Before I go into this, I just want everyone to be mindful that I don't normally post these kinds of things. I leave the political/religious/social semantics and diatribes for others to tackle, so please allow me this one time to get some things off my chest that have been with me since, oh, I don't know...childhood? It's been awhile since I've blogged or journaled anything, and I don't consider myself a professional writer, so I'll probably be lacking a certain savoir faire as I communicate my feelings on certain issues. However, I'll do my best to just be honest and from my heart.
Over the years, particularly since the advent of social media, I've absorbed more information and opinions on issues of political and social standing than I even know what to do with sometimes, and for the most part, I keep silent about it, unless I'm talking one-on-one or in very small groups. I have my social circle of friends and theatrical/film acquaintainces on one side of me - most of which are of the liberal Democratic leaning - and then my business "bread n butter", some of whom are also very good friends - predominantly of a Republican-Conservative grouping - and yet, my own personal background is one that is politically neutral. NOT apolitical. That suggests no interest, regard, or concern to politics whatsoever. No, I can absolutely say that I pay very close attention to today's political climate and the world's overall general condition but not always for the same reasons that others do. It's mainly because I'm looking for parallels on how closely things may start shaping up to resemble events that happened in the former century's history which influenced my own personal beliefs on things.
I've heard a lot all my life about which racial and religious groups were persecuted - which ones were victims, which ones were perpetrators - but it's not very often that I hear about any one particular group that made the ultimate sacrifice to stand against prejudice and sectarianism which has led to wars. Not just individually, but as a WHOLE. There is one that does come to mind. I wanted to point out what this particular group stood for during one of the blackest periods of racial and social hatred known to mankind: The Holocaust.
This group was identified as the Purple Triangles.
The Purple Triangles were a group of Bible Students, or the "Bibelforscher", as they were called in Germany up until around 1931. In the late 1920s and early 30s, brown-shirted Nazis regularly broke up religious meetings of these Bible Students, vilifying them in the Nazi and religious press as a dangerous, subversive sect, seeking to undermine the German government and charged with having ties to supposed Jewish-Bolshevist world conspiracies. The fact that many of these Bible Students held on to Hebrew scripture as a fundamental part of their faith, including calling on the Hebrew name of God (Jehovah), which was used frequently in their prayer and studies, made them that much more of a target by the swiftly hardening administration of Hitler's totalitarian machine.
On January 20, 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and on February 28, 1933, the Decree for the Protection of the People and State provided legal basis to suppress all who were considered Hitler's enemies. Among those listed as enemies were these Bible Students, by then known as Jehovah's Witnesses. Despite their insistence of political neutrality and refusal to take up arms, the Nazis viewed them as seditious and insubordinate, and they quickly found themselves pitched directly against the Nazis, who expected absolute loyalty, subservience and silence from the churches.
The Witnesses were anything but silent. And they were not secretive about their resistance. They spoke out vigorously against all basic points of Hitler's fascist regime: racism, ultranationalism and the deification of the State and its Fuhrer. Although the Witnesses believed in obeying the laws of the state and living as honest citizens of the country, they held theocratic allegiance only to Jehovah God and to His appointed Son, Christ Jesus, who set the example during his time on earth of demonstrating political neutrality, even refusing earthly kingship when it was offered to him. Due to this tightly held religious belief, based on their personal studies and interpretation of the Bible, the Witnesses were thrown into a spiritual battle against the Nazi regime, and fierce persecution became a result.
Because of the Witnesses' daily refusal to offer up the Hitler salute, a symbol translated to mean "Salvation comes from Hitler", they suffered beatings, destruction of property, job loss and prison sentences. Out of love for their neighbors, they did not join the Nazi party, Hitler Youth, nor take any part in elections, observe Jewish business boycottings, neither did they take part in the military or support it in any way, even refusing to work in munitions factories. While other German citizens took part in picketing and defaming Jewish businesses, Witnesses sought to help their Jewish neighbors by offering patronage and even providing food and milk, asking nothing in return. In June of 1933, the religion was officially banned and outlawed; the printing presses that Witnesses used to produce literature for distribution were shut down. Dozens of truckloads of biblical literature were destroyed. Witnesses became virtually unemployable, and businesses, pensions, social security benefits and wages were seized. They were sometimes paraded through the streets and made to wear signs around their necks saying they did not vote, forced to be on public display, often against angry patriotic mobs. Even being married to a Witness was a lawful ground for divorce. Witness children were expelled from schools, with some 500 of them sent to penitentiary reform schools.
