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Between Resistance and Martyrdom: Jehovah's Witnesses in the Third Reich

Between Resistance and Martyrdom: Jehovah's Witnesses in the Third Reich
By Detlef Garbe

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Between Resistance and Martyrdom is the first comprehensive historical study of the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses during the Holocaust era. Refusing to perform military service under Germany’s Third Reich due to their fundamental belief in nonviolence, Jehovah’s Witnesses caught the attention of the highest authorities in the justice system, the police, and the SS.
            Although persecuted and banned from practicing their beliefs by the Nazi regime in 1933, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ unified resistance has been largely forgotten. Basing his work on a wide range of sources, including documents and archives previously unconsidered as well as critical analyses of Jehovah’s Witness literature and survivor interviews, Detlef Garbe chronicles the Nazi’s relentless persecution of this religious group before and during World War II.
    The English translation of this important work features photographs not published in the German edition. These striking images bring a sense of individual humanity to this story and help readers comprehend the reality of the events documented. Between Resistance and Martyrdom is an indispensable work that will introduce an English-speaking audience to this important but lesser-known part of Holocaust history.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #430293 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-03-28
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 856 pages

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“The persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany under National Socialism is not a new subject, but Detlef Garbe's book takes historical scholarship to new levels of subtlety and sophistication. His insights into the moral and legal resistance mounted by the Witnesses against the Nazis both inside and outside concentration camps are path-breaking and provocative. All students of persecuted religious minorities are greatly in his debt for bringing to light so much fresh evidence concerning the role of Jehovah's Witnesses in resisting National Socialism. This is historical investigation of the highest importance and quality.”—James A. Beckford, University of Warwick


“Between Resistance and Martyrdom is a strong book that tells a compelling and deeply important, understudied story.”—Michael Berenbaum, author of A Promise to Remember: The Holocaust in the Words and Voices of Its Survivors

About the Author

Detlef Garbe is director of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial in Hamburg, Germany. He is the author of numerous publications about the history of the concentration camps, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other marginal victim groups, military justice, and Germany’s postwar confrontations with the National Socialist past. He is also the editor of Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland.

Dagmar G. Grimm is a native of Bremen, Germany, who now lives in the United States. Her work as a translator and editor includes other works on the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses under the Hitler regime as well as under communist rule in East Germany.

Customer Reviews

First Major Scholarly Study5
German scholar Detlef Garbe, now director of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, produced the first comprehensive historical account of the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses by the Nazi regime. Garbe went to great lengths to produce as accurate account as possible. (There are 210 pages of footnotes and a 40 page bibliography.) He researched a wide range of resources: Nazi government archives, newspaper archives, private documents, unpublished reports, concentration camp memorial archives, Watch Tower Society publications (in English and German), personal interviews of participants, memoirs of non-Witnesses prisoners that were imprisoned with Jehovah's Witnesses, accounts written by former Witnesses, ect. All to get as many verified facts as possible. This resulted in what is now considered the standard scholarly account about the persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses under National Socialism.

It must be said that this book is not an easy read. It's not a novel. It's a scholar writing a book for other scholars. There are many footnotes and abbreviations. Garbe always uses the correct terminology to refer to people, places, and ideas But still this book is a fascinating read. You just can't help but wonder why the Nazis spent so much time and effort to try get this small minority (about 25,000 out of 65,000,000 Germans in 1933) to conform to Nazi standards. Yet the Nazis were never able to completely shatter the core of this group. As Garbe says in the preface, page xvii:

"This book reports about religious people who refused to conform to the Third Reich but whose faith in God and trust in his biblical promises gave them the strength to preserve their respect for life, even during those difficult times."

This book is a translation based on the 1999 4th German edition of Detlef Garbe's Zwischen Widerstand und Martyrium: Die Zeugen Jehovas im "Dritten Reich".