After 1935, many Witnesses lost jobs, homes, businesses, and pensions because
they won't give the Heil Hitler salute. They were viewed as enemies of the
state, arrested, imprisoned in concentration camps, and marked with a purple-colored
triangle. More than 900 Witness children, who refused to join the Hitler Youth,
were involuntarily removed from parental custody to Nazi penal institutions
and juvenile homes.
About 10,000 Witnesses from Germany, Austria, Belgium,
Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland were arrested and
deported to various concentration camps; between 2,500 and 5,000 died
in Auschwitz, Berlin-Plozensee, Brandenburg prison, Dachau, Esterwegen
Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Hamburg prison, Mauthausen, Neuegamme, Sachsenhausen,
Ravensbrück, Wewelsburg
and other camps. More than 250 Witnesses were executed for refusing
to serve in the German military.
In the concentration camps, they were beaten and fed only a slice of bread in
the morning and thin watery soup in the evening. Other punishments included
hanging from a pole with your hands tied behind you and being put outside soaking
wet in the frigid below freezing cold weather. They could have been given their
freedom if they would renounce their faith. Few did. Many spent 10 years in
confinement. They were allowed to write to outsiders only 3 or 4 sentences.
Afraid that they were spreading their faith to other prisons, anyone talking
to them were gien 25 strokes.
Video: "Jehovah's Witnesses Stand Firm Against Nazi Assault" Watch Tower
Bible and Tract Society of PA.
"Joachim Alfermann was repeatedly beaten and humiliated, and then he was placed
in solitary confinement. But Alfermann remained steadfast and refused to bear
arms. After enduring prolonged efforts to break his integrity to God, Alfermann
was finaly sent to the Stutthof concentration camp in February 1944. Liberated
in April 1945, he survived the war and remained a loyal Witness of Jehovah
until his death in 1998. Altermann was one of the 13,400 Witnesses in Germany
and in countries occupied by the Nazies, who suffered reprisal because of their
faith. They followed the direction of the Bible, remaining politically neutral
and refusing to take up arms (Matthew 26.52; John 18:36). Some 4,200 Witnesses
were interned in concentration camps, and 1,490 lost their lives." Watchtower
October 15, 2007.
A Toronto survivor of the Janowska Camp told FORUM that there were about 10,000 people in the camp at one time of which about 3,000 were Ukrainians and Poles.
