Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context, “Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany”
“At first, the leadership of the Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany hoped to convince the Nazi regime that they were a politically neutral Christian group, and they urged their followers to obey the new laws.”
The sentence carries a footnote reading: “To learn more about early efforts of the Jehovah's Witnesses to accommodate the new Nazi regime, see Detlef Garbe, Between Resistance & Martyrdom: Jehovah's Witnesses in the Third Reich, translated by Dagmar G. Grimm (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 87-91.”
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Provenance and verification note for Experiencing History: Holocaust Sources in Context, Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany
Confidence note. The page’s HTML was downloaded and read directly on 19 September 2026, including the footnotes, and again for an independent audit. The footnote quoted in the context note is the note attached to the sentence quoted here.
Notes. A footnote on the same page states: “More than 25,000 Witnesses lived in Germany when the Nazis rose to power, and roughly 10,000 were imprisoned during the years of Nazi rule. About 2,000 German Witnesses were imprisoned in concentration camps, and scholars estimate that roughly 1,200 died under Nazi rule. Around 250 Jehovah’s Witnesses were executed, mostly for refusing military service”, citing Garbe p. 484. The body of the page states that “in June 1933, the Nazi regime banned Jehovah’s Witnesses from meeting, preaching, or distributing their publications.”
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-de33-ushmm-experiencing-history