Jehovah's Witnesses

On Trial as a Jehovah's Witness:

Annemarie Kusserow

After 1933 the Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany numbered about twenty thousand members. Although their meetings and distribution of their religious tracts were outlawed very quickly after the Nazis assumed power in 1933, they continued their religious gatherings as smaller family groups. It was only when the Witnesses, as a matter of religious principle, refused to use the Heil Hitler salute and after 1935 refused to serve in the army, that they were seen as enemies of the Nazi state. The Witnesses also did not salute the flag, nor participate in the affairs of government. They saw themselves as conscientious objectors, since they believed that their allegiance was to the high orders of God. These religions convictions led to the repeated arrests and imprisonments in concentration camps after 1935.

At all times the Witnesses were a relatively small group of prisoners in the concentration camps (not exceeding several hundred per camp), and mostly of German nationality. After 1939 Witnesses from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland were arrested and deported to various concentration camps. About ten thousand Witnesses in all were imprisoned in the concentration camps, and of these about twenty-five hundred died in Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and other concentration camps. Many Witnesses were also incarcerated in Nazi jails and penitentiaries.

Even in 1944, with the war clearly lost, Jehovah's Witnesses were still arrested and placed on trial for their beliefs. Annemarie Kusserow, then thirty-one years old, came from a family of devout Jehovah's Witnesses. Two of her brothers had been sentenced to death and executed for refusing to serve in the German army. Her mother, Hilda Kusserow, had been taken into custody one year earlier in 1943 and deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was held until the war ended. Annemarie Kusserow was spied on by the Gestapo throughout the 1930s and finally arrested in October 1944. She was placed on trial in December, receiving a four-year jail sentence to be served at Berlin-Moabit and Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel prisons for participating in clandestine Bible study groups. Annemarie Kusserow served seven months of her jail sentence, from 25 October 1944 to 25 May 1945, and was released at the end of the war.

The following document indicting Kusserow for the "crime" of participating in illegal Bible study groups is reprinted from the Kusserow family collection in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archive. Translation by Anton Legerer, Jr., and Sybil Milton.

The Chief State Prosecuting Attorney of the Berlin

Superior Court (Kammergericht) 12. O. Js 549/44b

Berlin W 35, 10 December 1944 Essholzstrasse 32

Phone: 270013

ARRESTED!

To the Presiding Judge of the

Sixth Judicial Senate of the Superior Court of Justice

Additional charges against the secretary Annemarie Kusserow, residing at Palisaden Strasse 30, Berlin Northeast 18, arrested on 25 October 1944 and currently incarcerated in the remand prison of the Criminal Court (Kriminalgericht) in BerlinMoabit; Ms. Kusserow, born on 26 January 1913 in Bochum, is unmarried, religious, of German nationality, and has no previous convictions.

I am accusing her of (1) participating in and supporting antimilitary associations during the war, and (2) of trying to subvert the will and morale of the German people for military self-defense. These are crimes under paragraph 5 of the 17 August 1938 law and paragraph 75 of the Reich criminal code.

Results of the Preliminary Investigation

The accused descends from a family totally saturated by the beliefs of the International Bible Researchers (i.e., the Jehovah's Witnesses). Since the age of ten, she has been educated by her parents as a devout Witness. Her parents and many of her siblings are now held in prisons and concentration camps because of their Jehovah's Witness activities. Two of her brothers were sentenced to death and executed for refusing military service. The accused has also participated herself in Bible classes together with other Jehovah's Witnesses in 1940. Legal proceedings were therefore instituted against her (3 P. Js. 290/40) but were dismissed by the Prosecutor's office in Berlin. In 1942 she received warnings from Berlin Gestapo headquarters because of the contents of a letter to her sister Magdalene.

Since the summer of 1943, the accused has often met her sister Hildegard, who is also a believer and Jehovah's Witness. She asked the accused to get her Witness publications. The accused continually gave her sister publications like the Watch Tower, Daniel, Micha, and newsletters containing "last" letters written by Jehovah's Witnesses, allegedly sentenced to death and drafted before their executions. The accused and her sister both admitted to procuring and passing such publications to other Witness third parties. The accused has personally been especially interested in such publications, in which the rejection of military service is praised, and both of her brothers have been executed because they refused to serve in the military.

