1 Preceding Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück, Moringen (near Göttingen) was one of the early concentration camps for women (1933-1937). Nearly half of the known women at Moringen were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

2 Among the Moringen inmates was 32-year-old Katharina Thoenes. The director isolated her and her fellow Witnesses from the others and enforced a correspondence, parcel, and money ban “because the women refused to do sewing for the winter relief work.”

3 Because he refused to pledge allegiance to the fuehrer, 18-year-old Jonathan Stark was taken to the youth concentration camp of Moringen in 1944.​—(On November 1, 1944, he was hanged as a conscientious objector in Sachsenhausen.)

4 In May 1939, shortly before the camp’s dissolution, more than 40 percent of the female prisoners in Lichtenburg were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

5 Erna Ludolph and many other female Witnesses were taken to Ravensbrück in May 1939, in order to help construct a new concentration camp there.

6 At Ravensbrück, the women had to work under the severest circumstances.​—(Taken from an SS-propaganda photo album.)

 7 Therese Schreiber was among the many Austrian Witnesses whom the Nazis carried off to Ravensbrück and other concentration camps. Later, a court in Vienna sentenced her because underground she had duplicated The Watchtower, a magazine of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

8 Charlotte Müller and Ilse Unterdörfer were moved from Lichtenburg to Ravensbrück camp. Both had been active in their faith despite the ban.

9 The camp inmates with the purple triangle became known as reliable and trustworthy workers. This card allowed Charlotte Müller (as from 1942) to serve as a housekeeper for an SS family close to the camp.

10 In 1944, a small group of Ukrainian girls at Ravensbrück camp, among them Alekseyevna Yarosh, became familiar with the teachings of Jehovah’s Witnesses and soon joined them.

11 Even under the extreme conditions of camp life, the Witnesses looked for opportunities to talk to each other about their faith and, at the risk of their lives, to read Bible literature.​—(The modern painting, displayed at the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum, is based on an eye-witness report.)

 12 Sachsenhausen concentration camp (1936-1945), north of Berlin. In pre-war years, about 5 to 10 percent of all held captive in the camps were Jehovah’s Witnesses. When new Witnesses arrived, they were immediately taken to the “penal labor unit,” where the hardest and dirtiest work had to be done for 10 to 12 hours a day, including Sundays.

13 The Bible Students (Jehovah’s Witnesses) constituted a separate category of prisoners, and were stigmatized with a purple triangle. Their firm stand exposed them to special cruelty by the SS guards and the kapos (inmates serving as overseers), and the Witnesses were at their mercy.

14 As one of many punishments, the prisoner was tied and beaten on the naked backside with iron rods.

15 Regardless of the weather, the prisoners often had to stand lined up for hours at the roll-call squares (here at Sachsenhausen). On September 15, 1939, at this very place, the SS had conscientious objector August Dickmann executed in the presence of the entire camp.

 16 The camp inmates could be punished for trivial offenses, for example, by hanging them on a stake, the so-called tree hanging, an extremely painful measure.

17 In addition to the degrading conditions, the camps were extremely overloaded. Jehovah’s Witnesses were permitted to share barracks with their fellow believers for a time, but because they held religious meetings, the SS later separated them. However, since they then preached more to other inmates, the SS put the Witnesses together again. Commented an observer: “One cannot escape the impression that, psychologically speaking, the SS were never quite equal to the challenge offered them by Jehovah’s Witnesses.”​—Eugen Kogon.

18 As a result of their poor diet, many died or suffered from malnutrition and diseases, such as hunger-related typhus.

19 Special furnaces were used to get rid of the countless dead bodies.

 20 At Buchenwald concentration camp (1937-1945), located near Weimar, and at other camps, from 1938 onward the SS isolated Jehovah’s Witnesses in special barracks behind barbed wire, not allowing them to write letters for nine months. During the following three and a half years (at Buchenwald​—where the Witnesses made up the greatest number of prisoners in the “penal labor unit”—​even until the end of the war), they were not allowed to write to their relatives more than 25 words once a month.

21 The following text was stamped or printed on the camp stationery: “The prisoner remains, as before, a stubborn Bible Student and refuses to reject the Bible Students’ false teachings. For this reason the usual privileges of correspondence have been denied him.”

22 The SS would often present to the Witnesses a declaration. By signing this and renouncing their faith, the Witnesses could have been set free. Yet, few signed it.

23 At the risk of his life, Wilhelm Töllner gave Bible talks at Buchenwald.

 24 The Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria (1938-1945). On September 27, 1939, 145 prisoners wearing the purple triangle arrived from the Dachau camp. Some were forced to do hard labor at the notorious quarry with its stairs of death.

25 August Kraft from Vienna, who for a time had organized the underground work of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Austria, was arrested on May 25, 1939. He died at Mauthausen in February 1940.

