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EmailPurple Triangles: Witnesses to the Holocaust
Jolene Chu, New York
Originally published in Judaism Today, No. 14 Winter 1999-2000
pp. 16-23 (with permission from the editors)
'I never personally hated the Jews . . . the emotion of hatred is foreign to my nature. Nevertheless the reasons behind the extermination program seemed to me right. I did not reflect on it at the time. I had been given an order, and I had to carry it out.' So did Rudolf Höss portray his helplessness as countless murders were committed during his watch as commandant of Auschwitz.
Maximillian Grabner, Höss's colleague, was similarly dismissive of his culpability. 'I only took part in this crime,' he told a Krakow court, 'because there was nothing I could do to change anything. The blame for this crime lay with National Socialism. I myself was never a National Socialist. Nevertheless, I still had to join the party.'
The assertion, 'I had to do it,' is a pervasive thread running through the remarks of Nazi perpetrators from every stratum. This article will not attempt to validate or dismiss such a defense. Instead, it will supply examples of people whose actions belie the claim that no other course of action, no resistance, was possible. Of course, the question, 'at what cost?' will remain, and it is up to each individual to determine when and if it is ever justifiable to resist evil at all costs, even when it appears that such sacrifice will do nothing to right a terrible wrong.
In contrast to the purportedly passive, helpless cogs that ran the Nazi killing machine was one Franz Reiter, a young Austrian Jehovah's Witness. Reiter clearly felt that he had free choice, and he exercised it. He refused to join the German army on grounds of conscience; along with him were five other young Witnesses from his hometown. On the evening of January 5, 1940, he wrote to his mother: 'I am strongly convinced in my belief that I am acting correctly. Being here, I could still change my mind, but with God this would be disloyalty. All of us here wish to be faithful to God, to his honor. . . . And now, my dear Mother and all my brothers and sisters, today I was told my sentence, and don't be terrified, it is death, and I will be executed tomorrow morning. I have my strength from God.'
Reiter died by guillotine-the favored Nazi method of dealing with this type of deviant. A German bullet was too good for someone who wouldn't fight in the Wehrmacht, according to Himmler. Reiter was one of at least 360 Witnesses executed by the Nazis following sentencing by military courts for being conscientious objectors.
A previous issue of Judaism Today offered a basic overview of the experience of Jehovah's Witnesses, a group who based their resistance to the Nazi regime on their Christian convictions including political neutrality, humanitarian values, and aversion to violence*. This is not to say, of course, that Jehovah's Witnesses are the only example of resistance to the Nazi regime. Various individuals and groups, though few in number, resisted in their own way and according to their particular circumstances and value systems. The Witnesses as a group were mostly ordinary people who had a clear set of religious tenets with which to respond to the National Socialist phenomenon. Whether or not the Witnesses believed that their deeds would make a difference, as it were, they took a remarkably consistent stand against overwhelming odds.
This further discussion will explore the reasons why the Witnesses' response to Nazism differed so dramatically from that of the larger German churches. It will also examine the Witnesses' reaction to the escalating assault on European Jewry as Hitler's genocidal intentions became clear. From their vantage point as fellow victims of Nazi oppression, the Witnesses occupied a unique position as witnesses to the Shoah.
The small religious community of Jehovah's Witnesses, known by many as Bibelforscher, or Bible Students, consisted of about 30,000 in Nazi-occupied lands. Of these, 10,000 spent significant time in Nazi prisons and camps, and 2,000 died. The Witnesses were the only religious group in the camps to be given their own uniform symbol: the purple triangle.
According to Detlef Garbe, leading authority on the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses during the Nazi period, 'no other religious group answered National Socialistic pressure to conform with an even comparable united front and as uncompromisingly. . . . They were of all religious-ideological groups the most severely persecuted by the National Socialist regime, second only to members of the Jewish religion.'
Besides the obvious difference in the numbers of Jewish and Witness victims-millions as compared with thousands-there are other important fundamental differences in the paths to destruction chosen for them by the Nazi oppressor. In perpetrating the 'Final Solution,' the Nazi regime displayed little interest in the religious affiliation of their Jewish victims, save, perhaps, for occasional propaganda purposes. The religious beliefs of the Witnesses, on the other hand, were the central issue in the Nazi attack on this very small group. Religious belief was also central to the stance of resistance among the majority of Witness victims.
