The cook Therese Kühner, born on April 25, 1884 in Unterweikershofen, married a musician in 1914. In 1929 she joined the Bible Students movement, which soon changed its name to Jehovah’s Witnesses. During the Nazi period this religious community was banned and its members relentlessly persecuted. In the concentration camps, Jehovah’s Witnesses were identified with a “purple triangle” symbol on their prisoner uniform. Of the approximately 25,000 members of this movement in the German Reich, about 10,700 have been documented as persecuted under the Nazi regime. About 9,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses were imprisoned and 1,000 murdered, including Therese Kühner. At the latest since spring 1942 Therese Kühner was receiving banned writings from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and sharing them. She also hosted Bible circles and meetings of Jehovah’s Witnesses in her apartment at Auenstraße 15 in Munich. On August 2, 1943 Therese Kühner and her sister-in-law Else Danhofer were arrested. The Gestapo (Secret Police) confiscated a printing machine and several packets of sticker paper. On August 23, 1944, after being held more than a year in prisons in Munich and Landshut, Therese Kühner was transferred to the women’s prison in Berlin-Moabit. On August 30, 1944 the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) sentenced her, Else Danhofer and two other Jehovah’s Witnesses “to death and permanent loss of honor” for the crime of “Wehrkraftzersetzung” (undermining military force). The court considered it proven that they had been “active to a significant extent on behalf of the forbidden International Bible Students Association, especially by distributing anti-Reich writings” until 1943. Therese Kühner’s plea for clemency, in which she stated that she was unaware of having been guilty of such a serious crime, was rejected. She was beheaded in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison on October 6, 1944. (text Christoph Wilker, editior C. Fritsche, translation T. Axelrod)
