Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses in Nazi Germany  Jehovah's Witnesses suffered religious persecution in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 after refusing to perform military service, join Nazi organizations or give allegiance to the Hitler regime. An estimated 10,000 Witnesses—half of the number of members in Germany during that period—were imprisoned, including 2000 who were sent to Nazi concentration camps. An estimated 1200 died in custody, including 250 who were executed. They were the first Christian denomination banned by the Nazi government and the most extensively and intensively persecuted. Unlike Jews and Romani, who were persecuted on the basis of their ethnicity, Jehovah's Witnesses could escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs by signing a document indicating renunciation of their faith, submission to state authority, and support of the German military. Historian Sybil Milton concludes that "their courage and defiance in the face of torture and death punctures the myth of a monolithic Nazi state ruling over docile and submissive subjects." Despite early attempts to demonstrate shared goals with the National Socialist regime, the group came under increasing public and governmental persecution from 1933, with many expelled from jobs and schools, deprived of income, and suffering beatings and imprisonment. Historians are divided over whether the Nazis intended to exterminate them, but several authors have claimed the Witnesses' outspoken condemnation of the Nazis contributed to their level of suffering. Jehovah's Witnesses were an outgrowth of the United States-based International Bible Students, who began missionary work in Europe in the 1890s. A German branch office of the Watch Tower Society opened in Elberfeld in 1902. By 1933, almost 20,000 Witnesses were counted as active door-to-door preachers, and their annual Memorial service was attracting almost 25,000 people. In Dresden, there were more Bible Students than in New York, where the Watch Tower Society was headquartered. Members of the movement, who were known as "Ernste Bibelforscher", or Earnest Bible Students, had attracted opposition since the end of World War I, with accusations that they were Bolsheviks, communists and covertly Jewish. From 1920, the German Evangelical Church called for a ban on Watch Tower Society publications, which were engaging in increasing amounts of antichurch polemic. Through the remainder of the 1920s, opposition mounted from a combination of church and Völkisch movement agitation and pamphlet campaigns. Nazis began to harass Bible Students, with SA members also disrupting meetings. From 1922, German Bible Students were arrested on charges of illegal peddling as they publicly distributed Watch Tower Society literature.