Because the regime usually objected not to the Witnesses' ethnic origin, but to their ideology, Witnesses who were willing to abandon their beliefs could avoid further persecution. Jews were generally denied any such options. It should be clear from the outset that though the Witnesses faced a persecution of brutal and murderous dimensions, they did not face a planned program of total physical annihilation, as did the Jews.
The Nazis found the Witnesses' beliefs so odious that the administration generated a form that was offered regularly to Witness prisoners, often accompanied by a round of torture or other means of persuasion. In exchange for his pledge to renounce his faith and association with the Witnesses and to fully support the Nazi government, the prisoner could go free. So it could be said that the majority of the 10,000 Witnesses who were incarcerated for their faith chose to remain in custody rather than renounce their convictions.
Origins and beliefs regarding the State
The religious community of the International Bible Students had its beginnings with a small core of Christians based in the United States in the 1870s. The group considered itself independent and distinct from both Protestant and Catholic traditions, which they saw as riddled with non-Biblical practices and beliefs. The Bible Students believed that the time had come for the reestablishment of pure Christian practice and the proclamation of the good news concerning the Kingdom of God, a central component of Witness doctrine. The Kingdom was understood to be God's heavenly government, administrated by the Messiah. Their expectation of the imminent restoration of earthly paradise is somewhat reminiscent the golden age of Jewish Messianic hopes.
Because the Witnesses saw themselves as emissaries and supporters of God's government, they adopted what they believed to be the position assumed by first-century Christians toward the secular state. The Witnesses term this stance 'political neutrality.' It should be noted, as we shall see, that neither the Nazi regime nor the Witnesses saw the position of 'neutrality' as passivity or indifference. To the Witnesses, 'political neutrality' defined for them what to render to 'Caesar,' or the State, and what to give to God. To God would belong absolute obedience, loyalty, and dedication. To the State the Christian would render relative obedience, but only insofar as the State's requirements did not contravene the laws of God. Neutrality would mean that the Christian would not participate in the political process and would not take part in intra-State or inter-State conflicts. Neither would they swear allegiance to the State or its Führer. This was, not surprisingly, an untenable position as far as the Nazi regime was concerned.
The Witnesses' offenses went even further. As the name suggests, a key function of a Witness is to be a public advocate of the Kingdom of God. In the best tradition of the Hebrew prophets of old, this testimony would include the denunciation of behavior deemed ungodly, particularly when perpetrated by professed Christians. Thus, the Nazi movement and its Führer, having wooed the churches in the early days with conciliatory gestures of its 'high and holy' relationship with God and its intention to champion the cause of religious freedom, left itself open to sharp criticism by the Witnesses. They felt that their scathing criticisms of the regime were well within the realm of their ideals as Christian neutrals. Suffice it to say that there was considerable friction between the Witnesses and the Nazis, even before 1933.
Pre-War period. Clashes with the Nazi regime began almost immediately, and high tension between the State and the religion remained the norm throughout the period. The Witnesses were the first religious group to be banned in states throughout Germany, their activities and literature being proscribed within the first six months of 1933. The majority of Witnesses refused to heil Hitler, a gesture that carried religious overtones, to display the swastika flag, to join the Party, to vote, and to enroll their children in Nazi youth groups.
The regime came down hard and swift on the religious community, no doubt assuming that it would, like most other groups, capitulate at the least, or perhaps even be coerced into collaboration. Instead, the totalitarian state was frustrated time and again with the resilience of the group despite the vigorous application of the usual Nazi measures: threats, raids, property confiscation, arrests, torture, incarceration, and in later periods, executions. According to historian Christine King, 'Government documents throughout these years give evidence of real police and bureaucratic exasperation with these 'fanatics' who, in spite of convictions and terms of imprisonment, it was noted, were not being deterred.'
By 1938, more than 6,000 Witnesses were in Nazi prisons and camps. Witness children were taken away by the hundreds and placed in Nazi homes and reform schools. Like the Jews, Witnesses were stripped of all civil rights and reduced to a state of impoverishment. Gestapo agents specialized in surveillance and torture of Witnesses.
Following the November 1938 pogrom, the paths of Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses as discrete prisoner populations converged. As the Witnesses became eyewitnesses of the unfolding horror of the Shoah, it is instructive to look at the underlying religious beliefs that governed their actions, as well as their reaction to the tragedy.
