Ever heard of the Purple Triangle?
I hadn't either, until I met my husband.
Next time someone feels compelled to make fun of Jehovah's Witnesses when they knock on your door, perhaps you should remember this:
http://www.baycrest.org/Spring%202001/article12.htm The Gestapo and Criminal Police assigned special units to hunt down Witnesses and destroy the religion. Despite a nationwide sweep that netted thousands in August 1936, members continued to meet in secret and to carry on their ministry work underground. Two daring protest campaigns in December 1936 and June 1937 shocked Nazi officials, as the Witnesses blanketed the country with leaflets detailing the regime's human rights abuses. "During the whole length of the Nazi era in Germany, no other resistance organization took comparable initiatives," wrote German scholar Dr. Elke Imberger. The repressive Nazi measures in part caused the Witnesses' stance to take on the character of resistance, albeit nonpolitical and nonviolent.
By 1938, Nazi prisons and camps held about 6,000 Witnesses, about 5 to 10 percent of the total prewar camp population. Concurrent with the travails of the Witnesses, the Jewish community was feeling the ever-intensifying heat of Nazi terror. The plight of the Jews did not escape the sympathetic attention of the Witnesses, both in Germany and abroad. One month prior to Kristallnacht, Watch Tower Society president J. F. Rutherford voiced outrage in an international radio broadcast, saying: "The Devil has put his representative Hitler in control, a man who is of unsound mind, cruel, malicious and ruthless . . . He cruelly persecutes the Jews because they were once Jehovah's covenant people and bore the name of Jehovah, and because Christ Jesus was a Jew."
Witness literature became an instrument of spiritual resistance, exposing the criminal actions of the Nazi regime and its murderous antisemitic agenda. Witness prisoners wrote secret reports of camp conditions. These were smuggled out and printed in the Witness journals The Watchtower and Consolation (forerunner of Awake!). The 1938 Witness book Crusade Against Christianity contained diagrams of the camps Sachsenhausen and Esterwegen. Consolation of May 4, 1938, said, "History never recorded a more systematic, efficient, devilish obliteration of Jews than at present in Germany." Following the November pogrom, Consolation asked, "How can one remain silent?"
Chilling descriptions of the attack on European Jewry appeared frequently in Witness publications. Hundreds of column inches detailed and decried the destruction of the Jews' religious, social, and economic life, and ultimately, the physical annihilation of the Jews.
During and after Kristallnacht, according to historian Anton Gill, German Witnesses showed themselves "especially courageous," sheltering and protecting Jewish neighbors. In July 1939 the New York Yiddish daily Der Tog reported about Jehovah's Witnesses, "There were numerous cases in Danzig where members of the same religious sect have defended Jews against attacks by Nazis, or when these sincere women of the common people intentionally patronized Jewish stores just when Hitlerites picketed those Jewish shops. Only a half a year ago, when like a plague all kinds of food stores began to post the well-known signs 'Juden unerwünscht' (Jews not wanted), the same German women regarded it as a sacred duty to provide their Jewish neighbors or mere acquaintances with food or milk without asking anything in return."
The book Crystal Night: 9-10 November 1938, reports that 300-400 Witness inmates in Buchenwald shared their bread rations with some of the 2,250 Jews brought to the camp in 1938. One Buchenwald survivor told how Witnesses gave their bread to Jewish prisoners and went without food themselves for up to four days.