Jehovah's Witnesses (Ger., Bibelforscher, or "Bible Students")
Religious sect organised in Germany as the Internationale Bibelforscher Vereinigung (International Bible Students' Association), affiliated with the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York, Inc., whose main task is to distribute the sect's printed material
In 1933 the sect had about twenty thousand members in Germany. The Jehovah's Witnesses' faith is based on an eschatological doctrine; in every generation they expect the "end of days," which will be inaugurated by a great trial of all people who do not belong to the sect. The "end of days" will be preceded by political catastrophes, such as war, revolution, or economic crisis. Obviously, the Nazi policy of persecution and war could be interpreted as heralding the approach of the "end of days." While the Witnesses were among the early victims of Nazism, their initial attitude toward the Nazi regime was ambivalent. There is no evidence of concrete action on their part against the regime in its early period. In Bavaria the sect was outlawed in April 1933, and other provinces followed suit. Relations between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church seem to have been a decisive consideration for this step, in view of the extremely tense relationship between the sect and the Catholic Church. An additional consideration was the existence of a tight international organisation of Witnesses, and their refusal to officially renounce religious meetings, Bible evenings, and the recruitment of new members. The day after Prussia issued its prohibition of the sect (June 24, 1933), a convention of the Witnesses in Germany was still able to declare that essentially it had no quarrel with the National Socialist government, and in principle shared its hostile attitude toward Bolshevism and the church, and its anti-Semitism. It was only when the Witnesses refused to make the "Heil Hitler" salute, and, beginning in 1935, to serve in the army, that the sect's officials and large parts of its membership adopted a clear posture of opposition to the regime. This led to the first wave of arrests of Witnesses in 1936 and 1937, which in many cases led to imprisonment in concentration camps. International convention of the Witnesses, held in Lucerne, Switzerland, in September 1936, reacted by issuing a resolution condemning the entire Nazi regime. Although at the time the sect's leading officials in Germany were under arrest, it found a way of distributing the text of the "Lucerne Resolution" among its members in Germany (as it did in the rest of the world). More large-scale waves of arrests were recorded after the outbreak of the war, and again in 1944. At first, the SS used special methods of harassment, their purpose being to break up the Witnesses' internal solidarity. The SS also sought to keep the Witnesses apart from other prisoners lest they gain new converts to their faith. At a later stage, the SS made a conscious effort to disperse the Witnesses in the camps and thereby to break up their cohesive groups. Finally, the SS exploited the Witnesses' exceptional behaviour for its own purposes. On Heinrich Himmler's orders, for example, it was permitted to use the Witnesses for gathering mushrooms and fruit outside the camp, since there was no danger of their trying to escape or attacking the SS. As a result of this change in SS policy, the situation of most of the Witnesses in the concentration camps was changed for the better.
