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Familie Zietlow Anfang der 1930er Jahre
© Privatbesitz

Karl Zietlow * 1901

Lehmweg 6–8 (Hamburg-Nord, Hoheluft-Ost)

1940 KZ Neuengamme
ertrunken auf MS Thielbek versenkt

Karl Zietlow, born on 24 Jan. 1901 in Schievelbein (Pomerania, today Swidwin in Poland), arrested on 15 Sept. 1937, perished on the "SS Thielbek” on 3 May 1945 in the bombing in the Bay of Neustadt

Lehmweg 6–8

"Jehovah’s Witnesses’ efforts to persevere in their faith and resist Nazi coercion” were exemplified by the life story of ‘group servant’ or ‘ministerial servant’ (Gruppendiener) Karl Zietlow, as Detlef Garbe wrote in a 1986 article on the forgotten victims of the Nazi regime. Karl Zietlow was the first born of six children. His parents had met at the hospital in Schievelbein (Pomerania), where they had worked in the medical service. To get an apartment, the father applied to the Reich Railroad Company for a job, and the young couple was given a track house. They also ran a small farm on the side. Karl grew up there, very secluded from the world. After finishing school, he did not learn a profession, but worked in his parents’ house and in agriculture.

Probably at his father’s insistence, he enlisted as an NCO candidate school in Treptow in 1918, even as the war was still ongoing. After the end of the war, some of the students were transferred to the Hamburg police, and so from 1919 onward, he worked for the barracked Uniformed Police (Schutzpolizei) in Hamburg, where accommodation, a uniform, and food were provided. Karl Zietlow had already met the "Bible Students,” as the Jehovah’s Witnesses then called themselves, through relatives at his parents’ house in Pomerania. His mother and siblings had converted, and he, too, oriented his life toward their teachings since the early 1920s. At this time, he also met his wife Elise, who did not belong to the religious group.

His son Karl-Heinz describes the living conditions at Wendenstrasse 343b in his autobiography as follows: "Mom’s five siblings lived in the same apartment ... Right next to the house, the ‘Produktion’ consumer cooperative operated a large meat products factory. Large cooling units were making a lot of noise, day and night. It was an unpleasant sound. An industrial canal could be seen from the apartment windows.” Karl Zietlow stayed overnight in the barracks and only came to Hammerbrook during the day. It was not before 22 Dec. 1923 that Elise and Karl were able to marry.

Police sergeant (Wachtmeister) Karl Zietlow first came into conflict with his employer during the Communist workers’ uprising in Hamburg in 1923: He refused to use the weapon against workers and was dismissed from the police service. For the young family – son Karl-Heinz was born in 1922 – hard times of unemployment and odd jobs began during the economic crisis until Karl Zietlow finally found a permanent job again in 1929 as a driver of the company ambulance at Blohm & Voss.

Since 1927, the family – grown by two daughters – lived in their first separate apartment on "Im Winkel” in Eppendorf. His consistent refusal to extend the Nazi salute ["Heil Hitler!”] as a uniformed member of the company fire brigade led to his dismissal from Blohm & Voss in Feb. 1934. According to his son, "He said that salvation [Heil] is not Hitler, but that salvation is due only to Christ, so he cannot greet Hitler with ‘salvation.’” Without a permanent contract of employment, he then laboriously kept his family afloat outside Hamburg by doing "public relief work.” In the ensuing period, the Zietlows had to move with the three children from the beautiful spacious apartment into a small place at Lehmweg 7. Despite the poverty and the consequences of his refusal for himself and his family, Karl Zietlow was committed to the Bible Students, among whom he had no official function, however. In the fall of 1934, after it was decided at a conference of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Basel to remain active in the Nazi Reich despite the ban, Karl Zietlow participated in bible study meetings and even held one in his apartment. Of course, there was no lack of intimidation by the state and Zietlow received more and more visits from the Gestapo, which his son describes as follows: "In our two-and-a-half-room apartment, I slept in the living room. The Gestapo used to come in the evenings. ... When the doorbell rang in the evening, father would go to the front door and then into the living room with Gestapo officials. I was listening and I noticed that some of them were former police buddies, because officers were saying ‘du’ to father and said ‘Karl’ directly to him. Words were uttered like, ‘Karl, just let it go, think of your family.’” After a search of the apartment of the Hamburg leader of the Bible Students, his notebook fell into the hands of the Gestapo, in which the names of 22 leaders of the district groups, including "Eppendorf, Zietlow,” were recorded. On 1 Feb. 1935, Karl Zietlow was arrested as one of the last district leaders and sentenced to six months in prison by the Hanseatic Special Court (Hanseatisches Sondergericht). After a short time in freedom again, he sought contact with well-known Jehovah’s Witnesses and tried to spread their magazine, the illegal Wachturm (Watchtower).

