Jehovah’s Witness Victims of the Nazi Era

My name is Dr. Will Meinecke. I’m a historian here in the division of education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I came to the Museum in 1992, it seems like forever ago, as a German specialist. My background is Nazi state policy formation and its implementation. Today’s presentation is part of a bigger work that is currently in production and is being finalized, a new book on the victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution. I really want your feedback, I want your comments, because it will be integrated into this book. Those of you who have heard me talk about this for the last two years, it really does exist, and it will come out.

Let me outline briefly what today’s presentation will be. I want to first tell you a little something about the experience of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany before the Nazi rise to power, because they existed in Germany before the Nazis came to power; and then I really want to talk about the appointment of Hitler as chancellor and the vision that Hitler had for Germany’s future; and then to show you how that vision relates to the particular groups that the Museum is mandated to tell the history of, especially the role for today, of Jehovah’s Witnesses in that; and then very very briefly since we only have about a half hour, outline the experience of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Nazi era. So let me without further ado just get started.

I wanted to give you an image [shows photograph] of individual Jehovah’s Witnesses who lived in Germany and also Austria here before the Nazis come to power. And it’s important to realize that Jehovah’s Witnesses had been in Germany really since the 1890s. The first missionary work was done in the 1890s. And they were generally known at that time as “ernst Bibelforscher” -- so “earnest bible students.” They changed their name to Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931. In 1902 they opened their first Watchtower society in Aberfeld, Germany, and by the early 1930s, there were about 25,000 to 30,000 members of the Jehovah’s Witness church in Germany proper. Now to put that in perspective, that’s less than one half of one percent of the German population. Overwhelmingly, Germany is either Catholic or Protestant/ Lutheran, so overwhelmingly Catholic in the south and west, and Lutheran/Protestant in the north and east.

This is a publication of the Watchtower Society published in German in 1928 for distribution in Germany. Now, those established churches, Catholic and Lutheran, regarded Jehovah’s Witnesses as heretics, outside the mainstream of their society, and many ordinary Germans regarded Jehovah’s Witnesses, because of their mission going door-to-door preaching the bible, as both irritating and annoying. That meant then that local communities, even some states in Germany, began the practice of trying to restrict the missionary work of Jehovah’s Witnesses by using civil code ordinances, especially the ban against unlicensed salesmen going door-to-door. So you see lots of harassment and discrimination against Jehovah’s Witnesses, being arrested by the police, for going door-to-door supposedly selling these booklets when in fact they’re giving them out, and saying that they’re peddling without a license. So repeated short arrests, and then they’d be released.

But it also meant political and social discrimination in that often as the result of these arrests and police registration they were denied government services. So you hear things like, unemployment insurance would be canceled, they simply wouldn’t get it, they wouldn’t receive it. That’s reserved for Catholics or Lutherans.

When the Nazis came to power appointed by the president in January 1933, President von Hindenburg, he’s not compelled to do this, certainly the Nazis are... Hitler’s the head of the largest party in the Parliament, but he by no means has a majority here, so this is a gamble on behalf of the president. He’s hoping that they’ll use whatever support the Nazis have, not to enact the Nazi agenda but to enact a nationalist conservative agenda. Hitler’s involved here because he also realizes this is a risk; look at his body language shows photograph], he is bowing subserviently to Hindenburg. This is a photo op. He wants this photo to be seen everywhere in Germany, because it illustrates then that he’s accepting the traditional values of German society. He’s hoping that once he gets his foot in the door, something will happen that will enable him to institute a one-party dictatorship. Hindenburg suspects this, but at this point he argues that this is the only way out of the constitutional crisis that the German state was in at the time, so he will take the gamble. The problem is that Hitler is not the usual, traditional politician on the right. Hitler is really not a practical politician at all; he’s a radical ideologue. And he has a particular vision that he wants Germany to go to into the future. And he hasn’t been shy about outlining what that vision is; he’s been very open about it. And I’ve just sort of reduced it and simplified it and itemized it for you. These are the major pillars of Nazi racial ideology.

Hitler insisted that, just as the individual has an instinct for survival, it’s what keeps you from walking in front of a bus, that there must be a group instinct for survival. The group instinct of all Germans for survival. And that group instinct is under threat from within and without. From within through race mixing and people with disabilities threatening the superiority of the Aryan German race; and from without by the Slavs who were in competition for Lebensraum -- “living space” -- in Europe, hemming Germans in into smaller and smaller territory.

