The word means "beech forest" in German. It was here, overlooking Weimar, Germany (about 15 minutes by train from Erfurt) that the Nazis built the prison facilities, forced labor and death camp of Buchenwald. The town of Weimar is known as one of the centers of German culture with familiar names to some like Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche and Bauhaus. The SS built the camp in the early 1930s to hold political prisoners. During the Night of Broken Glass action, between November 1938 and February 1939, the SS imprisoned hundreds of Jewish men from the region, killing 650 people and telling those remaining to leave (See Thuringian State archival records in Weimar and Gotha). During the war the Nazis also imprisoned Russian soldiers, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. A local company from Erfurt, Topf and Sons, developed the crematoria and ventilation systems for the SS death ovens. It is said that on a clear day, Topfs' engineers could see the chimney smoke from their drafting room windows in Erfurt. After the war, former prisoners began commemorating their experiences on site (there is little left of the original camp buildings). The Soviet and GDR officials used this place as an opportunity to articulate their propaganda and political myth of Antifascist resistance to Nazism. On the ridgline overlooking the valley, they erected a monumental structure. If you are interested in seeing some of these photos, please click here.
For more information on Buchenwald, please see the link in English to the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.
For more information on Buchenwald, please see the link in English to the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.
5 comments:
Per their own WatchTower Society literature, once in the concentration camps, many of the Jehovah's Witnesses eventually collaborated with Nazi Camp Management to improve their own lot.
As a JW child, I vividly remember multiple occasions when JW Elders would boast from the "platform" (pulpit) how JW concentration camp prisoners acted as housekeepers, barbers, and in other positions of trust and responsibility for the Nazi Concentration Camp Management.
Why does noone notice that it is estimated that only about 15-25% of the JWs who were eventually imprisoned actually died in the camps? Because, of the JWs who actually died in the camps, most were those JWs who first entered the camps in the 1930s. By the 1940s, many JWs had learned to collaborate. Those JWs who died in the 1940s were mainly those in camps where death was unavoidable.
Additionally, the WatchTower Society teaches its own brand of "replacement theology", in which Jehovah's Witnesses believe and teach that YHWH rejected the Jews as His chosen people, and replaced them with Jehovah's Witnesses. As YHWH's current "chosen people", JWs HATE the Jews and all other peoples who they see as being followers of Satan.
Thus, the obvious question. Why is it mandatory that every article about the Holocaust contain the obligatory mentioning of the JWs in the same positive fashion as the other victims who could or would not collaborate with their captors?
Thank you for your comment. In other camps, other peoples also participated. Croat guards were notorious; some said Austrians made better Nazis than Germans; so you tap a key point about complicity. Each nation and group should look at itself so closely as you do. It is important that you point out the JW theological tailoring of the Bible to purposely change the status of the "chosen people". However, I do not see what is "mandatory" the same way. I would argue that what is "mandatory" is what you wrote this. But you begin to selectively skew the historical record again, if we then fail to mention in that same breath, the history of Jewish collaboration with Nazi prison officials or others from the rest of Europe. Therefore, I think it first important to let people erect their memorials on this site and not shy from looking at history with honesty
I like the thoughts that JJones generates on this history. Another side of this problem is the issue of victimhood (in German: “Opfern” with the dual meanings of sacrifice and victim). JJones sees the JWs as collectively complicit in the Nazi regimes; JJones interestingly points out in his/her (?!?) post that the JWs in general worked with the Nazis in the camps to save their own lives. JWs were not categorically predisposed for destruction as the Nazis had decided for the Jews. There were some cases of Jews who worked with the Nazis to save their own lives, but collectively, they did not or could not. After the war, JJones writes that his JW leaders boasted of the jobs they did in the camps, simultaneously, claiming that they were now the chosen people and not the Jews. How many people (JW or otherwise) survived because they complied with the Nazis and genocide? How many died? These are important questions, but numbers alone do not describe the whole history.