The next time you may be tempted to denounce or criticize a Jehovah's Witness for their refusal to salute the flag, pledge allegiance regardless of the country they live in, join in patriotism, vote, or take up arms in the military service with the thought that they are cowardly, apathetic and would rather "bury their heads in the sand", please research for yourself the accounts documented of how the Jehovah's Witnesses of that time boldly opposed the Third Reich, waging a spiritual warfare against Hitler and those who followed him. Stories of relentless courage and stalwart opposition in the face of persecution and death will abound. They did not wait until after the fact when it was clear to everyone else just what a powerhungry monster Hitler had shown himself to be. Because of their already spiritually ingrained views on rejection of patriotic nationalism, refusing to give allegiance to Hitler was an easy choice for them - and the reason why Hitler named Jehovah's Witnesses very early on as "enemies of the State" and targeted them for annihilation. Many of them were imprisoned, beaten, and tortured for their refusal to support Hitler. They lost friends, family members, businesses, livelihoods, and even their lives. Yes, many were beheaded by guillotine and executed by firing squad for their refusal to give in. Others died of starvation and illness in the camps. And unlike their Jewish and Polish neighbors and other countrymen who had no choice because of their heritage, all that most of the Witnesses rounded up would've had to do was sign a piece of paper, renouncing their faith, and they could've walked away and went back to living their lives, as long as they kept silent.
I am reposting a comment made a while back by my friend, R.C., which he posted underneath a link to an article that he shared on his page, entitled "Seduced by Hitler: The Choices of a Nation and the Ethics for Survival." The article contains information about the various major Christian churches which did not take a stand against Hitler for his cruel treatment of the Jews and others who were targeted. I commented under his link that there were some Bible followers who did not cooperate with Hitler's regime. (I did not mention the religion I was thinking of nor the emblem they were assigned to wear on their uniforms while in the concentration camps.)
This was his response:
R.C.
"@ Hannah, Yes, there were plenty of religious folks who took a principled stand against the changes in Germany during the pre-war years. One of the groups who really put themselves out there was the Jehovah's Witnesses who actually were rounded up & sent off to concentration camps and were murdered for their faith-based opposition to the acts of the Nazis against the Jews, Gypsies, mentally ill, and all of the other targeted "undesirables." When I was in St. Pete last Fall I went to their Holocaust Museum and they had a great exhibit on the role of the Jehovah's Witnesses during that dark time." (Side note to my friend's comment: There is an area dedicated to the JWs in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. also.)
There were many non-Jehovah's Witness people who were targeted by Hitler and the Nazis. There were also many other people who bravely stood up against the Nazis on at least one issue or another, quite a few of these likely being members of various Christian sects, and some churches also opposed parts of the Nazi policy and received backlash for it. The New Apostolic Christian Scientists were banned in 1941, and the Seventh Day Adventists experienced intermittent harassment. Some Mormon groups were ignored and maybe were even viewed with partial favor, apparently because of genealogical records tracing back the majority of its members to be of Aryan descent. There are individual Mormon members recorded to have been executed for harboring Jews. The Pastors' Emergency League and the Confessing Church of the Protestant Clergy represented a minority of Protestant pastors who exposed pro-Nazi "German Christianity" but not Nazi racial or social policies. The Catholic and Protestant churches together protested strongly against the Euthanasia Program, which impacted the Nazis enough to reduce the "visible" element of the program, but did not stop it secretly. The churches generally spoke up for converted Jews and Jews married to Christians. Neither major church group is recorded to have officially protested the persecution of Jews or the horrors of the Final Solution. Virtually all Christian sects were at some point accused of harboring Marxists or "enemies of Germany".
However, no other religious group, other than Jewish, was given a uniform emblem identifying who they were when assigned to concentration camps. Individuals of various other religions who resisted strongly enough to be arrested and sent to camps were given the same purple triangle symbols that were primarily used to identify the Bibelforscher, or Jehovah's Witnesses. They were the most persecuted religious group throughout Europe during this time and the only one to ever be brought before the Special Fascist Court.
True courage is knowing you can be destroyed, and despite having a way out, choosing to stand against evil anyway. No one wants to be victimized. And far fewer of us, I think, would ever want to be the perpetrators. But I imagine that most - if not all of us - would like to believe that we would be brave enough to stand in between both. This seldom told story of a small band of nonviolent people refusing to be shaken from their deeply held spiritual beliefs and choosing to join the persecuted rather than stand by doing little to nothing to oppose the persecution, or even worse, join the persecutors, is proof that such courageous examples existed and still do.
I had a friend of mine - a good one - but one who is very jaded toward religion tell me a while back that he thought religions should just keep their beliefs to themselves and in their own church. Well, those Witnesses could've felt the same way prior to and during World War II in Germany and throughout Europe, but most of them didn't. And quite a few paid the ultimate price for it. If you have a Jewish friend or neighbor, or know someone who is a descendant of a survivor of The Holocaust, please reflect for a moment about the sacrifices many courageous people made to help them, directly or indirectly - and how one of them might have even been aided in some way by one of Jehovah's Witnesses at that time.
Their deeply ingrained beliefs to help and protect their neighbors and the foreign ones among them have not changed, and they would do the same if anything like it were to ever happen again. If it does - no matter what has happened in my own life - I hope I will be counted among them.
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