He also insisted that there is a natural hierarchy of races, that these races have value, and the best race of course, in his mind, is the Aryan German race, so the people that he comes from, they’re at the pinnacle, even though they’re under threat. Now I’m arguing that from these basic ideas of Nazi racial ideology is derived all of his view of the various groups that the Nazis targeted for persecution and even elimination. Most importantly is the Nazi view of Jews. The Nazis are simply a racial state, a racial and antisemitic state to be sure. Jews were the central racial enemy for the Nazis. They regarded them not as a religion but as a race, regardless of what Jews themselves say, the Nazis insisted they were a race, and unlike other races they don’t have living space of their own, instead they infiltrate a host population and they’re biologically driven to undermine that population so that they can dominate. So they’re biologically defined as a dangerous enemy of Aryan Germans. I think this is why the real focus of Nazi policy is about Jews and the so-called Jewish problem, leading ultimately to genocide in the Holocaust.

But just as Jews are identified through Nazi racial ideology as the special enemy of the Aryan Germanic race, all the other groups are also justified in the Nazi mind, they’re justified in persecuting those groups from one major plank of Nazi racial ideology. And I would argue here that this concern about the purity of the Aryan German race is the main justification for the Nazis to target the Romani community, German disabled persons, and even Germans of African descent. This idea that there’s a tremendous struggle between Aryan Germans on one side and Slavs, especially Poles and Soviet POWs on the other, for control of Europe, of the territory of Europe, that Hitler viewed as vital to the expansion of Germany and the preservation of the Aryan German race. That sort of explains that whole thrust toward eastern Europe and that attack.

What’s really pertinent for us here today is that last grouping in Nazi ideology, and what Nazis will regard as racially acceptable, Aryan Germans. These are members of the elect, these are the Nazi constituency, but these groups for one reason or another are not willing to partake in this Nazi constituency. For Jehovah’s Witnesses, it’s the idea of Volksgemeinschaft, the national community, that somehow all Aryan Germans are united like never before, are united in a way that has real meaning to the Nazis under the leadership of the Nazi party, under Hitler’s leadership, and that their racial instinct is to follow the Nazis and prepare for war, to seize territory in the east, and to cleanse their society of impurities. For the Nazis, that’s a biological impulse, and they are unwilling to tolerate any deviation from that mission of Aryan Germans; this is what Aryan Germans should want to do. So for them, it’s very puzzling that Jehovah’s Witnesses reject this vision, this idea that this is a natural instinct of Aryan Germans. This kind of unity like they’ve never had before, this intoxication, under the leadership of the Nazis, creating a new society, a new vision for where Germany will go. This is what they expect to happen. And between the appointment by Hindenburg of Hitler as chancellor and Hitler taking really, alone, authority in 1934, there’s a rush to join this unity. There’s an impulse to subsume the individual and individual organizations in the collective pull of what was called “Gleichschaltung”. Gleichschaltung is German for synchronization. Think of it as all of German society shifting gears in the direction of Nazi thinking, the way Nazis want them to think. So they’re physically changing their thought processes into this idea of the national community, the Volksgemeinschaft.

Now you can get lost in this, pageantry, huge huge rallies, emblems, flags, this kind of losing the individual, losing the self in the emotional “Drang” [impulse, yearning] of the group, that is very much a Nazi way of thinking about the Volksgemeinschaft, it’s absolutely under the leadership of the Nazi state.

So in the middle of this, people are trying to figure out what the new Nazi government is, and whether they should subsume themselves in the movement, or stay apart from the movement, or is there any way to stay apart from the movement? This is one of the first reactions of the Jehovah’s Witness community in Germany, in October 1934, so right after Hindenburg’s death it’s clear that the Nazi state is going to be there for a while, most of German society has already made the decision to give up their individual identity or their group identity and subsume it into Nazi organizations in that process of Gleichschaltung.

The Jehovah’s Witness church has already been banned on the state level, most of the German states, so already they’re operating in illegality, and they publish this Statement of Principles. Basically it’s a statement that says “Look, we’re a church, we’re not a political group, we don’t have political aspirations, we’re not anti-state, you can’t classify us as anti-state, we simply want to continue our mission work as a quiet moral existence. We want to hold to our principles, we’re not going to give them up.” As you see in the conclusion to the second page, “We have no interest in political affairs, we are wholly devoted to God’s Kingdom under Christ His King.” That’s their statement.