The accused was also acquainted with the functionary Franz Fritsche. She has met him and the accused Venske on several occasions for Bible study classes. The accused was also a close friend of the accused Steinfurth and Elisabeth Tschenske, with whom she met repeatedly to discuss the Bible and practice their religion. Several Jehovah's Witness publications were found in the possession of the accused Kusserow when she was arrested.

Additional evidence: The accused's own admission.

I therefore move that we place the accused Kusserow on trial and that she be charged together with the defendant Helene Venske.

Signed for: Potjan, Senior Prosecuting Attorney

Medical Experiments

Experiments on Homosexual Prisoners at Buchenwald

The persecution of homosexuals began in Nazi Germany in 1933, and included the prohibition and burning of publications by and about homosexuals. From 1933 to 1935, the German police raided homosexual associations, clubs, and bars, arresting many German homosexuals. They were detained in prisons and also in early concentration camps, such as Columbia House in Berlin, Lichtenburg, and the early Moor Camps. From 1935 to 1939, the number of prosecutions and arrests of homosexuals increased, and in 1936 the systematic registration of homosexuals was organized by the police and the Reich Central Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion.

During the war years, 1939-45, the criminalization of homosexuality and the physical terror for homosexuals in concentration camps increased. Moreover, homophobic legislation expanded to occupied Europe, including Austria, France, the Sudetenland, Poland, and the Netherlands. Further, homosexual prisoners were subjected to castration, and medical experiments, and even received death sentences.

The following documents from the archive of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp provide background information about brutal SS medical experiments, including castration, and the implantation of an "artificial male sex gland," and artificial hormone implant experiments. They were conducted in 1944 on homsexuals incarcerated in

Buchenwald by a Danish SS physician, Dr. Carl Vaernet, an alias for Dr. Carl Peter Jensen. The first document is a letter from the staff of the Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler, to the Head of the State Police Office, SS Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Gerke, Prague, concerning Vaernet's appointment. The original document is in the Buchenwald Archive, Signatur 50–3–35, and is reprinted in facsimile in Wolfgang Röll, Homosexuelle Häftlinge im Konzentrationslager Buchenwald (Weimar: Weimardruck, 1991), 37. The second document is a note for the files from SS Captain Dr. Gerhard Schiedlausky, the Waffen SS Chief Garrison Physician in Weimar, about his first meeting with SS Major Dr. Carl Vaernet. This original document is in the Thuringian State Archive, Weimar, Record Group KL Buchenwald 50, page 2, and is also reprinted in facsimile in Röll, Homosexuelle Häftlinge im Konzentrationslager Buchenwald; 38. Both documents were translated from the German by Patricia Heberer and Sybil Milton.

Berlin, 25 February 1944 Prinz Albrecht Strasse 44

Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police carbon copy

To the Head of the State Police Office, Prague, SS Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Gerke, Prague

Dear Comrade Gerke!

The Reichsführer SS [Heinrich Himmler] brought to Germany some time ago the Danish medical researcher Dr. Carl Vaernet so that he might work, unhindered and uninfluenced, on an extremely important hormone experiment. I have been entrusted by the Reichsführer SS to accommodate the wishes of Dr. Vaernet, and [he] informed me that Dr. Vaernet is to be assisted in the most generous manner. A position was created for Dr. Vaernet at the Deutsche Heilmittel Inc. by the SS Central Office for Economy and Administration in cooperation with the SS Reich Surgeon General.

Dr. Vaernet will relocate to Prague on 26 February 1944 and reside in a hotel there, together with his family of six. Because his research work will last at least one year, hotel lodgings cannot be considered a definitive solution— especially since Vaernet does not intend to return to Denmark and wishes to send his children to a German school in Prague. I would therefore be especially grateful if you could assist me in finding an appropriate fully furnished apartment for Dr. Vaernet. Following consultation with the SS Central Office for Economy and Administration, Staff B, SS Lt. Col. Dr. Hoffmann assumes the payment of rent via Deutsche Heilsmittel GmbH.

Waffen SS Chief Garrison Physician

Weimar

Re: Memorandum

Weimar-Buchenwald 29 July 1944

SS Major Vaernet arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp on 26 July 1944 to investigate various possibilities for his experiments, which have been approved by the Reichsführer SS.

