Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: How many Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps?
About 10,000 Witnesses were imprisoned, including 2000 sent to concentration camps, where they were identified by purple triangles; as many as 1200 died, including 250 who were executed. From 1935 Gestapo officers offered members a document to sign indicating renouncement of their faith, submission to state authority, and support of the German military. Historian Detlef Garbe says a "relatively high number" of people signed the statement before the war, but "extremely low numbers" of Bible Student prisoners did so in concentration camps in later years.
In 1997, the authorities in Transnistria announced that they would annul the registration of the Jehovah's Witnesses. The Jehovah's Witnesses in Transnistria were originally registered in 1991, and the church was reregistered by the "Ministry of Justice" in 1994 and 1997. However, in 1997 the "President's Commissioner for Religions and Cults" sent official letters to public authorities falsely claiming that the activity of the Jehovah's Witnesses was banned and that their registration was annulled. Using the "President's Commissioner's" deceptive letter, authorities have repeatedly harassed the Jehovah's Witnesses, including halting the distribution of religious literature and refusing to approve a property request to build a house of worship. In 2001, the Jehovah's Witnesses lodged an official complaint with the "President" of Transnistria, and in 2002, they lodged a complaint with the Magistrate in Tiraspol against illegal actions taken by the "President's Commissioner for Religions and Cults." In July 2002, the "President's Commissioner for Religions and Cults" sent a letter to various government departments with instructions to consider the Jehovah's Witnesses as illegal until the case brought against them had been finalized. The Jehovah's Witnesses have lodged an official complaint and a counter lawsuit against the "President's Commissioner for Religions and Cults." Following several hearings, the Court has decided to suspend the trial until the liquidation case has been finalized.In December 2003, the Jehovah's Witnesses were informed that the two trials would be combined into one trial that would be heard by a panel of three judges. The case was being heard at the close of the period covered by this report.
At the time of its founding, the ghetto imprisoned 34,000 Polish Jews, and an unknown number of Roma people. Virtually all of them were dead by the war's end. Most of the victims, about 30,000 were deported to the Belzec extermination camp (some of them through the Piaski ghetto) between 17 March and 11 April 1942 by the Reserve Police Battalion 101 from Orpo helped by "Schutzpolizei". The Germans set a daily quota of 1,400 inmates to be deported to their deaths. The other 4,000 people were first moved to the Majdan Tatarski ghetto – a small ghetto established in the suburb of Lublin – and then either killed there during roundups or sent to the nearby KL Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp. 
The last of the Ghetto's former residents still in German captivity were executed at Majdanek and Trawniki camps in the Operation Harvest Festival (German: "Aktion Erntefest") on 3 November 1943. At the time of the liquidation of the ghetto, the German propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary, "The procedure is pretty barbaric, and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews."
Jehovah's Witnesses originated as a branch of the Bible Student movement, which developed in the United States in the 1870s among followers of Christian Restorationist minister Charles Taze Russell. Bible Student missionaries were sent to England in 1881 and the first overseas branch was opened in London in 1900. The group took on the name International Bible Students Association and by 1914 it was also active in Canada, Germany, Australia and other countries. The movement split into several rival organizations after Russell's death in 1916, with one—led by Russell's successor, Joseph "Judge" Rutherford—retaining control of both his magazine, "The Watch Tower", and his legal and publishing corporation, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania.
Doctrines of Jehovah's Witnesses are established by the Governing Body. The denomination does not tolerate dissent over doctrines and practices; members who openly disagree with the group's teachings are expelled and shunned. Witness publications strongly discourage followers from questioning doctrine and counsel received from the Governing Body, reasoning that it is to be trusted as part of "God's organization". It also warns members to "avoid independent thinking", claiming such thinking "was introduced by Satan the Devil" and would "cause division". Those who openly disagree with official teachings are condemned as "apostates" who are "mentally diseased".
During World War II, an estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals or citizens residing on the West Coast of the United States were forcibly interned in ten different camps across the western interior of the country. The internments were based on the race or ancestry rather than activities of the interned. Families, including children, were interned together. Four decades later, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 officially acknowledged the "fundamental violations of the basic civil liberties and constitutional rights" of the internment. Many Japanese-Americans consider the term internment camp a euphemism and prefer to refer to the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans as imprisonment in concentration camps. Webster's New World Fourth College Edition defines a concentration camp as, "A prison camp in which political dissidents, members of minority ethnic groups, etc. are confined."