In 1935, just a little over six months later, there is a tremendous intensification of the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses. So you see on the one hand the Jehovah’s Witnesses are saying, “We want to be separate, we want to have our own existence, we’re not going to subsume ourselves into the national collective called the Volksgemeinschaft,” and the Nazis’ response is “Well then you’re a target for persecution.” In their mind, an Aryan German would naturally want to do the Heil Hitler salute, would naturally want to integrate themselves into the Nazi organizations, would naturally want to join the German military, because the German is a fighter, he’s going to fight for “living space” in Europe.

Now you’d think that such a small group of less than one half of a percent of the population would be irrelevant to a movement like the Nazis. They are in control of Germany. They have unfettered power. It’s a one-party dictatorship. But for them, they [Jehovah’s Witnesses] are a serious threat. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a rival ideology that has international ties, that has access to information outside Germany. For the Nazis, that’s a serious threat, especially since they [Jehovah’s Witnesses] insist on continuing their missionary work in Germany. So they’re going door-to-door and they’re telling people what’s going on. They have access to outside information, so they are very dangerous. In fact they’re a rival way of viewing the world. They’re insisting to maintain their own moral code, their own faith in their religion.

So here are some of the pressures, for example, that Jehovah’s Witness children would be experiencing. In the fall of 1933, the Heil Hitler salute is introduced into the classroom. Nazi racial ideological instruction is introduced into the classroom. The class begins and ends with the teacher entering, everyone standing, the teacher gives the Heil Hitler salute, the children have to respond with the Heil Hitler salute. And then they sit down and they begin the lesson. Well that makes it really obvious who is part of the Volk community, the national community, and who is separate from the national community. And being separate from the national community exposed Jehovah’s Witness children to the ridicule of teachers, to the teasing and even fighting with their classmates about it, and what I think is even more insidious is this Nazi ideology of fighting and death. That instituted into the classroom, and you see again -- and this is a great example -- a page from a students’ school exercise book [shows photograph] talking about “Berlin will be National Socialist or dead. The Rhine will be National Socialist or dead.” So this idea of you have to be a Nazi or you’re dead, you have to be Nazi or die, and then learning all of the Nazi rituals, the Horst-Wessel-Lied [song] and what the words are, they have to be able to sing it outright. So again, Jehovah’s Witness children are exposed to this ridicule of not participating with the group, of not being part of the group, and it also exposes them to danger. Here’s a letter from a principal of a school in Oldenburg [shows photograph]. He says that it has come to his attention that two students are refusing to do the Heil Hitler salute, one girl and one boy, they’re brother and sister, and the students have told him that their parents have explained to them that this is not what they do. That their family values aren’t in that direction. And look who he’s writing to; he’s writing to the Gestapo, the political police, the state security police.

The state has a whole myriad of choices, of tools to use to force compliance on Jehovah’s Witnesses. Here for example they’re using Paragraph 1666 [shows photograph] of the German civil code, which authorized the government to take children away from families where the parental influence is such that the young person will behave or is likely to behave in an immoral or dishonorable fashion. That’s a law that existed before the Nazis came to power, they just reinterpreted it to say “If the parents aren’t raising the children to be good National Socialists, then they’re not moral parents. The children need to be taken from that home and put into a ‘good home’ where we can expect then that children will learn Nazi mores, Nazi values.”

We’re talking just in the years 1935-1938, more than 860 cases where children from the families of Jehovah’s Witnesses are taken from their family and either put into state institutions -- public childcare, orphanages -- or put into custody of card-carrying Nazis so they can be raised as good Nazis. And I find it really inspiring that many of these children even though they’re underage and you really can’t expect adult decisions or adult behavior from them still find that the teachings from Jehovah’s Witness keeps them centered, keeps them balanced, despite all the pressures around them, they still remain committed to their faith. Here’s Berthold Mewes [shows photograph], and again, we have his ID card here so you can see it.

