Survivors tell of the Nazis' oppression of Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany

A passage in Stephen Fry's novel, Making History, pits a senior history professor against a doctoral student. The professor asks him if he knows which group of concentration camp inmates bore a purple triangle on their uniform. The student does not, and starts guessing. Was it Communists, Slavs, lesbians, Cossacks or anarchists? he asks. Then he gives up.

The plight of Germany's Jehovah's Witnesses, or Bibelforscher (Bible Students) as they were then called, has not yet widely come to light. Compared with the millions murdered on racial grounds, the Witnesses form a relatively small group of victims who were never the focus of an extermination programme. Rather, the Nazis wanted their re-education.

Nonetheless, a fifth of Germany's Jehovah's Witnesses died as a result of opposing the Nazi regime. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were about 25,000 Witnesses among a German population of 65 million. By the end of the war, more than 1,200 of them had been executed, mainly for refusing military service, and of the 10,000 who were imprisoned, half had perished in the concentration camps. Uniquely among the victims of National Socialism, Jehovah's Witnesses could have gained their freedom at any point by signing a document officially to renounce their faith. Yet only a tiny fraction did so.

The Witnesses' suffering during the Third Reich has been neglected for a number of reasons, not least because victims wanted to put the horror of the immediate past behind them and focus on rebuilding their lives. When Germany began a frank examination of the Nazi past in the Sixties, conscientious objectors remained taboo. The old tags of "coward" and "traitor" lingered, a stigma that even the former Chancellor Willy Brandt, who worked for the Norwegian resistance, could never lose. To commemorate the bravery of the conscientious objectors might reflect badly on all those ordinary Germans who did go to war. Only in the past ten years have German scholars started to give objectors their due.

Television also contributes to the ignorance over the Witnesses' fate, for when featuring the Third Reich it concentrates on key military events, or Hitler himself, at the expense of minority groups. This is a criticism made to me by Professor Christine King of Staffordshire University, a non-Witness whose research on the new religions in Nazi Germany triggered academic interest in the field. In the past few years, however, several autobiographies have appeared, and occasions such as Holocaust Memorial Day have encouraged Witnesses who were imprisoned in the concentration camps to join the more familiar groups of victims in relating their experiences, particularly to the young.

Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to give allegiance to any worldly government out of fidelity to their belief in a future Kingdom of God on earth. Therefore they do not vote and will not bear arms. In totalitarian Nazi Germany, where Fascist ideology aimed to penetrate hearts and minds, such behaviour quickly drew attention. Witnesses additionally refused to give the Heil Hitler salute, join the Nazi Party and display the Swastika flag, all of which they considered an idolatrous deification of the State and its leader. "Heil" is related to the German word for Saviour.

It was dangerous for Witnesses' children to refuse the obligatory Hitler salute each day at school. On Saturday last week, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, large audiences in Penrith's Rheged Centre in the English Lake District heard four Jehovah's Witness victims speak about "Facing the Lion". Magdalena Kusserow Reuter, one of 11 siblings, told us how some kinder teachers would allow her to wait outside the classroom while the other children gave the salute. But the more committed Nazis among the teaching staff beat and victimised her for her disobedience. One teacher reported her parents to the Gestapo, who later abducted her three younger siblings, aged seven, nine and 13, and put them in a reform institute. About 500 Witness children suffered this fate.

Magdalena herself at the age of 17 was too old for a youth institute but too young to follow her parents to a concentration camp, so she was sentenced to six months' imprisonment, much of which she spent in solitary confinement. At the end, she was offered the chance to renounce her faith by a kindly female guard but she refused. Magdalena remembers that the guard was almost reduced to tears by her steadfastness. This encouraged her, she told me, and allowed her to see the pain of some of the Nazi conformers who respected but could not match her principles. She was later sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she learnt that one of her older brothers had been shot and another guillotined for refusing military service.

The National Socialist Party was inherently hostile to Jehovah's Witnesses because of their perceived internationalism - they first sent missionaries to Germany in 1890 - and links with the United States, where the Witness movement was founded in 1870. Witnesses' penchant for the Old Testament, particularly the use of the name Jehovah for God, led some Nazis to align them with Judaism. Essentially, the Witnesses' belief that God would establish a 1,000-year rule on earth, sweeping away all human governments including that of the Nazi's Thousand-Year Reich, was viewed as a competing ideology that could not be tolerated.