Theological position toward Jews, antisemitism, and genocide
The tenets of the Witness faith represent a sharp departure from traditional 'Christian' antisemitism and the teaching of contempt. Witness belief is characterized by a resolute belief in the brotherhood of man reminiscent of first-century Christianity. Notes historian John Weiss, 'The Witnesses were free of German racial nationalism and had not brooded for centuries over the failure of the Jews to convert.' Witness doctrine has also been historically free of teachings involving blood-libel myths, 'just world' theology, and charges of deicide.
Their principled aversion to racism in general motivated their specific rejection of Nazi and church-inspired antisemitism. So the Witnesses' resistance to Nazi racial agendas, while extraordinary considering the landscape in which it occurred, was entirely consonant with the belief system of the Witnesses. Not so with the lonely lot of Protestant and Catholic resisters who in many ways defied both their religious traditions and their hierarchy in protesting Nazi antisemitism.
Nazi officials charged the Witnesses with harboring sympathies, if not conspiratorial connections, with Jews. Among the allegedly incriminating evidence was the name 'Jehovah's Witnesses,' with its decidedly Hebrew associations; there was also literature and doctrine full of references to the Hebrew Scriptures, strong printed and verbal criticism of Nazi policies toward Jews, and a general refusal to support anti-Jewish policies. Even before the ascendancy of the Nazi regime, the Witnesses had been accused of seditious ties with supposed Jewish-Bolshevist movements. Nazi propaganda picked up and expanded the theme. While there was no basis to the charges, the Witnesses refused to conform to pressure to practice an 'Aryanized' Christianity.
It cannot be denied that Nazi authorities viewed Witness literature, with its international circulation, as a genuine threat. Court records show that this was especially true in the prewar period when the regime tried to maintain a facade of respectability. The intensity with which the Gestapo tried to suppress the Witness underground and the severity with which they punished those who produced, distributed, or even possessed the literature, indicate that they regarded the material as much more than church newsletters. These were tools of resistance in what scholar Henry Huttenbach describes as 'an extraordinary, sustained campaign.'
Witness literature contains a staggering amount of detail about Nazi terror as it progressively ravaged the European landscape and its Jewish communities. Reports written by Witnesses inside the camps were smuggled out through well-organized underground channels and appeared regularly in the Witness journal The Golden Age and its successor Consolation. Aside from details regarding persecution of Witnesses, the Nazi oppression of Jews received by far the most attention, although other groups such as Communists, Poles, and the clergy are mentioned as well. The Golden Age and Consolation contained headlines such as 'Mistreatment of Fleshly Israel' (October 9, 1935, p. 6), 'Finishing Off the Jews in Austria' (December 10, 1941, p. 27), 'Why the Jews Are Being Slain' (a review of the Dreyfus case and the Vichy government's looting of Jewish assets, March 17, 1943, pp. 19-21), '2,000,000 Slain at Treblinka' (June 21, 1944, p. 21), and 'Terrible Plight of Hungarian Jews' (February 28, 1945, pp. 10-11).
It is clear that the Witnesses at the time saw the annihilation of Jews as a predominant objective of the regime. Witness literature of the late 1930s and early 1940s used such ominous words as 'annihilation,' 'extermination,' 'elimination,' 'obliteration,' and 'destruction' in detailing the escalating attack on European Jewry.
The Witnesses did not see the tragedy befalling the Jewish people as divine retribution for past deeds. On the contrary, they considered it their duty to expose the Devil-inspired regime that was, in their view, doing the bidding of the Vatican and destroying an innocent people. Witnesses inside and outside Germany distributed their literature to the public. Their activities quickly took on the character of resistance with clandestine printing operations, networks of couriers, and daring campaigns, blitzing the nation with leaflets. While much of the literature was intended to reinforce the resolve of individual members, it also served to uncover the 'criminal character of the Nazi State.'
What accounts for the remarkable acts of resistance undertaken by the majority of Witnesses? Those involved would likely answer by citing Scripture texts that informed their actions. However, we can also learn something of the character of resisters from sociological studies of other nonconformists, such as rescuers who perform altruistic acts despite the grave risks. Samuel Oliner sums up acts of heroic altruism this way: 'They are the deeds of ordinary people whose moral courage arises out of the routine ways they live their daily lives-their ways of feeling, their perceptions of what authority should be obeyed, and the models of conduct they learned from parents, friends, or religious instruction.'
