Conscientious objectors in the "Third Reich": At the Jehovah's Witness the Nazis despaired

Probably it was meant well, perhaps unthinkingly naive, in any case fatal: At the beginning of September 1939 met August Dickmann's home address in Dinslaken his military passport. His wife sent the official document to his current whereabouts. To the concentration camp Sachsenhausen.

On Friday, September 15, in the concentration camp north of Berlin, the prisoners had a break earlier than usual. When they arrived at the camp after forced labor, there was a double wall made of thick planks with sandbags in the space in front of the platform, in front of it a large black box.

The camp elder Harry Naujoks, a communist from Hamburg, later reported on a staging as a "big play". The approximately 8,000 inmates were deployed, hundreds with a purple triangle on their clothes was called forward in the front row. SS guards were building around them.

Then a man tied to his hands was led out of the cell building in front of the wooden wall: August Dickmann. From the speakers came the voice of camp commandant Hermann Baranowski. He read the execution order, whereupon shooters fired on command and the 29-year-old worker from Dinslaken collapsed. At a sign from Baranovsky, his adjutant Rudolf Hoess, later the Auschwitz commander, jumped in and shot the person lying on the ground in the head. Four from the front row, one of them August's brother Heinrich Dickmann, were ordered to put him in the coffin and remove it.

They did not even try to avoid a punishment

The press and radio of the German Reich reported the following day, two weeks after the beginning of the Second World War, the first public execution of a man who refused to "fulfill his duty as a soldier". Dickmann was described as a "fanatical supporter of the international sect of serious Bible Students."

The show execution was intended as a deterrent. That she completely missed this effect, Baranowski should understand the same evening. Other NS institutions worked for years on a - as Max Bastian, President of the Reichskriegsgericht, she called - "strange category of people" from. In these cases, the execution was no longer public.

photo gallery

16 pictures

The phenomenon of conscientious objection had surprised the Nazi judiciary. The German Military Penal Code of 1872 did not even know the term. There were punitive measures against deserters, simulators or self-perpetrators, against men who wanted to escape military service in various ways. Completely new, however, was that someone openly confessed to it and did not make any attempt to escape punishment. Like the Jehovah's Witnesses.

In Germany, they were known by the name of "serious Bible Students" and that they refused any military service. In preparation for the Second World War, the military justice had precautionally declared this attitude to be the offense of "defensive force decomposition", on which the death penalty stood.

August Dickmann did not really care about that, he was already in prison at the beginning of the war. Hundreds of Jehovah's Witnesses were deported to concentration camps in 1936 because, like Dickmann, they continued their proselytizing despite being banned. They also did it in the camps and were therefore marked and separated by the triangle on their clothes, the so-called Lila Winkel. Work in penal colonies and ill-treatment should put them under pressure to sign a "letter of commitment" promising them to be released if they renounced their beliefs.

Despite the threat of death, two men appeared

Dickmann was imprisoned since 1936, since 1937 in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. According to historian Detlef Garbe, he had signed this letter of commitment - then his wife sent the military passport. As Garbe, head of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, has reconstructed, Dickmann was appointed after the arrival of the post in the concentration camp to the "Political Department", the Gestapo office. But he refused to sign the passport.

According to Garbe, the Gestapo probably reported the incident to Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS. In Berlin, it was concluded that this refusal case was for a "special treatment" - an execution without a court decision. Thus, it was about a quick murder not even with a "short process" as a dummy of the rule of law process, but without any process.

Dickmann's corpse had just been taken away, as camp commandant Baranowski threatened, according to testimonies, those who were still on the roll call square with the same fate if they did not sign the pledge, that is, the official departure from the Jehovah's Witnesses. Those who do not want to be shot should step forward.

After a long break, as described by researcher Garbe the process, two men had actually come forward - albeit to explain that they withdrew under the impression of the straight Miterlebten their already performed signature. Thereupon Baranowski left the place with rage.

Praying the concentration camp commanders to death?

