9. How were Jehovah’s Witnesses in Nazi Germany treated by Hitler, and with what reaction by the clergy?

⁹ During Nazi rule in Germany, Hitler completely banned the preaching work of Jehovah’s Witnesses. For years, thousands of Witnesses were cruelly confined in concentration camps and prisons, where many died, while some 200 young men who refused to fight in Hitler’s army were executed. The clergy’s support of all of this is evidenced by the words of a Catholic priest, published in the newspaper The German Way of May 29, 1938. In part, he said: “There is now one country on earth where the so-called . . . Bible Students [Jehovah’s Witnesses] are forbidden. That is Germany! . . . When Adolph Hitler came to power, and the German Catholic Episcopate repeated their request, Hitler said: ‘These so-called Earnest Bible Students [Jehovah’s Witnesses] are troublemakers; . . . I consider them quacks; I do not tolerate that the German Catholics shall be besmirched in such a manner by this American Judge Rutherford; I dissolve [Jehovah’s Witnesses] in Germany.’” To this, the priest added: “Bravo!”

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For many years, historians have been providing testimony regarding the integrity of the German Witnesses of Jehovah during the Nazi regime. The book Mothers in the Fatherland, by historian Claudia Koonz, published in 1986, has this to say: “The overwhelming majority of all Germans from non-Nazi backgrounds found ways of existing under a regime they despised. . . . At the other end of the statistical and ideological spectrum were the 20,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses who, practically to a person, unequivocally refused to render any form of obedience to the Nazi state. . . . The most cohesive group of resisters were sustained by religion. From the first, Jehovah’s Witnesses did not cooperate with any facet of the Nazi state. Even after the Gestapo destroyed their national headquarters in 1933 and banned the sect in 1935, they refused to do so much as say ‘Heil Hitler.’ About half (mostly men) of all Jehovah’s Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, a thousand of them were executed, and another thousand died between 1933 and 1945. . . . Catholics and Protestants heard their clergy urge them to cooperate with Hitler. If they resisted, they did so against orders from both church and state.”