We reached an understanding during our first conversation that five genuine homosexuals who are deemed suitable will be chosen to test his hypothesis. Before surgery is performed, there must be an examination of the hormone levels in urine samples... This will take place in Prague, the present residence of SS Major Vaernet, in a specially equipped institute. The question of daily transporting the required urine samples to that location could not be completely resolved, since there is the possibility that the urine samples will deteriorate between the time they are collected and their examination. Major Vaernet wants to settle this problem on the spot in Prague and report to us here. Only then can we ship urine samples from the prisoners selected for the experiment. If the testing works out positively, the surgical operations will be performed.

Garrison Physician of the Waffen SS, Weimar (signed) Dr. G. Schiedlausky

SS Captain (Reserve)

Forced Labor

Heinz Rosenberg's "Years of Terror"

Heinz Rosenberg was born in 1921 in an established Göttingen Jewish family. Already in 1933 the family business, the S & A Rosenberg textile factory, was confiscated, and the family were evicted from their apartment by their Nazi landlord. The Rosenberg family then moved to Hamburg, where Heinz Rosenberg's older brother Curt and his sister Irmgard worked for Jewish clothing manufacturers; Heinz attended school as one of ten Jewish students among six hundred "Aryan" classmates. Expelled from school in 1937 before completing his education, Heinz Rosenberg worked as an apprentice in an import-and-export firm. This business was "Aryanized" in 1938. Heinz Rosenberg's brother Curt and many relatives were arrested during "Crystal Night" and deported to concentration camps. Although the family tried to emigrate from Germany, only his brother Curt was able to obtain a visa to England after release from a concentra

tion camp. After Heinz completed his apprenticeship, he was assigned to a forced-labor camp for Jews at Wohlerst near Buxtehude in March 1939. He was compelled to live in barracks with fifty other Jews and was assigned to dig drainage ditches under SS guard. In August 1939 he returned to Hamburg with severe stomach problems.

In October 1941 family members were informed that they would be forced to "resettle." The Hamburg SS told them to report on 8 November to the former Jewish Lodge on Moorweiden Street; yjey should bring their apartment keys and fifty pounds of clothing, linen, and other household goods. After inspection and registration at the assembly center, the Rosenbergs were deported to the Minsk Ghetto at 5 A.M. on the next day. From November 1941 to September 1943, Heinz Rosenberg survived the privations of the Minsk ghetto. Most of the other members of his family perished as did his grandmother Anna Rosenberg, who had remained behind in Göttingen until she was transferred in 1942 to Theresienstadt, where she died in February 1943.

On his twenty-second birthday, 15 September 1943, Heinz Rosenberg was deported to the killing center at Treblinka. Surviving the initial selection with 250 other deportees, he volunteered to work as a skilled mechanic and was thus among a small number of Jewish prisoners reassigned to forced labor at the Heinkel armaments factory in Budzyn 1 concentration camp near Lublin. Transferred later to Budzyn 2, Rosenberg worked shifts of up to sixteen hours a day under brutal conditions until he was sent to the Rzeszow (Reichshof) concentration camp in February 1944. Rzeszow was a small labor camp with two hundred prisoners and four barracks; conditions were relatively mild, and rations were better.

In June 1944 Heinz Rosenberg was once again transferred, this time to Plaszow concentration camp, located in the outskirts of Cracow. He later noted with astonishment that "the valuable human cargo of concentration camp prisoners would have been shot if they could not have been transported to new camps. Thus the cattle cars were our salvation." Plaszow was built at a former Jewish cemetery outside Cracow and held twenty-five thousand prisoners, 90 percent of them Jewish women from the greater Cracow area. Here Rosenberg received a small tattoo on the inside surface of his right arm. In late June he was sent to labor in the salt mines at the small camp Veliczka. Overcrowded filthy barracks, long roll calls, and the chaos of Veliczka were only some of the daily tortures. In July Rosenberg was moved to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where after a brief quarantine he was assigned to work in the stone quarry. In mid-August 1944 he was again deported, this time to the subterranean tunnel factories of Urbis concentration camp near Colmar, in the foothills of the Vosges Mountains in France, a satellite labor facility of the Natzweiler concentration camp.

