Jehovah's Witnesses
Germany

In 1933, there were approximately 20,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany, of whom about 10,000 were imprisoned. Jehovah's Witnesses suffered religious persecution by the Nazis because they refused military service and allegiance to Hitler's National Socialist Party. Of those, 2,000 were sent to Nazi concentration camps, where they were identified by purple triangles; as many as 1,200 died, including 250 who were executed. They were hanged, beheaded, beaten to death, or shot dead. Conditions for Jehovah's Witnesses improved in 1942, when they were increasingly given work details that required little supervision, such as farming, gardening, transportation and unloading goods, while others worked in civilian clothing in a health resort, as housekeepers for Nazi officials, or were given construction and craft tasks at military buildings.

Unlike Jews and Romani, who were persecuted on the basis of their ethnicity, Jehovah's Witnesses could escape persecution and personal harm by signing a document indicating renunciation of their faith, submission to state authority, and support of the German military. Historian Sybil Milton writes, "their courage and defiance in the face of torture and death punctures the myth of a monolithic Nazi state ruling over docile and submissive subjects." Jehovah's Witnesses would preach inside the concentration camps, hold meetings, and smuggle in their religious literature.

Approximately 800 children of Jehovah's Witnesses were taken away from their families. Witness children typically expressed defiance to the Nazi regime's attempts to make them go against their beliefs. They were often expelled from public schools due to their refusal to say " Heil Hitler ". Some children were sent to reeducation centers, while others were adopted by families in good standing with the Nazi regime.

In East Germany, from the 1950s to the 1980s, Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted extensively by the State Security Service (the Stasi), which frequently used decomposition methods against them. Jehovah's Witnesses were considered a threat because their beliefs did not conform to socialist standards and their members sometimes had contact with the West.
detectable_format:title