Doctrines of Jehovah's Witnesses are established by their Governing Body, which Witnesses are taught Jesus uses as a channel for God's progressive revelations and to direct Christians on biblical matters. Until late 2012, the Governing Body described itself as the representative and "spokesman" for God's "faithful and discreet slave class" (a limited number of "anointed" Jehovah's Witnesses). The Governing Body seeks neither advice nor approval from any "anointed" Witnesses other than high-ranking members at the Brooklyn headquarters. At the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Watch Tower Society, the "faithful and discreet slave" was defined as referring to the Governing Body only.
Doctrines of Jehovah's Witnesses are established by the Governing Body, and the denomination does not tolerate dissent over doctrines and practices. Members who openly disagree with the movement's teachings are expelled and shunned. Witness publications strongly discourage followers from questioning doctrine and counsel received from the Governing Body, reasoning that it is to be trusted as part of "God's organization". They also warn members to "avoid independent thinking", claiming such thinking "was introduced by Satan the Devil" and would "cause division". Those who openly disagree with official teachings are condemned as "apostates" who are "mentally diseased".
Former Governing Body member Raymond Franz has accused the movement's Governing Body of resenting, deprecating and seeking to silence alternative viewpoints within the organization and demanding organizational conformity that overrides personal conscience. He claimed the Watch Tower Society confirmed its position when, in a 1954 court case in Scotland, Watch Tower Society legal counsel Hayden C. Covington said of Jehovah's Witnesses: "We must have unity ... unity at all costs". He also stated that Witnesses are subject to a disciplinary system that encourages informants.
During World War II, an estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals or citizens residing in the United States were forcibly interned in ten different camps across the US, mostly in the west. The internments were based on the race or ancestry rather than activities of the interned. Families, including children, were interned together. Each member of the family was allowed to bring two suitcases of their belongings. Each family, regardless of its size, was given one room to live in. The camps were fenced in and patrolled by armed guards. For the most part, the internees remained in the camps until the end of the war, when they left the camps to rebuild their lives.
While the term "Holocaust" generally refers to the systematic mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe, the Nazis also murdered a large number of non-Jewish people who were also considered subhuman ("Untermenschen") or undesirable. Some victims belonged to several categories targeted for extermination, e.g. an assimilated Jew who was a member of a communist party or someone of Jewish ancestry who identified as one of Jehovah's Witnesses.
Witnesses believe that after the death of the apostles, the Church embarked on a "Great Apostasy", diverging from the original teachings of Jesus on several major points. Influenced by Restorationism in the 19th century, Charles Taze Russell and his associates formed a Bible study group in the 1870s in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, developing teachings that they considered to be a revival of "the great truths taught by Jesus and the Apostles". Watch Tower publications claim both the Great Apostasy and Russell's subsequent "restoration" of original Christianity were a fulfilment of Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds at Matthew 13:24-30,36-43. Although many of their eschatological teachings have changed over the years, Jehovah's Witnesses have consistently claimed to be the only true religion. Based on their interpretation of Revelation 18:2-24, Jehovah's Witnesses believe all other religions are part of "Babylon the Great", a "world empire of false religion" under the control of Satan; consequently, they refuse all ecumenical relations with other religious denominations.
The Catholic Church in Poland was brutally suppressed by the Nazis during the German Occupation of Poland (1939-1945). Repression of the Church was at its most severe in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany, where churches were systematically closed and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported. From across Poland, thousands of priests died in prisons and concentration camps; thousands of churches and monasteries were confiscated, closed or destroyed; and priceless works of religious art and sacred objects were lost forever. Church leaders were targeted as part of an overall effort to destroy Polish culture. At least 1811 Polish clergy died in Nazi concentration camps. An estimated 3000 clergy were killed in all. Hitler's plans for the Germanization of the East saw no place for the Christian Churches.
Since 2002, the association has extended to cover the whole of Germany, including camp communities of former prisoners of the concentration camps as incorporated associations. The VVN-BdA claims to be the biggest antifascist organisation in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Among one million Polish soldiers fighting the Germans in September 1939, 13 percent (130,000) were Polish citizens of Jewish background, who fought in all branches of Polish Armed Forces. It is estimated that during the entirety of World War II as many as 32,216 Jewish soldiers and officers died and 61,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans; the majority did not survive. The soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were released ultimately found themselves in the ghettos and labor camps and suffered the same fate as other Jewish civilians. Germans killed about 20 000 civilians in September 1939, a number of them Jewish. For example, in Częstochowa 227 civilians were murdered on September the 4th, 22 of them Jewish.