As with most of these historical cases, the JWs’ complicity and victimhood are complex. In the 1920s, some local community leaders saw the JWs (known locally as Ernster Bibelforscher (Earnest Bible Studiers)) as threats. In among the police records of Erfurt, there were a couple Protestant ministers who would participate in the rightwing German National Folk Party’s (the DNVP) meetings and actively link the JWs to the threat of the Jews, perhaps as a way to mobilize some more people against the JWs, and in the process helping to make the “Jew” more of a problem. From one JW autobiographical account in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive (Johannes Schindler, Biography, USHMM RG-02.058), Johannes Schindler found widespread interest in this same period in German-speaking communities among people interested in talking with him and his companions about the Bible. That is an interesting note itself because it suggests that many Germans were still interested in Christianity despite the loss of institutional church authority with the collapse of the Kaiserreich in 1918 and the subsequent waves of people who officially left the churches. Consequently, in Central Germany the JWs developed a significant movement of interested people. In 1924, the Jehovah’s Witnesses established a headquarters in Magdeburg (Sachsen-Anhalt) and began organizing their form of Christian evangelism. Schindler recounts the development of their public activity: passing out fliers, even using airplanes to tow banners and annually convening at rallies that grew into thousands of people (see photos of 1925 convention in Magdeburg; also note that 1925 was a year that the JWs predicted would be millenarian in its outcome (sic!)). By the early 1930s, the JWs began having more direct confrontations with the Nazis. Municipal authorities, however, did help protect JWs from local and later Nazi persecution until 1933. In Schindler’s case, he claims that like many other JWs in response to the Nazi control of the German state, he refused to give the Nazi salute when singing the national hymn and he rejected military service as a matter of his interpretation of the Bible. These actions symbolically rejected Nazi authority and the Nazis took the JWs like other Christian groups who thought likewise very seriously (see Bundesarchiv records on Nazi surveillance of Christian sects). They placed the JWs under surveillance, confiscated their facilities and eventually arrested them in the mid 1930s. In Schindler’s case, he was sentenced to die several times, but was fortunate that circumstances helped stay his execution. JWs did not comply with the Nazi regime, even though their “Aryan” status allowed them a more favorable status. For their non-compliance, the Nazis persecuted the JWs. Once in the prison camp system that is another story for further research.
Anti-Semitism is another important issue that JJones brings up. Interestingly, Schindler does not talk about Anti-Semitism or the Jews at all in his biography, which looking back, seems like a very large omission. I find that interesting and suspect that such omissions are widespread beyond the JWs. In my research among the Bundesarchiv records of Nazi surveillance, I found lists of hundreds of Christian groups throughout Germany who looked to the Bible for guidance. Readers should remember that many of central German Christian communities had begun to split along German Christian (DC) and Confessing Christian (BK) lines in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Erfurt became an important center for the “Aryanizing” German Christians who supported Nazism. In the Protestant records for Magdeburg I found more evidence of resistance to the DC church among the ministers and Church leaders and some sympathy for the BK, albeit very aware of the Nazi pressures from local DC leaders and the threat of the Nazi state apparatus. There were few Christian leaders who openly spoke about Anti-Semitism or found a way to openly and successfully challenge Nazi doctrines of race and militarism. Given the evidence for continued interest in the interpretation of Christianity which promotes love for the other, why did not more Christians speak out about Nazi policies? The simple answer would be the widespread acceptance of Anti-Semitism, but some scholars over exaggerate this point; another factor was the threat of persecution from Nazi/DC leaders from below and the Nazi state from above. JJones’ anecdote suggests that JWs were not interested in the lesson of love for the other, in this case the Jews; moreover, the JWs were interested in promoting themselves as the chosen people. However, this also needs more research. The proponents of democratic government and liberal society were also there in central Germany. In the case of my Nuremberg research, I found the last proponents of the Liberal form of German Protestantism. Christian Geyer (1862-1929), for example, was an old man in the early 1920s, but he still took to the pulpit in the St. Sebald Church and drew from Biblical texts like the Book of John (13, 31-35) to preach love for other peoples in a place where other people were harassing the Jewish members of the community (LKAN.1.24.Geyer). St. Sebald’s congregation numbered in the hundreds and it provided support for Nuremberg’s moderate, liberal, socialist, Jewish and Christian political coalition that withstood the growing storm of Nazism that emerged around it.
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