Professor King told me she sees the persecution of the Jehovah's Witnesses as the Nazis' first strike against religious freedom, victimising a group they believed could be stamped out swiftly and publicly. Hitler had a personal vendetta against the Witnesses, she says, while others in the party believed persecution would appease the Catholic and Protestant Churches, who considered the Witnesses heretics, while warning these Churches of the punishment they would face for any insurrection of their own.

In the summer of 1933 the Jehovah's Witness congregation was branded part of a Jewish-Bolshevik plot and banned in most German states. The Gestapo took over the Witnesses' headquarters and printing site in Magdeburg and burned 25 lorryloads of Bibles and the Witnesses' fortnightly doctrinal journal, The Watchtower. From 1935 Jehovah's Witnesses were ousted from civil-service jobs and deprived of all state benefits, while hundreds were arrested for continuing to preach. Nonetheless, in December 1936 and June 1937 Witnesses still managed to blanket Germany with leaflets, smuggled from Switzerland, detailing the regime's abuses.

By 1938, Witnesses made up a tenth of the pre-war concentration camp population. They were treated particularly brutally in this period, as the SS was determined to break their will, but their spiritual resistance rarely faltered. Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, would later write in his memoirs that the SS chief Heinrich Himmler used the "fanatical faith" of the Jehovah's Witnesses to illustrate the "unshakeable faith" he expected from his own men. Himmler even planned to stop the persecution of Witnesses after the war and to expel them to the easternmost reaches of the Reich to act as a buffer state.

Höss regretted having so few Witnesses at Auschwitz as they were reliable and stoical workers who never attempted to escape. The only duties they refused were those relating to the German war effort, including the tending of Angora rabbits, whose fur was used for lining pilots' jackets. Once the war and the Nazis' industrialised mass killings were under way, some Witnesses were given more privileged positions in the camps, often as secretaries or domestic servants, but the threat of arbitrary punishment remained. One of those who spoke at Penrith, an 88-year-old German Jew, Max Liebster, remembered how in the winter of 1940 a group of Witnesses in Sachsenhausen, a camp north of Berlin, were doused with water and then made to stand outside all night in sub-zero temperatures. By the morning a third had died.

Today Liebster speaks as a Jehovah's Witness. His first encounter with the group was in 1940, when he spent two weeks handcuffed to a Witness during transportation to Sachsenhausen. Liebster was impressed by the Witnesses' fervour and resistance to all combat. Once inside the camp, he was intrigued by attempts to isolate them: for example, any prisoner who spoke to one of them was whipped. "What could be so dangerous about the Bible?", he remembers thinking. On the several occasions when death seemed imminent, a generous gesture by an inmate bearing a purple triangle seemed to save his life.

Camp guards could never resolve the dilemma of how to house Witness prisoners. If placed with other prisoners, they tended to make converts. If isolated, their tight cohesion as a group and fervent belief that their fate was part of the universal struggle of good against evil gave them an aura of courage which won the respect of other prisoners.

The Jehovah's Witnesses did not set out specifically to resist National Socialism, and in June 1933 their American leader, Joseph Rutherford, gave a "Declaration of Facts" to Hitler. As the Nazis had linked the congregation to Judaism, much of this declaration was an attempt to distance Witnesses from it. In doing so, it used crude stereotypes of "commercialistic Jews" who were alleged to be controlling New York and London. At one point it even stated that "the purely religious and apolitical goals and objectives of the Bible Students" (the name used for the Witnesses at the time in Germany) "are in complete harmony with the similar goals of the National Government of the German Reich".

Certain individuals who are hostile to Witnesses continue to use this declaration to vilify the congregation. But Professor King believes it should be understood in its historical context, as an example of a group confronting "the very new challenge of Nazi Germany and trying to find a way to help their religion survive". King stresses that the Witnesses quickly moved away from this position and were openly condemning Hitler and anti-Semitism within a few years.

Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the world is under the sway of Satan and prepare themselves for suffering and adversity. During the Nazi regime they remained faithful to their beliefs and consequently encountered suffering and adversity in its most extreme form. Even children stood firm, remembering biblical stories of those who had also been tested for their faith. Magdalena Kusserow Reuter told me how, alone in prison, she remembered the three Hebrews who refused to worship King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, the steadfastness of Job, and the intercession for the Jews of Queen Esther, who pleaded with her husband to save them. Magdalena's own story, which affirms this biblical tradition, is one of many others like it that deserves to be heard.