26 The Gestapo hunted for Albert Wandres (left) for three years. The Special Court in Frankfurt am Main sentenced him to five years of detention. Also, Martin Pötzinger (right) from Munich had been very active in the underground work. Despite hunger, both men had to perform hard physical labor at Dachau and Mauthausen; both survived.

27 Hans Gärtner, a hairdresser from Zwingenberg, did not survive his detention at Mauthausen and Dachau. In his home town, a street bears his name today.

 28 More than 1,000,000 people died at Auschwitz, most of them because they were Jews. Auschwitz was one of the biggest concentration, labor, and extermination camp complexes (from June 1940 until January 27, 1945) Roma (Gypsies), Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others died as well.

29 In 1942, Russian Aleksej Nepotschatov was tattooed with the number 154888 at Auschwitz. Because he was a prisoner of war, he barely escaped being murdered. At Buchenwald camp, he met German Witnesses and accepted their faith.

30 Gestapo photos taken of Jan Otrebski, a Polish Witness who received prison numbers at three camps: Auschwitz (no. 63609), Gusen (no. 13449), and Mauthausen (no. 31208).

31 Elsa Abt from Danzig was arrested in May 1942, and her apartment was sealed by the police. She entrusted her two-year-old daughter to a family in the same apartment building. Together with 11 other Witnesses, Elsa was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau and her husband, Harald, was taken to Buchenwald. In January 1945, she experienced the evacuation transports from camp to camp: to Groß-Rosen, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, and Dora-Nordhausen, where she was freed.​—(Harald is on the left in the inset.)

 32 Camp bureaucracy meticulously kept account of all inmates. After the dissolution of the Niederhagen concentration camp (1939-1943; for some time the camp was under the jurisdiction of the Sachsenhausen camp), a “remaining labor group,” consisting almost entirely of Jehovah’s Witnesses, stayed at Wewelsburg. Theodor Sponsel was one of them.​—(Group picture taken shortly after liberation in 1945.)

33 Max Hollweg recalls how the SS tried to work 26 conscientious objectors to death (1942). They did not succeed because other Witnesses secretly gave them food and support.

34 Despite the ban and until his imprisonment, Georg Klohe secretly produced sound records with Bible-based talks (1934-1936). In 1944, while at Wewelsburg camp, he managed to have a cello built for himself. The SS conceded because Jehovah’s Witnesses had no prospect of being released. However, the musical instrument never came to be used in a prisoners’ orchestra, and Georg Klohe played it only occasionally after work.

 35 Simone Arnold’s parents, Emma and Adolphe Arnold, from the Alsace (France) adhered to their faith and were both imprisoned. (Simone is in the center in the photograph.) In 1942, Adolphe Arnold was sent to Dachau camp. Once a month, while still free, his wife Emma mailed him a cake with three hidden slips of paper containing Watchtower articles. Adolphe memorized the texts. When liberated, he was able to take home three of these slips of paper hidden in his jacket.

36 In January 1936, Leopold Engleitner from Austria was arrested for the first time. Between October 1939 and July 1943, he was sent to the camps at Buchenwald, Wewelsburg, and Ravensbrück. One time, he was so severely beaten on the head that he sustained painful long-term injuries. Even after his unexpected release from the concentration camp in 1943, Engleitner was not completely free, since he had to work as a forced laborer. However, in 1945 he was able to leave the area and avoid being drafted into the army.

37 Margarete Unterner (Alsace) refused to support the Reichs Work Service, and in 1942, she was imprisoned in Saverne and later at Schirmeck-Vorbruck camp. Her husband, Marcel, refused to join the German army and was sent  to the military prison in Berlin-Tegel. On account of a severe nerve disorder, he was released.

38 Despite the ban, Johanna and Johann Degen held Christian meetings at their house in Lorsch. As a result, in 1936, Johann was sentenced to two years in Darmstadt prison. When his time was up, in October 1938, he was transferred to a concentration camp (Dachau). In January 1941, he died from hunger-related typhoid at Mauthausen camp.

39 At his job in the quarries near Zwingenberg, Adam Heim helped persecuted citizens. He was denounced and sentenced by the Special Court in Darmstadt. There followed time in prison and at Dachau camp.​—(Later he died in a motorcycle accident.)

40 Horst Schmidt (Emmy Zehden’s foster child) carried Watchtower publications as a courier from Berlin as far as Danzig. After his arrest, he was sentenced to death in 1944. From Brandenburg-Görden, fettered and awaiting his execution, he was freed on April 27, 1945.

41 For their faith, 12 members of the Kusserow family from Lippspringe were sent to various prisons, penitentiaries, concentration camps, and Nazi reform schools. Two sons were executed as conscientious objectors.