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

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.