Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Nazi Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses”
“Of the 25,000 to 30,000 Germans who in 1933 were Jehovah's Witnesses, an estimated 20,000 remained active through the Nazi period. . . . At least 3,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps . . . An estimated 1,000 German Jehovah's Witnesses died or were murdered in concentration camps and prisons during the Nazi era, as did 400 Witnesses from other countries”
The museum’s summary article, published over the museum’s own name. It also states that by 1939 “6,000 Witnesses (including some from Austria and Czechoslovakia) were detained in prisons or camps”; that “Jehovah’s Witnesses were marked by purple triangular patches” in the camps; and, in a sentence printed with a grammatical slip, that “In addition, at least 273 Jehovah’s Witnesses were sentenced to death by military courts for refusing military service were executed.”
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Provenance and verification note for Holocaust Encyclopedia, Nazi Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses
Confidence note. The page’s HTML was downloaded and read directly on 19 September 2026, again for an independent audit, and a third time for a second adversarial audit on the same day; the sentences quoted here were taken from the raw text, not from a summary. The page carries no publication or revision date, so the date recorded is the date it was read. The first ellipsis stands for two sentences: one saying that the remainder fled Germany, renounced their faith or confined their worship to the family, and one giving the proportion of those remaining active who were convicted and sentenced. The second stands for the parenthesis listing the nationalities of the camp prisoners and for the paragraph break that follows it. The quotation stops at “from other countries”, where the museum’s sentence continues “, including about 90 Austrians and 120 Dutch persons.”
Notes. The article makes no mention of the June 1933 Berlin convention or of the Declaration of Facts.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-de33-ushmm-persecution