{"id":6626,"date":"2023-01-22T14:29:03","date_gmt":"2023-01-22T11:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/?p=6626"},"modified":"2023-01-22T14:29:03","modified_gmt":"2023-01-22T11:29:03","slug":"hours-from-execution-by-the-nazis-judith-refused-to-deny-her-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/hours-from-execution-by-the-nazis-judith-refused-to-deny-her-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"Hours from execution by the Nazis, Judith refused to deny her faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

In June 1942, Judith Hochegger sat in a German jail cell, hours from her execution. Her situation looked hopeless. Her \u201ccrime\u201d was following a religion that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler didn\u2019t like \u2013 the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses.<\/p>\n

\"Judith
Judith Hochegger was persecuted for being a Jehovah\u2019s Witness.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But there was an extraordinary reprieve. She prayed for God to save her, and at 3am, an hour before the planned beheading, Hochegger had a stroke and was taken to hospital. The execution was called off.<\/p>\n

In 1940, she had been \u201cwitnessing\u201d, or preaching to colleagues, at a factory where she worked as a cleaner and commented that a picture of Hitler should be cleaned.<\/p>\n

She was dobbed in and police found copies of the banned Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses magazine The Watchtower in her apartment in the Austrian town of Waidhofen, west of Vienna. She was tried and jailed in Aichach, Germany.<\/p>\n

After two years, she refused to stop preaching in prison and was sentenced to death. The Nazis offered to free Hochegger if she signed a document renouncing her beliefs, but she refused.<\/p>\n

After the stroke and cancelled execution, Hochegger was resentenced and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp, north of Berlin, where she was subjected to starvation, disease and physical abuse for the next three years.<\/p>\n

In later life, after migrating to Moe in the Latrobe Valley, about 135 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, she would tell her daughter, Louise Gahleitner, of her horrific experiences.<\/p>\n

Gahleitner says her mother recalled guards spraying water on inmates outside in winter, killing many of them. Hochegger and her friends would sing hymns and hold each other.<\/p>\n

\u201cClothes started to freeze, the body went numb, and they didn\u2019t feel anything,\u201d Gahleitner says.<\/p>\n

Gahleitner, now 92 and a great-grandmother, recently recorded her family\u2019s extraordinary survival story on video for the first time, shared exclusively with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.<\/p>\n

In the lead-up to International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, she wants to raise awareness about how Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses were persecuted for refusing military service, for not joining Nazi organisations, or for not pledging allegiance to Hitler.<\/p>\n

According to the church, under the Nazi regime, about 10,000 Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses were sent to prisons and camps, and more than 1500 were murdered.<\/p>\n

Gahleitner was one of 860 children taken from their families; she did not see her mother for five years, from the ages of 10 to 15.<\/p>\n

She was sent to foster homes. At the first one, she was exploited as a servant and ran away, sleeping in an empty house until a social worker sent her to a family in Hayingen, Germany, that treated her well.<\/p>\n

Gahleitner vividly remembers the joyful reunion with her mother.<\/p>\n

In May 1945, after Hochegger was liberated from Ravensbruck, so determined was she to see 15-year-old Louise that she walked the 750 kilometres to her.<\/p>\n

Her mother was \u201cskin and bones\u201d and wore her blue and grey striped camp jacket.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe said, \u2018You\u2019re not my Louisa, you are too tall.\u2019 When she left me, I was little. I was now a head taller than she was.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen she gave me a big hug and we both started to cry. That\u2019s when I realised, my mother is back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gahleitner says her mother \u2013 who joined Gahleitner and her husband Karl in Moe in 1964 aged 65, and who died there in 1979 aged 81 \u2013 had a hard life.<\/p>\n

She was cast out by her Catholic family aged 14 when she converted to the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses, and in 1930 she was abandoned by her husband when she was pregnant with Gahleitner. Her son, Kornelius, died fighting in World War II in Greece.<\/p>\n

Gahleitner says she cannot believe that \u201ca person can go through so much\u201d, but that Hochegger was a loving person and was never bitter or angry.<\/p>\n

In her later years, Hochegger worshipped at the Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses Kingdom Hall in Moe.<\/p>\n

She forgave those who persecuted her.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost people wouldn\u2019t [forgive them] but my mother wasn\u2019t the type,\u201d Gahleitner says. \u201cShe knew God will take care of it. She was such a lovely person. She believed in God and God was her leader and whatever she felt to do, to please God, she did. And anger is not what pleases God.\u201d<\/p>\n

She admires her mother and other Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses for their integrity. \u201cSign the paper and stay alive, that was their choice, but they decided to keep their faith and die for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was a very humble person but also very firm. She was a very strong-willed person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brad Hall, a Melbourne-based Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses spokesperson, said he felt overwhelmed when he heard Gahleitner\u2019s story. He had never met a Jehovah\u2019s Witness survivor of Nazism and hadn\u2019t known there were any living in Australia.<\/p>\n

Hall said Jehovah\u2019s Witnesses are still persecuted in countries such as Russia and Eritrea, where followers of the faith have been jailed and tortured.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In June 1942, Judith Hochegger sat in a German jail cell, hours from her execution. Her situation looked hopeless. Her \u201ccrime\u201d was following a religion that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler didn\u2019t like \u2013 the Jehovah\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6627,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-germany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6628,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6626\/revisions\/6628"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}