Eva Fogelman adds to the picture by isolating the rescuers' ability 'to see beyond Nazi propaganda . . . and to recognize that innocents were being murdered.' They also retained their sense of empathy and strong equilibrium despite the drastic and rapid reordering of society. The significant link, according to Fogelman, 'is that most were taught to tolerate people who were different from themselves.'
In the context of camp life, sociologist Anna Pawelczynska isolates many of the same mechanisms that motivated resistance and adaptation. Resistance to physical and mental deterioration required a strong belief system. 'Models and values that are deeply internalized create the strength to resist every alien system which denies those values. . . . They defined the field of each individual's battle.'
Correspondingly, Witness doctrine allowed no place for Nazi racial theories, and the Witnesses' egalitarian view of mankind as having common origin precluded their devaluing Jews and others as Untermenschen. Witness literature regularly reinforced this value by clearly rejecting Nazi atrocities and reiterating the fact that the Jews could not and should not be made scapegoats for past history.
However, the Witnesses in good times and bad had ample opportunity to develop empathy beyond the bounds of their group through their outreach evangelizing work, which encouraged values clarification and perspective taking. 'Participation encourages the assumption of personal responsibility for the welfare of others,' as the Oliners observed. Looking after the spiritual welfare of another would sensitize Witnesses to note the individual's physical needs and, if possible, alleviate them. Therefore it is not surprising that non-Witness survivors remember the Witnesses in the camps as ready to share not only comforting words but also food, water, and other necessities as they were able. If Witnesses were ready to risk punishment in administering spiritual needs, it follows that they would exhibit a heightened readiness to supply physical needs despite danger.
The resistance of Jehovah's Witnesses as a coherent religious group is clearly unique among Christian communities during the Nazi period. Witness survivors saw themselves, not as heroes, but as ordinary people engaged in a battle to maintain Christian values.
Anna Pawelczynska well summarizes the experience of Jehovah's Witnesses during the Shoah: 'This little group of prisoners was a solid ideological force and they won their battle against Nazism. The German group of this sect had been a tiny island of unflagging resistance existing in the bosom of a terrorized nation, and in that same undismayed spirit they functioned in the camp at Auschwitz. They managed to win the respect of their fellow-prisoners (of various colors of triangle), of prisoner-functionaries, and even of the SS officers. Everyone knew that no Jehovah's Witness would perform a command contrary to his religious belief and convictions. . . . The Jehovah's Witnesses waged passive resistance for their belief, which opposed all war and violence.'
* 'Purple Triangles: A Story of Spiritual Resistance,' Spring 1999 issue, pp. 15-19. A few relevant points will be reiterated for readers unfamiliar with this aspect of history.
References and Footnotes
Quoted in The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), p. 204.
For an excellent discussion of the theory of moral responsibility, powers of agency, and the 'could not do otherwise' defense, as related to perpetrator behavior, see chapter 3, 'Excuses,' in David H. Jones', Moral Responsibilitiy in the Holocaust-A Study in the Ethics of Character (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999), pp. 63-77
1989 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses, (Brooklyn, NY: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 1988), p. 121.
Garbe, Detlef: 'Die Verfolgung der Zeugen Jehovas im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland - Ein Überblick, in Widerstand aus christlicher Überzeugung: Jehovas Zeugen im Nationalsozialismus, edited by Kirsten John-Stucke, (Essen, Germany: Klartext, 1998), p. 24.
See Gabriele Yonan, 'Spiritual Resistance of Christian Conviction in Nazi Germany: The Case of the Jehovah's Witnesses,' in Journal of Church and State, Spring 1999, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 307-322.
See Light, Vol. 1 (Brooklyn, NY: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, 1932), p. 164. Cf. The Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. 'Kingdom of God;' The Encyclopedia of the Jewish Religion, edited by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky and Geoffrey Wigoder (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1966), p. 229; Dictionary of Judaism in the Biblical Period: 450 B.C.E. to 600 C.E., Vol. 2, edited by Jacob Neusner and William Scott Green (New York: MacMillan Library Reference USA, 1996), pp. 370-371.
Cf. Acts 5:29.
Cf. John 17:16. For a fuller discussion of the Witness doctrine of neutrality, see 'Neutrality,' in Reasoning From the Scriptures (Brooklyn, NY: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, 1996), pp. 269-276.
'Witness': Greek, martus; Latin, testimonium, according to Vine's Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 'denotes one who can or does aver what he has seen or heard or knows,' from which derives the word 'martyr,' that is, 'one who bears witness by his death.'
