The featured badges were worn by Albert and Luise Jahndorf when they were imprisoned in the Nazi camp system during World War II. Luise was assigned prisoner number 1989 at Ravensbrück concentration camp, and Albert was given number 46436 at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Camp authorities assigned people to different prisoner categories and identified these groups with differently colored triangles.1 These classifications had a huge impact on prisoners’ treatment and their chances for survival.2 The purple triangles that Jehovah’s Witnesses like the Jahndorfs were forced to wear identified them as distinct from other prisoners.
Albert, Luise, and their eleven-year-old daughter Irmgard had first started learning about the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses while living in the city of Gelsenkirchen, Germany in 1931.3 They were not yet baptized as Jehovah’s Witnesses when the Nazis came to power in 1933, but Nazi authorities still targeted the Jahndorfs because their new religious beliefs led them to defy the demands and expectations of the new regime.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believed that they should only turn to God for their salvation and they should only pledge their loyalty to God—and not to any person, state, or government.4 Albert was fired from his job working for the city of Gelsenkirchen because he refused to return the Nazi salute and say “heil Hitler.”5 He was not able to find another job in Gelsenkirchen after he was fired.6 The family moved roughly 100 miles east to the town of Bad Lippspringe, where there was an active group of other Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The Jahndorfs were first arrested in 1935 for violating a Nazi law that banned Jehovah’s Witnesses from preaching or distributing their publications. Nazi authorities saw these activities as a threat to their ideal of the so-called “national community” (“Volksgemeinschaft”). A private citizen in a neighboring village reported Albert and Luise to the German police7 for trying to convert people to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They were both arrested and sentenced to two months in prison. The Gestapo arrested Luise again in 1939 and sent her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The Gestapo also rearrested Albert in 1942. He was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Jehovah’s Witnesses imprisoned in concentration camps generally had a reputation for being stubborn but well-behaved prisoners—and for behaving decently to others despite the pressures of camp life. They did not believe in trying to escape, so camp authorities often trusted them to do domestic work in their own homes. Jehovah’s Witnesses were often imprisoned together, which helped them maintain community bonds and share practical and spiritual support. Many continued to hold Bible studies and preach to other prisoners. Authorities sometimes offered to free Jehovah’s Witnesses if they signed a form renouncing their faith and their communities, but few Jehovah’s Witnesses imprisoned in concentration camps agreed to do this.8
The Jahndorfs’ daughter Irmgard held Bible study groups with other young Witnesses and secretly distributed Jehovah’s Witnesses’ publications during the years that her parents were imprisoned. Albert returned home in June 1945, but the terrible living conditions at Sachsenhausen had caused him to lose so much weight that Irmgard did not even recognize him. Luise returned home in September along with several other liberated Jehovah’s Witnesses who lived in their town.9