Nazi concentration camp guards and members of the Gestapo throughout Nazi Germany often pressured Jehovah’s Witnesses to sign documents like the one featured here. Signing these statements committed the prisoner to break all ties with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and integrate “fully and totally into the national community” of Nazi Germany.1 In later years, these statements also required them to renounce their inner belief in their faith.2
Most Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich would have been considered “Aryan” according to Nazi racial ideology, but they were still excluded from the “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft”) because their religious beliefs led them to defy several of the Nazi regime’s demands and expectations. Nazi authorities targeted Jehovah’s Witnesses as a threat to German national unity because they would refuse to give the Hitler salute,3 fly the Nazi swastika flag, or serve in the military.4
Nazi authorities first began pushing Jehovah’s Witnesses to sign statements like this in 1935. The Gestapo held many Witnesses they arrested in so-called “protective custody”5 before any charges had been filed against them, and they often pressured these prisoners into signing such statements in exchange for their release.6 This statement was used at Dachau, but Jehovah’s Witnesses imprisoned in jails, prisons, and concentration camps across Nazi-dominated Europe were also pressured to sign these documents.
Local Nazi officials used their own versions of these forms until late 1938, when Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the replacement of these different statements by a single uniform text. The earlier versions had required people to promise to stop all their activities with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, cooperate with the police, and conform to Nazi expectations for members of the “national community.” The new text that Himmler ordered also required people to reject the “false teachings” of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and renounce their faith itself.7
Many Witnesses believed that being pressured to sign these statements was a test of their faith and refused to sign out of principle.8 Some saw themselves acting in the tradition of early Christian martyrs by willingly suffering for their religious beliefs. Others reasoned that signing was an opportunity to regain their freedom so that they could keep preaching and trying to convert others to their faith. Some Witnesses who considered this path struggled with the decision because they believed that lying in any circumstance was a sin.
Many Jehovah’s Witnesses refused to sign these forms, but a significant number of people did agree to sign their name to these statements.9 But signing did not guarantee one’s freedom or safety. A large number of the male Jehovah’s Witnesses who signed were then drafted into the German military.10 This meant that they either faced the risk of being executed for treason for refusing to serve—or they violated their pacifist religious beliefs and risked being killed as a soldier.
Evidence suggests that most of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who signed these forms did so before the changes requiring them to renounce their inner belief in their religion. Many of those who chose to sign were being held in Gestapo custody at the time, isolated from other Jehovah’s Witnesses. Those who refused to sign while in “protective custody” were often then imprisoned in concentration camps—sometimes specifically because of this refusal. Most of the Jehovah’s Witnesses imprisoned in concentration camps had been sent there for defying Nazi demands in some way, and these men and women generally remained firm in their refusal to sign these statements.