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In his incredibly rich and exhaustive study, Detlef Garbe, the director of the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial, investigates the courageous and bold resistance of the International Bible Students' Association or Jehovah's Witnesses under National Socialist rule. Originally completed as a dissertation in 1989 and published in 1993, this translation was made from an earlier revised fourth edition published in 1998. Garbe identifies the Jehovah's Witnesses as "largely 'forgotten victims'" of the Nazi regime, and his study is written to rectify this situation. According to Garbe, after the Jews, the Jehovah's Witnesses were the "most severely persecuted religious denomination during the National Socialist regime" (p. 484). Not motivated by political ends to overthrow the Hitler state, but acting on a strictly theological worldview that limited the allegiance of members to Jehovah God only, the Witnesses refused to partake in most external displays of allegiance to Nazism, i.e., taking oaths, offering the Hitler salute while saying "Heil Hitler," voting in elections, and later serving in the military. Throughout the book, Garbe meticulously records the history of the Witnesses' "fundamental opposition" as they refused to participate in the political exercises of the Nazi state.
After an insightful and thorough examination of the historiography concerning the Jehovah's Witnesses under National Socialism, Garbe presents an overview of the denomination's foundation in the United States; then, in 1902, its establishment in Elberfeld, Germany. Primarily attributing the growth of the Witnesses in 1920s Germany to the effects of a dire post-WWI situation, Garbe shows how this increase in membership threatened the long-established Catholic and Protestant churches. For example, Garbe records how prior to an address delivered in Munich's Circus Krone by Joseph Franklin Rutherford, the president of the Jehovah's Witnesses, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the archbishop of Munich and Freising, had prohibited Catholics in his archdiocese from attending the crusades of any anti-Catholic sects. Protestants responded no differently, especially in regard to the Witnesses. In like manner, völkisch groups also spoke against the...