The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nazis

July 1, 2001
"Prophecies about the return of the Jews to the Holy Land... classified the Witnesses in Nazi eyes as Zionists," writes Michael Berenbaum, president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, in his introduction to The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nazis: Persecution, Deportation, and Murder, 1933-1945 by Michel Reynaud, founder of the publishing house Editions Tiresias, and deportation scholar Sylvie Graffard, trans. from the French by James A. Moorehouse. Approximately 5,000 Witnesses were "voluntary prisoners" in concentration camps they could leave if they renounced their religion; most refused freedom. Many continued practicing their religion within the camps; one woman still free baked biblical passages into cookies to smuggle into Dachau. The previously untold history receives scholarly, sensitive treatment in this important addition to Holocaust studies. Photos.