Many Jehovah’s WItnesses insisted that what they do is [based on] higher authority to Jehovah. They will continue their prayer meetings, they will continue their bible study, but they have to do it surreptitiously. We have, for example, this is testimony from Robert Wagemann, who is with us today, you can see it [the testimony] in one of the classrooms. And here he’s talking about how his family continued studying the bible in secret. And for all intents and purposes they were holding a picnic in the forest, and they had lookouts, and when somebody was coming the literature would disappear under the blankets and it would look like they were just having a picnic, and when they were alone in the forest again out would come the literature and they would discuss the bible. Now we hear this again and again from Jehovah’s Witness survivors of Nazi persecution, these kinds of stories, they would go to house for what looked like a dinner, this was just dinner at neighbors, they’re just having fun, when in fact it’s an occasion when they can have an opportunity to study the bible.

Now the Nazis catch on to this relatively quickly, especially since Jehovah’s Witnesses are fairly well organized, and they’re able to smuggle in substantial literature from abroad [shows photograph], especially from Switzerland. And this is exactly one of the things most frightening to the Nazis, is that here we have this very small group -- again, less than half a percentage of the population -- and they have a sophisticated smuggling network bringing literature in from abroad. How do you explain this? This is just one example [shows photograph] and it’s boxes upon boxes of literature seized by the Gestapo in Munich, Germany, for distribution in Germany.

And here I think is the second idea that makes it really clear why this is so dangerous to the Nazis, because information is also going the other way. This is a cartoon published in The Golden Age, a Jehovah’s Witness publication, in July 1936, and it depicts a relatively accurate scene of a punishment being applied to a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp in the mid-30s. Relatively accurate, and this is published outside of Germany. They had access to information outside of Germany. In fact, once it’s clear that there is no way for the two to live in co-existence, peaceful co-existence, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Nazis, Jehovah’s Witnesses not just in Germany but everywhere begin to watch and condemn Nazi Germany in really the most outright, blunt terms. They criticized Nazi treatment not just of Jehovah’s Witnesses -- although that’s definitely a center point of the criticism -- but also their treatment of Jews and political prisoners like Communists and the like.

In any case, here’s part of why it’s a mixed picture for us. It would be simple if the Nazis simply said “Okay, they’re an enemy, let’s throw them all in concentration camps.” They don’t do that. The Nazis say “they are racially valuable people. We have to win them back to our side, we have to win them to Nazi ideology.” And part of winning them is the stick, and the stick is going to be arrest and trial in the court, it’s part of the pressure the state can apply on Jehovah’s Witnesses to give up their faith, to give up their commitment to their religion.

Here we have an example from Leopold Engleitner, and I’ve translated two paragraphs from this arrest order from the state secret police. And you can see the way the Nazis talk about Jehovah’s Witnesses when they’re writing among themselves. I just want to go to the second paragraph. The first paragraph simply says, “Well, we arrested him because he’s obviously continuing his illegal participation in the sect, involvement in a sect,” the International Bible Students Association. Engleitner makes no bones about it, he admits openly that he’s still doing this, and they call him a “fanatical follower of an irrational teaching.” And that’s the core of the danger and the jealousy the Nazis have toward Jehovah’s Witnesses. You hear often about SS officers for example saying “Why can’t the SS be as committed to Hitler and Himmler as the Jehovah’s Witnesses are to their church? We want them to be that kind of committed, from deep within, not motivated from without, but from within, to commit to Nazism,” and here we have Leopold Engleitner for all intents and purposes a law-abiding citizen and he insists on being a “fanatic follower” of what they call this “irrational teaching of the above-named sect.” And the Nazis declare it as an anti-state organization.

And it’s not just in Austria where they’re being arrested, it’s also in Duesseldorf, and again the police have the decision about what happens to these people, whether they face trial in a court and then, since they’re Germans, and racially acceptable Germans to boot, they have the same rights as every other German, which means if they are tried and they’re convicted they go to prisons that are operated by the Ministry of Justice, not by the SS. The SS is the concentration camp system that operates outside the law. This is drawing them into a legal process, a long legal process, that allows the state to ramp up the pressure on Jehovah’s Witnesses so that hopefully they can convince them to abandon this irrational faith and come to see the light of the Volk community and Nazism. And here again, arrests in Vienna. So there are hundreds and thousands of these arrests, maybe as many as 10,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses are arrested and taken to court, not sent to concentration camps, but taken to court, tried, convicted of participation in activities inimical to the state, and then sent to prison or even a prison labor camp, but not to the SS concentration camp system. That’s the important distinction to make here.

