 Jehovah's Witnesses sentenced to death.
He was sitting in a death cell at Brandenburg with two other men, awaiting execution.
He heard a very loud clattering noise, the clattering of keys, and doors were opened and slammed shut.
The guard opened their cell door. He called the first man out.
Then the guard looked at his list once more and read out the name of the other and said again, step outside.
Well, you think, of course, it's my turn now. And he looked at his list.
Then he looked at me. And then the door closed. Then, of course, you just collapse. That's obvious.
Horst Schmidt escaped the guillotine. His foster mother, Amy Seidon, did not.
She was imprisoned in Berlin-Platzensee for concealing Horst and two other conscientious objectors.
On June 9th, 1944, she was beheaded.
A street just outside the prison has been named in her honor.
The tide of the war had turned. The fall of the Third Reich was within sight.
The sounds of distant artillery fire raised hopes among the prisoners that freedom was near.
But with the Nazi front on the verge of collapse, the SS tried to empty the camps and forced the prisoners to march west and south.
Josef Schoen was on the death march to Dachau.
They were with the rifles hitting the doors, step out, step out. That was the beginning of a death march.
And they said to us, none of you will be turned over to the enemies.
That means they will finish us off before everyone who grew weak was shot.
A stone commemorates the site of another death march, along with thousands of others. 220 witnesses were forced out of Sachsenhausen.
This was not the only death march. There were several others.
And Arthur Winkler was on a death march too, and he would have not made it, so he would have been shot.
The brothers found on a farm an old wheelbarrow, put him on it, and that's how I met him after the war again in Holland.
A frenzied evacuation was made from the Neungarmkamp.
The prisoners were marched to the Baltic Sea, where there were put-on ships to be sunk.
And then we were taken to the ship Tilberg, and finally to the luxury line in Capacona.
This ship was then bombed by the British.
It went up in flames, and I was able to jump into the water, fully clothed, and swim to a small boat and climb into it.
Then I and other prisoners pedaled this small boat to the shore.
In late April 1945, a handful of Jehovah's Witnesses from the Stutthofkamp in the eastern part of Germany,
together with other prisoners, were forced onto a small barge to cross the Baltic Sea.
Those ten days at sea were dreadful, and some, including our Martel Melinke, became deathly ill.
She died soon after the liberation.
We were more dead than alive. We weren't people, and didn't look like them either.
On May 5, 300 prisoners, 15 of them Witnesses, landed on an island off the coast of Denmark.
Danish Witnesses heard the news and rushed to meet them.
When we realized that these were our brothers and sisters, and that we knew what they had been through in the concentration camps,
the treatment they had been through, we knew all about these things,
but this was the first time that we met somebody that had been in a concentration camp.
You can imagine the impression.
So after some talking, I was finally permitted to go on board.
Yes, I must say it was a great shock for me to see them.
I shall never forget how these walking skeletons embraced me out of sheer joy.
We were suffering from typhoid. We had lies. They put their arms around us.
It was an unforgettable experience, even for these sisters.
The liberation of Ravensbruck did not leave the old and the sick behind.
In the meantime, I recovered enough to go for walks, and I discovered an old carriage in the woods.
So I said, look, I found something for our old and sick ones. I was feeling much better.
Well, we put the carriage in good running order and put the elderly ones on it.
We hung a sign on the front, Jehovah's Witnesses returning home from Ravensbruck, an off event.
The SS at Vivesburg planned to kill all 42 witness prisoners before abandoning the camp.
Why? The witnesses knew where the SS had hidden stolen art treasures plundered from across Europe.
In the frantic final days, four execution attempts failed.
At one point, 15 witnesses were to be shot.
Help came from an unexpected source. Gottlieb Bernhardt, the SS official left in charge, had second thoughts.
According to eyewitnesses with whom he discussed his uncertainty as to what to do, he decided not to carry out the order
and is thus one of the main persons to whom the remaining group are indebted for their lives.
As far as we know, Bernhardt became one of Jehovah's Witnesses himself after 1945.
Marx and some other prisoners had another narrow escape.
We were to be taken through the forest, which was close by, away from the front.
And then we were to run into machine gun fire from the SS to give the impression that we had run into the front lines of the Americans.
Suddenly, the allied troops bombard Vivesburg. The guards scattered.
Marx and ten other prisoners ran for cover in the north tower of the castle.
Ironically, it was the very place that Himmler envisioned as the center for SS cult worship.
In this shaft we hid ourselves and the wall, three meters thick, protected us.
We waited until darkness, the SS had disappeared and we were free.
Adolf Hitler had often stood as a guard before a vast sea of troops in Jürenberg at the Zeppelin Meadow.
But now it was the Witnesses who assembled on these very same grounds. And Adolf Hitler was gone.
I can only say one thing. We Jehovah's Witnesses, we are not heroes. We could not say I can take anything that comes.
Whenever I pray to Jehovah I didn't pray. I want to go home right away. The gates ought to open up.
Instead of that, my prayer was always that Jehovah should give me the strength so that I would be able to endure in every situation that might arise.
The unity among the sisters and the brothers, that gave us so much strength. It was our aim to endure under all circumstances.
We never prayed to be set free. We prayed for strength to endure. Everything else was unimportant.
What mattered was standing up for Jehovah's name.
Franz Wohlfahrt expected to be executed like his father and brother before him.
Thinking of his mother, his bride-to-be and his fellow Witnesses, he wrote his farewell poem in 1944 while captive in a Nazi camp.
In my faith I will always stand firm, though this world may taunt and cry.
In my hope I will always stand firm for a beautiful better time.
In my love I will always stand firm, though this world repays with hate.
Devoted I will always stand firm, though this world disloyalstays.
From God's word flows the might of the strong and the weak ones it powerful makes.
In God's grace I will always stand firm. On my own I could never remain.
With my life I will even stand firm.
And as I my last breath confer, you should with that dying gasp hear, I stand firm, I stand firm, I stand firm.
These words echo the determination of the thousands of Witnesses, living and dead, who stood firm against Nazi assault.
The quote, the declaration of my chapters, the biblical
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