The Nazi regime targeted Jehovah's Witnesses for persecution because they refused, out of religious conviction, to swear loyalty to a worldly government or to serve in its armed forces. Jehovah's Witnesses also engaged in missionary activity to win adherents for the faith.
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The Nazis perceived the refusal to commit to the state and efforts to proselytize as overtly political and subversive acts. Unlike Jews and Roma View This Term in the Glossary (Gypsies), whom the Nazis targeted for perceived racial reasons, Jehovah's Witnesses had the option to avoid persecution and personal harm by submitting to state authority and serving in the armed forces. Since such submission would violate their religious beliefs, the vast majority of Jehovah's Witnesses refused to abandon their faith even in the face of persecution, torture in concentration camps, or death.
Background
Founded in the American city of Pittsburgh in 1872 by Charles Taze Russell as the International Bible Study Society, the group took the name "Jehovah's Witnesses" in 1931. The Society began missionary work in Europe in the 1890s. In 1902, the first branch office of the Watch Tower Society opened in Elberfeld, Germany. In Germany, Jehovah's Witnesses became known as the Society of International Bible Students. By the early 1930s, some 25,000 to 30,000 Germans (0.38 percent of a total population of 65 million) were members of the Jehovah's Witnesses or interested sympathizers.
Prejudice against Jehovah's Witnesses
Even before 1933, Jehovah's Witnesses were targets of prejudice. Mainstream Lutheran and Catholic churches deemed them heretics. Moreover, citizens often found the Witnesses' missionary work—knocking on doors and preaching—to be invasive. Individual German states had long sought to curb the missionary work through strict enforcement of statutes on illegal solicitation. At various times, individual jurisdictions actually banned Witness religious literature, including the booklets The Watchtower and The Golden Age. During the Weimar period, however, the German courts often ruled in favor of the religious minority.
Before the Nazis came to power, individual groups of local Nazis (party functionaries or SA men), acting outside the law, broke up Bible study meetings and assaulted individual Witnesses.