'Choose to Remember' on International Holocaust Remembrance Day

The United Nations General Assembly designated Jan. 27—the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau—as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

On this annual day of commemoration, the UN urges every member state to honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism and to develop educational programs to help prevent future genocides.

According to a press release sent by Jehovah’s Witnesses, few people know that the Nazis’ victims included thousands of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who suffered for their Christian faith. Their camp uniform is shown above.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, also then known as Bible Students, were “the only group in the Third Reich to be persecuted on the basis of their religious beliefs alone,” said Professor Robert Gerwarth.

The Nazi regime branded Witnesses “enemies of the State,” according to historian Christine King, because of “their very public refusal to accept even the smallest elements of [Nazism], which didn’t fit their faith and their beliefs.”

According to the National WWII Museum, “On assuming power as absolute ruler of the German state, Hitler began a systematic campaign to strip Jews of their property and their jobs in academia, the judiciary, the military, and the civil service. Synagogues were defiled and burned. Jewish businesses were boycotted or shut down. The Nuremburg Laws of 1935 denied Jews their German citizenship, forbade Jews to marry non-Jews, and took away most of their political rights. Jews became scapegoats for everything awful that had happened to Germany over the previous several decades: inflation, economic depression, the loss of World War I, and the punitive Treaty of Versailles.”

The Holocaust ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum invites all to “choose to remember” and observe Holocaust Remembrance Day.