The uncompromising attitude of Jehovah's Witnesses was hard to understand. Especially since the question of military service was originally of no importance in the still young religion: Charles Taze Russell, American preacher and founder of the "International Bible Students Association", had the invisible return in 1874 and 40 years later the visible establishment of Christ "redemptive" Millennium Reich "predicted on earth.

Since his supporters firmly counted on the end of the world in 1914, they hardly thought about a possible war. Russell died in 1916 without leaving a corresponding postulate, which is why the majority of German "Bible Students" followed the conscription to military service in the First World War.

The Jehovah's Witnesses

Who are the Jehovah's Witnesses?

DPA

How they proselytize

The missionary work includes the distribution of the magazines "The Watchtower" and "Awake!", Home visits and the dissemination of their messages on the Internet. The Jehovah's Witnesses strictly follow the Bible and early Christian models. Many critics see them as sects because they are organized in a very hierarchical and authoritarian manner, rejecting the state and imposing rigid rules on members, prohibiting them from dropping out and blood transfusions, for example. In most German states, they are now recognized as a public corporation and thus equal to the churches.

The end of the world

Corbis

It was only later that the Watch Tower Society, the umbrella organization of Jehovah's Witnesses, publicly propagated the religious duty of "not shooting at people as a soldier during the war" - which brought them into conflict with the military service reintroduced in Germany in 1935.

Jehovah's Witnesses were "mostly very simple people" who simply "relied on simple-minded belief as the foundation of their opposition", so in 1970 Canadian historian Michael H. Kater attempted to explain the behavior. Out of the suffering of the others, the survivors drew "the hope that Satan's kingdom would soon collapse."

The witnesses were only Bible words as a command. The thousand-year kingdom of God against the "thousand-year Reich" of Hitler - with the liberation of Germany they were, according to hangover, "firmly convinced that their ideology had been the superior".

A sign in this sense they had already gotten at the beginning of the war: When camp commander Baranowski suffered a stroke soon after Dickmann's execution, seriously ill and died in February 1940, rumored witnesses that even Baranowski's daughter believed that the Jehovah's Witnesses had prayed him to death ,

No deterrent effect

On the other hand, they rejected resistance in the political sense. Their interest was exclusively their own freedom of organization and belief, not the freedom of all, writes historian Garbe. So they cooperated neither outside nor in the camps with other regime opponents.

In the concentration camp, they instead "always loyal and willing workers," recalled Buchenwald prisoner and social scientist Eugen Kogon. Since they placed their fate entirely in the hands of Jehovah, they themselves refused to flee. The SS valued their diligence and care, leaving them to care for their gardens and private homes, getting them to cook and shave. Jehovah's Witnesses also took care of pupils in Lebensborn homes.

This improved their situation in the concentration camps - and the Wehrmacht justice believed that they could still make willing soldiers out of them.

At the beginning of the war there had been numerous executions for conscientious objection. Out of 117 death sentences handed down by the Reich Court Martial in the first year, 112 were Jehovah's Witnesses. But as early as October 1939, the Army High Command prohibited the otherwise usual publication of judgments - because a deterrent effect was not apparent.

In August 1942, Reichskriegsgerichts-President Bastian changed his strategy: Taking into account the "peculiarity of these people," he decided to admit readmission applications. Anyone who abandons his position would be sent to the front instead of being executed. Examining magistrates would make "great effort" to bring about a change of heart. In addition, family members should be called in to influence the objectors - if necessary, by removing or threatening the children. Everything rarely with success.

By the end of the war, the Reichskriegsgericht had passed around 80 percent of all such trials against Jehovah's Witnesses. The other cases involved members of other religious minorities, the two major churches or objectors for political reasons. Apart from the Jehovah's Witnesses, only the much smaller community of the Seventh-day Adventist Reform Movement called on its members not to participate in the war.

The experiences of the Second World War with the judgment practice of the military justice led to the fact that the right to conscientious objection in the Federal Republic received constitutional rank. Article 4 of the Basic Law was controversial in the Parliamentary Council, but since 1949 it says: "No one may be forced against his conscience for military service with the weapon."