• DOI:10.1080/09637490600624691
• Corpus ID: 145110013

Jehovah's Witnesses in National Socialist concentration camps, 1933 – 45*

@article{Wrobel2006JehovahsWI,
  title={Jehovah's Witnesses in National Socialist concentration camps, 1933 – 45*},
  author={Johannes S. Wrobel},
  journal={Religion, State \& Society},
  year={2006},
  volume={34},
  pages={125 - 89}
}

• Johannes S. Wrobel
• Published 1 June 2006
• Sociology
• Religion, State & Society

With thousands incarcerated in the prisons and concentration camps of the ‘Third Reich’, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Ernste Bibelforscher (Earnest Bible Students), were among the main and earliest victim groups of the terror apparatus of the National Socialists between 1933 and 1945. The Watchtower History Archive of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Selters/Taunus, Germany (WTA, Zentralkartei), has thus far registered a total of over 4200 names of male (2900) and female (1300) believers of different nationalities who went through a National Socialist concentration camp by the end of the regime in 1945. Between 1933 and 1935/36 members of this Christian faith were sent to official early camps, and then in far greater numbers to the newly established ‘modern’ main concentration camps (Stammlager), such as Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenwald (1937) and Ravensbruck (1939). A total of 2800 males and females went through these three camps alone by 1945. Allegedly enemies of the state, the Witnesses proved, as historian Christine King (1982, p. 169) has observed, to be ‘a small but memorable band of prisoners, marked by the violet triangle and noted for their courage and their convictions’. When the concentration camp system was reorganised in 1936, the SS administration, controlled by Heinrich Himmler, introduced an elaborate classification of prisoners by means of badges with triangles and with black, green, pink, purple and red colours. Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were assigned the purple triangle in July 1936 (Eberle, 2005, p. 92); other camps followed in 1937/38 (Orth, 1999, p. 57; Pingel, 1978, pp. 76, 90). In the opinion of historian Detlef Garbe (2002, p. 94), who has written an extensive study of the history and persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Hitler’s Germany, this kind of differentiation ‘took into account the actual ‘‘special position’’ of this group, which differed markedly from the other prisoner categories in its behaviour’. This article aims to identify these special