I do want to point out here that at some point, being a Jehovah’s Witness is automatic grounds for arrest and internment in a concentration camp. Typically, what happens after 1936, there’s an order that goes out that says Jehovah’s Witnesses may be arrested and interned in a concentration camp either as political prisoners, so “protective detention prisoners,” meaning the police have determined that they’re likely to do a political action that endangers the state -- or as professional criminals, meaning they violate the law and you expect them to continue violating the law so we can put them into the concentration camp as a professional criminal. And this [shows photo] is a labor saving device if you will from a SS official where they just have a checkbox, and this particular one is for a homosexual prisoner, but notice here Bibelforscher, that’s German for Bible Student, so you can see that they can just check the box and say okay, this guy is being sent to a concentration camp, or woman is being sent to a concentration camp, because she refuses to give up her faith in the Jehovah’s Witness church. No other reason is needed. It’s all covered by the Emergency Decree from the Reichstag Fire in 1933.

In the concentration camps, Jehovah’s Witnesses have their own special marking. The SS organized the marking of all prisoners in concentration camps so they could recognize on sight the type of prisoner they are. For the SS it’s very important that you treat prisoners according to what they’ve done, what they did to the state. They think of concentration camps also in terms of reforming citizens for society, odd as that may sound.

I just want to show you that with the war, it’s not just Jehovah’s Witnesses from Germany proper, it’s also from the territory that Germany annexed during the war, or will plan to annex in the future, from the Netherlands or from Norway but also from eastern France, and the western part of Poland. Many of them end up in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the killing center in southwestern Poland. And notice here on this [shows photograph], this is a photograph from the camp itself, and they indicate JBV -- J for [German words for] Jehovah’s Witness, and BV for [German words for] professional criminal. So already you can see a shift in Nazi thinking regarding Jehovah’s Witnesses as professional criminals, because they refused to obey the law and give up their association in the community.

This is forced labor in Neuengamme [shows photograph]. When Jehovah’s Witnesses are in camps together, they very quickly form sort of mutual aid societies, so that they help eachother out, and they help other prisoners who are in need as well, so for many prisoners in the concentration camps they’re a shining example of how to behave decently in a concentration camp. In fact, I think one of the worst punishments the Nazis gave to Jehovah’s Witnesses was isolation from other Jehovah’s Witnesses. When you’re reduced to just yourself, it’s extremely hard to maintain that faith especially when you’re under siege from the people around you.

You’ll hear more about this in this afternoon’s program, I just wanted to give you a foretaste, I’m going to show you an example of resistance, especially spiritual resistance, by Jehovah’s Witnesses in the concentration camps. This is a song that was prepared in a camp and sung in a camp [shows lyrics], about Jehovah’s Witnesses keeping up their spirits, keeping together. Keeping that commitment to their faith. Very uplifting.

Bibles were actually smuggled into the camp. Jehovah’s Witness literature was not just smuggled into the camp as here, but also printed in a camp and distributed in a camp, in Buchenwald for example. I think this is enormously brave. Here is Johanna Niedermeier Buchner [shows photograph]. She is in a prison, so she’s one of those that have been tried in a court run by the Ministry of Justice, and she notices that other prisoners, Catholics and Lutherans, they have a right to ask for a bible, so she makes the same request. It’s very brave of her to ask for that request because sometimes they can be acting arbitrarily. But eventually, she gets her way, she gets her bible. And that’s very important for her, it helps keep her committed, keeps her connected to her faith.

One of the things that is very unusual about prisoners of the Nazis in any camp, this is in German, I want to give you the English translation and especially point out here #4 [shows photograph]: “In the future I will obey the laws of the state and particularly in the event of war I will defend the fatherland with weapon in hand and totally become part of the national community.” This was a declaration the Nazis said after 1935, this particular one’s from Dachau, there are other ones from other camps in Germany and eventually it gets standardized, but this is the one from Dachau. And if you sign that form as a Jehovah’s Witness, that you recognize the Jehovah’s Witness faith is irrational, is not true, and that you will be part of the Volksgemeinschaft, national community, in the future, you could be released. No other prisoner is given that option. It shows that the Nazis regard Jehovah’s Witnesses as racially valuable people that must be won back for the Volk community, for the national community.