As the fronts advanced toward Germany itself, prisoners were transported from both eastern and western camps to camps inside the Reich, where conditions steadily deteriorated. Thus, in October 1944 Heinz Rosenberg was deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg near Berlin. At that time Sachsenhausen was packed with more than fifty-thousand prisoners in a facility originally intended to hold twenty-thousand. In late 1944 he was once again moved to new camps in Bremen at Bremen-Blumenfeld and Bremen-Schützenhof and survived the carpet bombing of Bremen in January 1945. Eventually in March Rosenberg was sent to Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated in mid-April. In May he was transferred by Red Cross train to Sweden for recuperation. From mid-September 1943 on, Heinz Rosenberg had survived an incredible ordeal in more than a dozen Nazi concentration camps.

Rosenberg's memoirs were originally written in German in late 1945 during his convalescence in Sweden. He translated them to English when he moved to the United States, registering the recollections with the copyright office in 1983 as a typewritten self-publication. In 1985 the English version was retranslated with the assistance of Hanna Vogt, a historian and survivor from Göttingen. The memoirs were published in German under the title Jahre des Schreckens: ... und ich blieb übrig, daß ich Dir's ansage (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 1985). The following excerpts from Rosenberg's memoirs of his 1944 odyssey were edited and translated from the German by Patricia Heberer.

In the Labor Camp Budzyn 2

In Budzyn 2 a number of us had to build large factory buildings. The prisoners had no modern equipment by any means but, on the contrary, had to do everything with their hands. They had to carry cement sacks, stones and beams, mix the cement, and so forth. The foundations were dug out with pickaxes and shovels-a nearly impossible task since the ground was frozen solid. There was only one single break from work, the so-called midday meal. I had the good fortune to be able to work inside the factory, in a long hall together with nine other prisoners. Even here a twelve-hour workday was extremely taxing.

In February 1944 there came a change, one which made it clear to us that the new buildings would never be used for the purposes intended and that the Germans had no use for them any more. We had no newspapers or other information, but somehow we understood that the front was coming closer to us and that it was feared the factory could fall into Russian hands. Several prisoners had already been educated as simple mechanics, but they had no more opportunity to use their capabilities because within a few weeks the order came to pack everything up and to retreat [with the Germans].

Our working hours were expanded; packing and loading for fourteen to sixteen hours was nothing unusual. It was very difficult for us to pack the heavy machines into crates and to transport them to the railroad cars. We received no additional food for this more difficult labor. The anxiety of our guards increased as did their brutality. "Faster, faster, you idiots!" we heard every day. "Get moving, we must be out of here in a week!" For us their nervousness was a compensation. Perhaps the Russians would free us soon, and our torment would have an end. And yet we also feared that the SS would still kill us all at the last minute or send us to an extermination camp. There were many rumors, and our fear concerning the future gave us no peace.

But now something completely different happened. After the factory was closed down and all the equipment carried away, we had to wait in the camp until a German tank-repair unit arrived. This happened within two days. The five-hundred strongest from our number were picked out to unload the damaged tanks from freight cars. Although the watch was doubled and despite all the beatings, we were not able to accomplish the task. Finally, cranes were driven out to the trains, and the tanks and trucks were unloaded in this fashion. The arrival every day, of newly damaged war materiel confirmed to us that the fortunes of war had shifted. Those of us who understood German learned the truth about the German defeat in Russia from the conversations of the guards. In the camp at night, we traded bits of the latest information and succeeded in forming a clear picture of what had occurred. The Germans were no supermen [Übermenschen] anymore.

The factory installations were reorganized for the needs of the army-repair center, and all three-thousand prisoners now worked for the army. The food was better because the army canteen delivered it. And as a result, we felt correspondingly better too. We grew accustomed to the use of the heavy machinery and to the German military police. Even the SS sergeant went a little bit easier on us.

The Army High Command insisted on receiving all available workers, and the SS commandant had to comply with the demands. A certain amount of suspicion and mistrust constantly prevailed between the army and the SS. Perhaps jealousy was the reason behind this, or perhaps one wanted to show the other who had more power and control. For us the change was advantageous because the military police were not so cruel.

The people at the Heinkel concern [which Budzyn labor camp served] did not like it that their prisoners were working for the army, and insisted on sending us to other factories belonging to Heinkel. This happened first in April 1944: five-hundred men were transported to another factory near Radom. Among them were my good friends Hermann and Arthur, as well as others whom I knew already from Minsk or Budzyn 1. In total, five transports left in April. We had