Auschwitz

[The Librarian]

Auschwitz. Jehovah's Witnesses prisoners shown here with their designated "purple triangles" sewn onto their uniforms.

 

[Arauna]

Proud to be a Witness of Jehovah - to stand united in our neutrality regarding this worlds divisive affairs and politics.  I know we are the custodians of the Truth because no other nation has the insight to understand this: we are in this world but no part of the world.  We all are loyal only to Jehovah and his enthroned king and a peaceful, self-sacrificing lifestyle of which Jesus provided an excellent example. Let Jehovah find us all in peace and without spot from this world!

[Ann O'Maly]

On 8/26/2016 at 7:38 PM, The Librarian said:

Auschwitz. Jehovah's Witnesses prisoners shown here with their designated "purple triangles" sewn onto their uniforms.

Sachsenhausen. Hard to tell if the triangles are purple in a black-and-white photo. The shading may also suggest blue, red, green, pink or brown. 

[Arauna]

One cannot deny the triangle whatever color you may personally think it is..... the same myopia!

Deny history.... this denial reminds me of the renegade Iranians.... deny, deny, deny....Death to all Jews... and Americans! they shout everyday in their mosques!

 

[Ann O'Maly]

1 hour ago, Arauna said:

One cannot deny the triangle whatever color you may personally think it is..... the same myopia!

Deny history.... this denial reminds me of the renegade Iranians.... deny, deny, deny....Death to all Jews... and Americans! they shout everyday in their mosques!

 

Huh? 

[JW Insider]

I think it is very, very wrong to denigrate the great sacrifices that Jehovah's Witnesses made for their faith during the regimes in Germany, etc, during WWII. But we should still be careful about making use of whatever pictures we find, and trying to associate them with the Witnesses. It seems like it might even be Witnesses in some cases who have misused pictures of miniature Bibles they find online, and then claim that they were smuggled by JWs into the concentration camps. Anything is possible, but sometimes this borders on the same idea behind peddling artifacts of the martyrs during the "dark" and/or medieval ages.

I don't know anything about this picture, but I've seen it before and I am pretty sure it wasn't the purple triangle that was given to those who identified as Bible Students, Earnest Bible Students and Jehovah's Witnesses. (I have heard from other Witnesses that these weren't always the same groups in the 1940's. Many of the ones who suffered persecution and even death rejected Brother Rutherford and the Watch Tower Society. I haven't checked out this claim yet, but put it here in case anyone has.)

The reason I say that this unlikely to be a purple triangle is that you can tell something about a color from its "value" meaning its place on a gray scale. Google is also good at this and a search on the photo returns " Best guess for this image: pink triangle concentration camp " Additional searches also link it with Sachsenhausen, not Auschwitz, as Ann has already pointed out.

Google probably guesses "pink" either because the value of the gray is much closer to the light stripe on the prison uniform and purple was much closer to the dark stripe, and it probably has been associated with "pink triangle" websites for a while. This would mean that these men were more likely homosexuals, although that color [pink] was also given to pedophiles and sex offenders of all stripes. There is another picture of a man standing just to the right of where the currently rightmost man is in this picture, who has an extra superimposed triangle that likely indicates that he is a Jewish homosexual. This also gives us evidence of the the gray value for yellow which shows up as lighter than the pink, which is as expected if the two colors were pink and yellow, and this provides even more evidence that the picture above is the pink triangle.

Note some of the related pictures here:

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge

 

[Arauna]

Goodness!  One has to have a magnifying glass to add a positive comment to a picture put in good faith on this forum?

My comment still stands -  I am happy to be associated with those who preferred to be incarcerated than fight in war - whatever the smaller details of the triangle in the picture!

[JW Insider]

25 minutes ago, AllenSmith said:

"The concentration camp prisoner category ‘Bible Student’ at times apparently included a few members from small Bible Student splinter groups,

Thanks Allen. That looks like a reasonable place to start. Thanks for finding a color picture. I still can't tell for sure if it's pink or purple, but the shades are closer here than how they had shown up on the page I linked to, where both colors are also shown. Seems quite possible that "pink-triangle" site owners might have even used pictures of the purple triangle and got them mixed up with the ones they tried to show as pink.

Thanks for the info on the Bible Student splinter groups. I heard it was true, but extra depth on the Nazi-era info is never something I researched for myself.

[HollyW]

8 hours ago, Ann O'Maly said:

Huh? 

I had one of those Huh? moments when I read somewhere that JWs believed Jehovah had brought the Holocaust on them and therefore they shouldn't try to escape from the camps.  That can't be right, can it?

[Arauna]

As a matter of fact the Witnesses were the only ones who were incarcerated who were there by their own free will.  This is why there has been numerous studies done on their mental health.  They found that the witnesses weathered the circumstances very well because they could have walked out any time by signing a repudiation of their faith.  They CHOSE to be there.  Many of the other groups could not choose to be there.  The conditions were terrible as we all know.

I read an article about a sister who repudiated her faith to get out and she said that she had extreme feelings of guilt for many years.... but she was serving Jehovah again with joy.... I thought it was a very good article because it showed that not all were faithful but - like Peter - denied their neutral stance. Like Peter - Jehovah forgave her.

Our decisions always have consequences .... and she had to face hers.  After the holocaust there were Jews and SS who joined Jehovah's people because they were so impressed how the majority of Witnesses conducted themselves.... JWs and their neutral stance truly brought honor to Jehovah.

[Ann O'Maly]

Hahahaha, Allen. Anyone can colorize a black-and-white photo with a purplish tint or any tint you like, really. A genuine color version of that particular photo does not exist. Smh.

And nobody here (Arauna) is denying the Holocaust, or that JWs/Bible Students were thrown into concentration camps, had to wear a purple triangle and were treated appallingly.

What I am pointing out is that the image purporting to be JW detainees at Auschwitz is actually an image from Sachsenhausen and it is unknown who the prisoners were.

Note the caption to the photo on this webpage: http://ww2today.com/13-december-1944-sachsenhausen-concentration-camp-new-arrivals.

They could be anybody - with an added observation that, as JW Insider mentioned, one of them was wearing a double triangle of different colors, one of them shaded considerably darker than the triangles the others are wearing.

In fact, if we put a color picture of an original uniform with purple JW badge into b&w, we get this:

See how dark the purple appears in monochrome. The prisoners' triangles in the OP image were a much lighter shade.

Uniform photo source: http://www.alst.org/pages-us/primary-documents/purple-triangles.html

 

[JW Insider]

21 hours ago, JW Insider said:

Google probably guesses "pink" either because the value of the gray is much closer to the light stripe on the prison uniform and purple was much closer to the dark stripe,

Thanks Ann, for confirmation of this. I was trying to give Allen the benefit of the doubt, because who knows how consistent these colors were? (I suspect they were very consistent, from what I have read about supposed German precision during WWII, but who can really say?) 

 

5 hours ago, Ann O'Maly said:

They could be anybody - with an added observation that, as JW Insider mentioned, one of them was wearing a double triangle of different colors, one of them shaded considerably darker than the triangles the others are wearing.

I was referring to another picture taken at just slightly to the right of the same spot [photographer's POV]  but with a different set of prisoners in that front row. The man in the foreground of that picture appears to have both yellow and pink. Looking at photos of the different colors can help to identify more of the colors and rule out certain colors. 

 

At any rate, I don't think any of us need a physical artifact or photograph to know that there were many faithful Jehovah's Witnesses in the concentration camps. Their faith was amazing considering what they went through.