This genocide that occurred during World War II is one of the biggest examples of bystander effect on a mass scale. We sometimes think of bystander effect as applying to only one individual where one individual needs assistance and bystanders expect another bystander to help; however, this can apply on a bigger scale too with multiple victims. When Nazi officers were on trial they pleaded that if the Holocaust was as terrible as everyone said, then someone else must have known about it. Near the concentration camps, villages such as Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen, and Ravensbruck, knew about what was going on inside the camp. When the Allies got to the camps they accused the villages nearby of making no attempt to save those in the camps. The Allies were angered that these nearby villages were waiting for someone else to come in and save the people in these camps. As a result, they forced these populations to clean up the corpses from the camps and bury them in mass graves as punishment for falling victim to this bystander effect.
After the executive order was signed in 1942, 120,312 Japanese residents were forced into one of 10, (11 including Crystal City, Texas), internment camps in the United States . Some Japanese residents voluntarily entered these camps to avoid being separated from loved ones. Other residents were forced into other government accommodations.  All 10 war relocation centers were located in inland in the United States, and many were in desert areas. The camps were fenced with barbed wire to avoid runaways. The camps themselves were self-sustaining communities; there were many kinds of factories, farms, hospitals, schools, churches, theaters, and shops within them. The prisoners were able to go anywhere they wanted within the camps, but the only time they were permitted to leave the camps was if they were ill beyond the camp hospital’s ability to help. The food from farms and fields in the camp fed the entire camp including the detainees and the camp workers. Internment camp housing were barrack style houses in which there were no barriers for the bathrooms. Many prisoners fell ill due to the unsanitary conditions of the housing situations. Japanese detainees did not enjoy many of their civil rights, including freedom of speech. These restraints led to numerous strikes, riots, and attempts at running away.July 26, 1941: America freezes all Japanese assets in the US.
Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Jesus Christ began to rule in heaven as king of God's kingdom in October 1914, and that Satan was subsequently ousted from heaven to the earth, resulting in "woe" to humanity. They believe that Jesus rules invisibly, from heaven, perceived only as a series of "signs". They base this belief on a rendering of the Greek word "parousia"—usually translated as "coming" when referring to Christ—as "presence". They believe Jesus' presence includes an unknown period beginning with his inauguration as king in heaven in 1914, and ending when he comes to bring a final judgment against humans on earth. They thus depart from the mainstream Christian belief that the "second coming" of Matthew 24 refers to a single moment of arrival on earth to judge humans.
Included with total war dead are victims of Japanese war crimes.The total war dead in the USSR includes about 1 million victims of Stalin's regime. The number of deaths in the Gulag labor camps increased as a result of wartime overcrowding and food shortages. The Stalin regime deported the entire populations of ethnic minorities considered to be potentially disloyal. Since 1990 Russian scholars have been given access to the Soviet-era archives and have published data on the numbers of people executed and those who died in Gulag labor camps and prisons. The Russian scholar Viktor Zemskov puts the death toll from 1941–1945 at about 1 million based on data from the Soviet archives. The Soviet-era archive figures on the Gulag labor camps has been the subject of a vigorous academic debate outside Russia since their publication in 1991. J. Arch Getty and Stephen G. Wheatcroft maintain that Soviet-era figures more accurately detail the victims of the Gulag labor camp system in the Stalin era. Robert Conquest and Steven Rosefielde have disputed the accuracy of the data from the Soviet archives, maintaining that the demographic data and testimonials by survivors of the Gulag labor camps indicate a higher death toll. Rosefielde posits that the release of the Soviet Archive figures is disinformation generated by the modern KGB. Rosefielde maintains that the data from the Soviet archives is incomplete; for example, he pointed out that the figures do not include the 22,000 victims of the Katyn massacre. Rosefielde's demographic analysis puts the number of excess deaths due to Soviet repression at 2,183,000 in 1939–40 and 5,458,000 from 1941–1945. Michael Haynes and Rumy Husun accept the figures from the Soviet archives as being an accurate tally of Stalin's victims, they maintain that the demographic data depicts an underdeveloped Soviet economy and the losses in World War Two rather than indicating a higher death toll in the Gulag labor camps.
After the Soviet invasion of Poland following the corresponding German invasion that marked the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union annexed eastern parts (known as "Kresy" to the Polish) of the Second Polish Republic. During 1939–1941, 1.45 million people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63.1% were Poles and 7.4% were Jews. Previously it was believed that about 1.0 million Polish citizens died at the hands of the Soviets, but recently Polish historians, based mostly on queries in Soviet archives, estimate the number of deaths at about 350,000 people deported in 1939–1945. From the newly conquered Eastern Poland, 1.5 million people were deported.
