The next day, a small item appeared in the German press, announcing Dickmann’s execution ‘for refusal to fulfil his duty as a soldier’. Dickmann, it was announced, ‘was a “Jehovah’s Witness”; he was a fanatical follower of the international sect of the Earnest Bible Students’. He was the first conscientious objector to be executed, and the sentence was publicised, as so often in Nazi Germany, because it served an educative, exemplary purpose.
