• Imprisonment
    Purple Triangles—“Forgotten Victims” of the Nazi Regime

    • 1 Preceding Lichtenburg and Ravensbrück, Moringen (near Göttingen) was one of the early concentration camps for women (1933-1937). Nearly half of the known women at Moringen were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

      The courtyard at the Moringen concentration camp.

      Maßregelvollzugszentrum Niedersachsen Moringen

      2 Among the Moringen inmates was 32-year-old Katharina Thoenes. The director isolated her and her fellow Witnesses from the others and enforced a correspondence, parcel, and money ban “because the women refused to do sewing for the winter relief work.”

      Concentration camp photos of Katharina Thoenes facing right, to the camera, and left.

      LAV NRW R, RW 0058 Nr. 8433, Erkennungsdienstliches Foto Katharina Thoenes

      Jonathan Stark.

      3 Because he refused to pledge allegiance to the fuehrer, 18-year-old Jonathan Stark was taken to the youth concentration camp of Moringen in 1944.​—(On November 1, 1944, he was hanged as a conscientious objector in Sachsenhausen.)