Now unfortunately, some SS officers used this as “Oh, okay, let’s see how bad it has to get to force a Jehovah’s Witness to sign this.” And this becomes a justification for all kinds of torture in the camps. Really gruesome kinds of activities. It depends on the whim of the local SS officer in many cases. It is believed that very few sign this form, very few people, that most Jehovah’s Witnesses in a concentration camp really stay true to their faith.

After 1942, the Nazis realize that the war is going to be a longer war and it’s taking many more resources than they have, so they were beginning to be a little bit more flexible, especially with Jehovah’s Witnesses. If they would agree to do work that was not related to the war effort -- Jehovah’s Witnesses were absolutely committed to not doing any work related to the war effort -- they could be released. And this is just an example, again it’s Leopold Engleitner [shows photograph], he had people at home saying “We need farmhands. He’s a farmhand. Send him to us. We’ll put him to work.” And without explanation really he’s released. Here’s his release certificate. So we see individual cases where, unexplained, Jehovah’s Witnesses are released from the camps without signing a declaration, without facing that confrontation, but are just told “Go and do this work, we need that work done.” But the problem comes when Germany loses the war and begins to call these people up again. Now in Leopold Engleitner’s case, he just headed for the hills, he had to hide.

But for other people it was much harder. And that’s the other experience, the last experience that I want to talk to you about. And that’s since 1935, when the draft is reinstituted, Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to serve a secular government in the military. They’ll participate in the final battle of Armageddon, but not for a secular authority. Not for a nation. They’ll do it for Christ, for Jehovah, but not for a nation, and that puts them before a war court. In the German army at the time, there’s no conscientious objection. So it’s take the oath, swear to Hitler, serve in the army, or you are beheaded as a traitor as somebody who is trying to destroy the “defensive capability of the country.” And this [shows photograph] is just a judgment of this war court. You can hear Franz’s testimony about that later today. His father was one of these individuals who had to make the choice between death and fighting for the German army. And in a few moments you’ll hear from Elena Kusserow, the same kind of choice here, for her brother. And look at that letter. This is an amazing piece, it’s on the back of a piece of Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet that the Museum publishes, and I just want to point out here, he knows he’s being executed the next morning. And yet I find this letter to be hopeful, hopeful of the future, optimistic even. He’s not sad. He’s not crying in his cups. He’s not terrified of death. He’s hopeful of the future.

The statistics are always a real problem, and I think there’s more work being done on it especially by the Watchtower archive in Germany, and I’ve already over-spent my time so thank you.

[applause]

So two of you asked questions, and I think I do have a moment to answer the questions. One of the questions was: “We say a ‘handful of persons’ signed that declaration renouncing their faith, do we know of any examples?” I asked that very question of Franz and Magdalena yesterday. And they knew of people who had signed it, but for very personal reasons -- there was a family emergency, it was a hard thing for them to do, they had to abide by it when they signed it, but they were really sorry when they signed it, but they did it because of family pressures or to save someone in the family, really, to tell you the truth. So there are a few who do it, but I don’t think it’s ever for gain or ever really a genuine renunciation of the faith, if that makes any sense.

“Is there a count on how many Witnesses were put to death?” Well here’s the problem. Statistics are very problematic, because they’re kept locally in the concentration camp itself, and so you’re talking 10,000 camps by the end of the war? So how are you going to track 10,000 camps and the people, 750,000 people were in these camps, and many of those records are destroyed. And that’s just the ones that are sent to concentration camps. What about the ones that are convicted under the criminal code and sentenced to prisons under the Ministry of Justice? Well I actually asked, can I see the indictments of everyone tried by the Nazis? And they said yes, it’s sitting right there in a file, 60,000 people listed only by name. I wasn’t ready to spend that kind of time to figure out who was there for what reason. That’s a future reserach project that I would encourage you to do. So I think there’s great work being done in Germany by the Watchtower archive and that we will have harder statistics that will give us a baseline to work from in the future. But right now the Museum is saying, you know, as many as 10,000 were put on trial and sentenced to prison, maybe 2,000 to 5,000 in a concentration camp, maybe as many as 1,500 to 2,000 perish in the camps.

Thank you very much.

[applause]