Jehovah's Witnesses and the Holocaust
Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany were persecuted between 1870 and 1936. Because Jehovah's Witnesses would not give allegiance to the Nazi party, and refused to serve in the military, they were put in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Unlike Jews and Gypsies who were persecuted for racial reasons, the Jehovah's Witnesses were persecuted on political and ideological grounds. If they were to submit to the state authority and serve in the military they would be free to go. Nevertheless, approximately 2500 Jehovah's Witnessess (about 10% of the pre-War total in Germany) were sent to concentration camps where they were forced to wear a purple triangle that specifically identified them as Jehovah's Witnesses.As early as 1921, the Witnesses, then called Ernste Bibelforscher (Earnest Bible Students), were accused of being linked with the Jews in subversive political movements. The Bible Students were branded as the dangerous Bolshevik "Jewish worm," though no proof of the charges was ever produced. Swiss theologian Karl Barth later wrote: "The accusation that Jehovah's Witnesses are linked with the Communists can only be due to an involuntary or even intentional misunderstanding."
A church magazine in Germany charged that the Witnesses and the Jews were coconspirators in revolutionary movements. In response, the April 15, 1930, German edition of The Golden Age (forerunner of Awake!) stated: "We have no reason to regard this false accusation as an insult—as we are convinced that the Jew is at least as valuable a person as a nominal Christian; but we reject the above untruth of the church tabloid because it is aimed at deprecating our work, as if it were being done not for the sake of the Gospel but for the Jews."
http://watchtower.org/library/g/1998/7/8/article_01.htm In spite of the evident hostility of the Hitler regime, Jehovah's Witnesses organized a convention in Berlin, Germany, on June 25, 1933. Some 7,000 persons assembled. The Witnesses publicly made their intentions clear: "Our organization is not political in any sense. We only insist on teaching the Word of Jehovah God to the people, and that without hindrance."
http://www.anti-fascism.org/da/afp/jw-evils-of-nazism.html
Initially, in 1934, the leadership of the Jehovah's Witnesses attempted to mollify the Nazis in response to denunciations for being too closely tied to America. They told Hitler that they believed that the "commercial Jews of the British-American Empire" was responsible for "exploiting and oppressing the peoples of many nations" and that Jehovah's Witnesses "have no interest in political affairs, but are wholly devoted to God's Kingdom under Christ His King." After intensified persecution of this group, a world-wide body of Jehovah's Witnesses passed a resolution in 1936 strongly condemning the Nazi regime.
During the same time period this group was also persecuted in the United States and many other countries for similar reasons, mainly because they refused to serve in the military and help with the war effort. In Canada during that time, Jehovah's Witnesses were interned in concentration camps along with political dissidents and people of Japanese and Chinese descent. In the United States, the Supreme Court issued a series of landmark First Amendment rulings that permitted the Jehovah's Witnesses to avoid military service and to refuse to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
