In the fifty years in which representatives of two ideological messages of salvation ruled in Germany, the religious community of Jehovah's Witnesses was banned. Both regimes believed they saw an imminent threat to their rule in the refusal of required gestures of loyalty, in the denial of any military or military service, and in the illegal continuation of the religious life. Many of the believers died, thousands were imprisoned, lost their jobs, or otherwise harassed. Neglected for many years by the public and by historical research, the Jehovah's Witnesses are no longer "forgotten victims".