For instance, in 1929 the Witness publication The Golden Age (German edition) stated: 'National Socialism . . . is a movement that is acting directly in the service of man's enemy, the Devil.' Das Goldene Zeitalter, October 15, 1929, p. 316.
Scriptural precedents include the divine denunciations delivered by Hebrew prophets of old such as Isaiah's rebuke of Assyria and Babylon (Isaiah 36:1-39:8 and 45:1-48:22), Jeremiah's prophecies again the Philistines, Moab, Ammon, Edom, and Elam (Jeremiah 46:1-49:39), Obadiah's condemnation of Edom (Obadiah 1-16), and Jonah's message to Nineveh (Jonah 3:1-4:11).
Garbe, Detlef: 'Die Verfolgung der Zeugen Jehovas,' p, 17.
King, Christine E., The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in Non-Conformity (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), p. 160.
Germany No. 2 (1939) 'Papers concerning the Treatment of German Nationals in Germany, 1938-1939,' Cmd. 6120, (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1939), p. 10.
Weiss, John, Ideology of Death--Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996), p. 313.
See Brian R. Dunn, 'The Death's Head and the Watchtower: Jehovah's Witnesses in the Holocaust Kingdom,' Jack Fischel and Sanford Pinsker, eds., The Churches' Response to the Holocaust, Holocaust Studies Annual, Vol. II (Greenwood, FL: The Penkevill Publishing Company, 1986), p. 158.
While some churches were known to have supplied Nazi officials with baptism records to prove 'Aryan' lineage, and thereby disenfranchise Jews, the Witnesses did not cooperate with Nazi authorities in identifying members with Jewish parentage. Moreover, Jews who had become Jehovah's Witnesses were commonly sheltered and hidden by congregation members.
The San Francisco Chronicle, November 20, 1938, p. 1, reported that Protestant churches were ordered to eliminate the name 'Jehovah' from their churches or they would be burned down as synagogues had been shortly before.
For instance, Hans Jonak von Freyenwald's Die Zeugen Jehovah: Pioniere für ein jüdisches Weltreich is a 104-page diatribe against the Witnesses, including an extensive bibliography of similar anti-Witness literature. (Berlin: Buchverlag Germania Aktien-Gesellschaft, 1936)
Henry R. Huttenbach, 'The Book War: Nazism vs. Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses,' in The Genocide Forum, July-August 1999, p. 6.
See Watchtower Reprints of the Holocaust-1933-1946, in the collection of the U.S. Holocaust Research Institute, Washington, D.C. The multivolume set contains more than 1,200 photocopied pages of magazines, booklets, books, and tracts printed by the Watch Tower Society.
This is a recurring theme in Witness literature of the period. See, for example, 'Jesuitized Germany (Part 2),' Consolation, (December 14, 1938, pp. 3-11) and 'Pius XII's and Stalin's Comrade (Part 2),' (June 12, 1940, pp. 19-28.)
The 1936 and 1937 the Witnesses distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets detailing Nazi atrocities. Scholars agree that by this time no other resistance organization, political or religious, remained with the capacity to carry out a similar campaign. See Benz, Wolfgang: 'Resistance Because of Christian Conviction,' in Informationen zur politischen Bildung, 2/1994, p. 21, and Imberger, Elke: Widerstand 'von unten'-Widerstand und Dissens aus den Reihen der Arbeiter bewegung und der Zeugen Jehovas in Lübeck und Schleswig-Holstein 1933-1945, (Neumünster, 1991), p. 345. Of the December 12, 1936, campaign, Imberger writes: 'In Germany, during the whole National Socialist period, there was no other organization in opposition that conducted a comparable initiative.'
Wolfgang Benz, Informationen zur politischen Bildung, No. 243, 1994, p. 21.
Oliner, Samuel P., 'Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust,' in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 686.
Fogelman, Eva: 'The Rescuer Self,' in The Holocaust and History p. 661.
Fogelman, 'The Rescuer Self,' in The Holocaust and History, p. 668, 674.
Pawelczynska, Anna: Values and Violence in Auschwitz-A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), p. 137.
Pearl M. and Samuel P. Oliner, 'Promoting Extensive Altruistic Bonds: A Conceptual Elaboration and Some Pragmatic Implications,' in Embracing the Other, (New York: New York University Press, 1992), p. 380.
Oliner and Oliner, Embracing the Other, p. 382.
Pawelczynska, pp. 88-9.