Like all Australian communities, Woody Point was affected by the impact of WWI. Of the 330,770 Australians who embarked for overseas service in WWI, 58,961 died and 170,909 were wounded, went missing or became prisoners of war. This meant that around 69% of embarked personnel became casualties - or 21% of eligible Australian males. To date, no previous or subsequent war has had such an impact on Australia in terms of loss of life; almost every community in every Australian state lost young people. Even before the end of hostilities, memorials were being erected by Australian communities to honour local people who had served and died. These memorials were a spontaneous and highly visible expression of national grief; substitute graves for the Australians whose bodies lay in battlefield cemeteries in Europe and the Middle East.
Japanese Americans were incarcerated based on local population concentrations and regional politics. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans in the mainland U.S., who mostly lived on the West Coast, were forced into interior camps. However, in Hawaii, where 150,000-plus Japanese Americans composed over one-third of the population, only 1,200 to 1,800 were also interned. The internment is considered to have resulted more from racism than from any security risk posed by Japanese Americans. Those who were as little as 1/16 Japanese and orphaned infants with "one drop of Japanese blood" were placed in internment camps.
Because they refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. They were marked out by purple triangles. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates between 2,700 and 3,300 were sent to concentration camps, but Sybil Milton states the number in the camps was 10,000. Between 1,400 and 2,500 died while in the camps. Historian Detlef Garbe writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."
Outside mainstream Christianity, the Jehovah's Witnesses were targets of Nazi Persecution, for their refusal to swear allegiance to the Nazi government. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s, Jehovah's Witnesses refused to renounce their political neutrality and they were placed in concentration camps as a result. The Nazi government gave detained Jehovah's Witnesses the option of release if they signed a document which indicated their renouncement of their faith, their submission to state authority, and their support of the German military. Historian Hans Hesse said, "Some five thousand Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to concentration camps where they alone were 'voluntary prisoners', so termed because the moment they recanted their views, they could be freed. Some lost their lives in the camps, but few renounced their faith".
Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and emigrants were sent to Dachau after the 1935 passage of the Nuremberg Laws which institutionalized racial discrimination. In early 1937, the SS, using prisoner labor, initiated construction of a large complex capable of holding 6,000 prisoners. The construction was officially completed in mid-August 1938. More political opponents, and over 11,000 German and Austrian Jews were sent to the camp after the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Sinti and Roma in the hundreds were sent to the camp in 1939, and over 13,000 prisoners were sent to the camp from Poland in 1940.
The prisoners of Dachau concentration camp originally were to serve as forced labor for a munition factory, and to expand the camp. It was used as a training center for SS guards and was a model for other concentration camps. The camp was about in rectangular shape. The prisoners' entrance was secured by an iron gate with the motto "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work will make you free"). This reflected Nazi propaganda, which trivialized concentration camps as labor and re-education camps, when in fact forced labor was used as a method of torture and murder.
A move to a newly built camp in the Niederhagen suburb of Wewelsburg followed. In September 1941, when the camp became an independent concentration camp under the name Niederhagen concentration camp, 480 prisoners were interned there. From 1941, more and more prisoners from outside Germany were imprisoned in the camp.
The approximately 3,900 prisoners included Jehovah's Witnesses, political prisoners, Sinti and Romani people, Yeniche, homosexuals, Jews, prisoners of war and forced laborers from Poland, the Soviet Union (also prisoners of war), Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands and Belgium. Almost a third of them did not survive their imprisonment. The deaths of 1,285 prisoners are recorded. They died of hunger, cold, disease and the consequences of ill-treatment. In 1942, a crematorium was built specifically for the camp. The Gestapo also used the camp as a place for executions. A total of 56 people from Westphalia-Lippe, including women and children, were executed there on the orders of Heinrich Himmler. In the period from 1 September 1941 to 1 May 1943, the camp was an independent concentration camp. Before, it had been a satellite camp first of the Sachsenhausen and then of the Buchenwald concentration camp. From 1943, only 50 people were imprisoned at Niederhagen, and on 2 April 1945, the prisoners were ordered to be executed, but the SS officer ordered to tell a couple of guards to kill them, said that he would do it himself and once all of the others retreated he told all of the Jehovah's Witnesses that they were free (and he is now a Jehovah's Witness himself), and they were liberated by the American army. Very little is left of the camp. Today, the former camp kitchen houses the local fire station of the volunteer fire department and some apartments, the gatehouse is now a two-family house, while a residential estate was built over the rest of the former camp.