In his incredibly rich and exhaustive study, Detlef Garbe, the director of the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial, investigates the courageous and bold resistance of the International Bible Students' Association or Jehovah's Witnesses under National Socialist rule. Originally completed as a dissertation in 1989 and published in 1993, this translation was made from an earlier revised fourth edition published in 1998. Garbe identifies the Jehovah's Witnesses as “largely ‘forgotten victims’” of the Nazi regime, and his study is written to rectify this situation. According to Garbe, after the Jews, the Jehovah's Witnesses were the “most severely persecuted religious denomination during the National Socialist regime” (p. 484). Not motivated by political ends to overthrow the Hitler state, but acting on a strictly theological worldview that limited the allegiance of members to Jehovah God only, the Witnesses refused to partake in most external displays of allegiance to Nazism, i.e., taking oaths, offering the Hitler salute while saying “Heil Hitler,” voting in elections, and later serving in the military. Throughout the book, Garbe meticulously records the history of the Witnesses' “fundamental opposition” as they refused to participate in the political exercises of the Nazi state.
After an insightful and thorough examination of the historiography concerning the Jehovah's Witnesses under National Socialism, Garbe presents an overview of the denomination's foundation in the United States; then, in 1902, its establishment in Elberfeld, Germany. Primarily attributing the growth of the Witnesses in 1920s Germany to the effects of a dire post-WWI situation, Garbe shows how this increase in membership threatened the long-established Catholic and Protestant churches. For example, Garbe records how prior to an address delivered in Munich's Circus Krone by Joseph Franklin Rutherford, the president of the Jehovah's Witnesses, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich and Freising, had prohibited Catholics in his archdiocese from attending the crusades of any anti-Catholic sects. Protestants responded no differently, especially in regard to the Witnesses. In like manner, völkisch groups also spoke against the Witnesses, but with more invective than the churches by labeling them Bolsheviks and supporters of Jews. All of this led to increased complaints against the mission activity of the Jehovah's Witnesses even prior to National Socialist rule. Thus when the National Socialists came to power in January 1933, there was no great outcry from civic or religious groups in support of the Jehovah's Witnesses to the state's efforts to suppress them. In fact, Garbe alludes to the fact that both Protestant and Catholic Church leaders encouraged such state restrictions.
At first the Jehovah's Witnesses attempted to address these negative charges that the National Socialist state attempted to level against them by issuing assurances that their religious group was “firmly established in positive Christianity . . . and not in opposition to the national government of the German Reich” (p. 90). Being “firmly established,” in this context, meant, among other things, distancing themselves from Jews. By 1932, their leader Rutherford, in his three-volume work Vindication, had already negatively altered his denomination's pro-Jewish stance. Later, in June 1933, when the Jehovah's Witnesses gathered in the Wilmersdorfer Tennis Hall in Berlin, they supported this change further by adopting a statement that included the following declaration: “It has been the commercial Jews of the British-American empire that have built up and carried on Big Business as a means of exploiting and oppressing the peoples of many nations” (p. 89). Unlike M. James Penton's 2004 study, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich: Sectarian Politics under Persecution, which viewed such statements and actions as essential to a modern understanding of the response of the Jehovah's Witnesses to the Nazi state, Garbe concludes that such reactions were “political calculation[s] and nothing else” (p. 89). He concludes that such statements did not serve as an essential basis for the Witness response to National Socialism. In the epilogue that he added to this English edition, Garbe does not alter this stance.
The richness of Garbe's study is the extensive research he has conducted to reconstruct the gradual and often varied suppression of the Jehovah's Witness denomination in Germany. For example, in mid-1933 when most states had already banned the Jehovah's Witnesses, Hamburg Chief of Police Dr. Hans Nieland argued that this denomination “did not give any cause for concern” (p. 73). At the same time, in September 1933 in Magdeburg, property belonging to the Witnesses that the Gestapo had confiscated earlier had to be returned to them after the American Ambassador William A. Dodd intervened, pointing out to the Nazi authorities that the denomination had an integral connection to its U.S.-based headquarters. This deference to the Witnesses was not unusual in the early 1930s. In fact, Garbe shows that the German judicial system initially either acquitted or applied lenient monetary fines as punishments toward Jehovah's Witnesses whom the Gestapo had arrested. In March 1934, the Hessen Special Court in Darmstadt even declared the ban there against the Witnesses to be “unconstitutional and legally ineffective” (p. 123). Such responses forced the Gestapo to use “protective custody” to ensure the confinement of known Witnesses. After 1935, however, when a change in the justice ministry's administration took place, the courts became less likely to view the charges against Witnesses as questions of freedom of religion, but more as involvement in “subversive activities” against the state and consequently impose more serious punishments.
The measures and means of punishment against the Jehovah's Witnesses also gradually intensified. By 1935, the Gestapo was regularly sending known Witnesses to the concentration camps Esterwegen, Moringen, and Sachsenburg; and before the end of Hitler's regime more than 3,000 Witnesses had met this fate. Not surprisingly, in 1936 and 1937, a series of Gestapo actions ended in numerous arrests and ultimately worked to destroy the network of Jehovah's Witnesses throughout Germany. By 1937, the courts also began to issue harsher sentences against arrested Witnesses, including ordering forced separation of children from their parents, compulsory sterilizations, and even forced psychiatric evaluations that led to confinement in mental institutions. Arrests and charges against Jehovah's Witness members increased even more in 1939 with the outbreak of war when the entire German legal system clamped down on any action deemed harmful to the interests of the state. Still Garbe shows that such actions failed to deter the resolute, theologically motivated Jehovah's Witnesses who, despite these harsh punishments, continually regrouped and continued their mission efforts in various innovative forms. Such actions, for example, included producing newsletters that specifically mentioned crimes of the SS committed against Germany's “enemies.”
Despite such resistance efforts, Garbe concludes that the leaders of the Jehovah's Witnesses “depicted the Hitler regime until the end as an instrument of a Roman Catholic conspiracy, and thus completely failed to recognize its true characteristics.” Thus when the Jehovah's Witnesses implored their neighbors “to withdraw their loyalty from the ‘barbarian Hitler state,’” such action was always “done with the objective of encouraging people to give their loyalty to Jehovah God instead” (p. 525). At the same time, Garbe is clear to point out that those Jehovah's Witnesses who deviated from their denomination's pattern of resistance and supported some measures of the state that their group deemed forbidden, risked being shunned by other members. Such shunning happened even amid the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Although Garbe has produced a definitive account of the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses under National Socialism, the work has a few noticeable limitations. For example, as much as he downplays the 1933 overtures of the Jehovah's Witness leadership toward National Socialism, he also barely addresses the denomination's conflictive relationship with persecuted European Jews throughout the Nazi years in power. Similarly, he downplays the denomination's anti-Semitism and proselytism efforts among Jews inside and outside the concentration camps. These limitations aside, Garbe has still produced an exemplary evidence-filled history of the Jehovah's Witnesses under National Socialism. It will serve as a point of departure for all future research and study of this religious denomination's trials during a dreadful period of human history.