He became a "group servant” for the Hoheluft, Eppendorf, Winterhude, Nord-Barmbek, and Gross Borstel cells. As "group servant,” he was responsible for the conspiratorial organization of the work of preaching and bible studies at home. He also provided the group with religious literature and maintained contacts with the other Hamburg groups. The Gestapo searched his house sporadically and did not find any incriminating material, although the entire distribution of illegally produced writings ran through Zietlow. If the printed material was not sufficient, he copied the Watchtower in several carbon copies by hand, also taking part in the so-called "door-to-door service.” Despite all caution, the Gestapo arrested him again on 15 Sept. 1937 and committed him to the Fuhlsbüttel police prison (KolaFu). Karl Zietlow was subsequently sentenced to three years in the Wolfenbüttel penitentiary. He experienced this stay not as punishment, but as a test before his God Jehovah and his Son Jesus Christ. "Yes, it was always my mother’s suffering that father had much less time for the family than for preaching the ‘Word,’” wrote his son about Elise Zietlow, who was not a Jehovah’s Witness.

During a short prison leave in the spring of 1940, tensions arose between the parents: "My mother said, ‘now Karl, put an end to it,’ but my father remained adamant” and he persisted in refusing to sign the ‘Declaration of Commitment’ to no longer oppose the Nazi state in the future and to renounce the Bible Students Association. Therefore, he was transferred to the Neuengamme concentration camp on 15 Sept. 1940, assigned prisoner number 2,969, and labeled with the purple triangle.

There are only few traces regarding his time in Neuengamme. He probably worked in the "Elbe command” and then in the "concrete command.” Czech political prisoner Frantisek Vala recalled: "With the help of my comrade Zietlow, I got out of the clay pit (Detlef Garbe’s note: this was where the punishment battalion worked in Neuengamme) into the command in which the concrete slabs were manufactured. I worked there for three months with my comrade Zietlow.”

Time and again, former police comrades tried to persuade him to sign the aforementioned "Declaration of Commitment” in order to be released from detention. In 1943, they even arranged a meeting with his family in the Fuhlsbüttel police prison (KolaFu). His son reported that the officials wanted to dissuade him from the Bible students with words like "Karl, it is nonsense what you are doing” and "Karl, have it out with your family.” But Karl Zietlow insisted he could not take an oath on Adolf Hitler. That two-hour meeting was the last time his family members were allowed to see him.

The last witness who gave an account of Karl Zietlow was Karl Hanl, who met him as a Kapo [prisoner acting as an overseer] in the "Weeding Command”: "He was a very dear comrade. ... He worked just like us. He was not spurring us on or anything like that. But someone had to do it [be the Kapo].”

In the summer of 1945, Elise Zietlow learned from the British military government in Hamburg that her husband was one of about 7000 Neuengamme prisoners who had perished on the "SS Thielbek” during the attack of British fighter bombers on ships in the Bay of Neustadt on 3 May. In the course of the evacuation of the concentration camp in Apr. 1945, these prisoners were driven on ships in the Bay of Neustadt.

It was not until the late 1950s that Karl-Heinz Zietlow was able to locate the remains of his father: "We knew his prisoner number from the letters from the concentration camp. This number was listed by the Working Group Neuengamme as ‘unknown.’ Then we looked in the list of numbers. There we found the following note: ‘No. 2,969 – unknown – Neuengamme concentration camp. On 1 Nov. 1950, on the occasion of the exhumation of the mass grave in the meadow area along Haffkrug beach street, six corpses were found, including this fabric number.” Karl Zietlow was buried at the Cemetery of Honor for Concentration Camp Victims in Haffkrug on the Baltic Sea.


Translator: Erwin Fink
Kindly supported by the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung, Hamburg.

Stand: May 2019
© Holger Tilicki

Quellen: Garbe, "Gott mehr gehorchen", in: Verachtet, 1986, S. 199, 201, 206, 207; Zietlow, Karl-Heinz, Hamburg 2003, S. 11; Rundbrief der Willi-Bredel-Gesellschaft 2006, Seite 15–17; Brief der Zeugen Jehovas, Geschichtsarchiv, Selters vom 8.12.2006; Rundbrief der Willi-Bredel-Gesellschaft 2009, Seite 48; Garbe, "Gedenkstätten-Aktivisten", in: Beiträge, 11, 2009, S. 177, 178.
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