Johannes Rose was born in Görlitz into a Roma family. His parents were Wilhelm Rose and Sophie Pohl. He also had a brother, Fritz, who was five years older than him. The brothers were German nationals and Catholics. After finishing school, Hans – as Johannes was also known – trained as a cattle and horse dealer. In 1926, he was living in Breslau, where he first came into contact with the Bible Students (known as Jehovah’s Witnesses from 1931 onwards), whom he later joined.

At the end of 1931, Johannes Rose moved to Chemnitz. ‘As the horse trade was a lost cause in those years,’ he attended the Saxon Higher Technical College for the Textile Industry here until early 1933, as he later explained when justifying his career change. After successfully completing his studies, he was granted a large-scale trading licence for the textile industry, which he held until around autumn 1934. His business was located in the suburb of Bernsdorf, in the tenement building at 13 Grenadierstraße (now Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße). On 8 August 1934, he married Theresia Wallus. His wife was regarded by the National Socialists as an ‘Aryan’ and divorced him in 1942.

Johannes Rose was stripped of his German citizenship in 1934. On 11 June 1938, he was arrested by the Gestapo as part of the so-called ‘Arbeitsscheu Reich’ campaign because of his Roma heritage. He was held in police custody in Chemnitz until 17 November 1938, when he was deported, together with his brother Fritz, to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Even whilst in Chemnitz, he had maintained close contact with the Jehovah’s Witnesses – who had been banned and persecuted by the Nazis – and had taken part in their acts of resistance. In Sachsenhausen, he finally joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses and was secretly baptised whilst in the concentration camp. In addition to Sachsenhausen, he was also held in the satellite camps at Fallersleben and Lichterfelde. In Lichterfelde, he was block elder and was described by a fellow prisoner as ‘a studious, ambitious man’, ‘honest and open-minded, a man of integrity and character’.

In the spring of 1945, Johannes Rose was part of a group of 230 Jehovah’s Witnesses on the death march from Sachsenhausen to Schwerin. There, on 28 July 1945, he married Trude Schwonbeck. The couple moved to Chemnitz and found a flat at 14 Dittesstraße. Johannes Rose was once again working as a self-employed livestock trader. His application, submitted on 26 April 1946, for recognition as a ‘victim of fascism’ was rejected by the authorities. A handwritten note on the application read: ‘He was fined in 1946 for profiteering’. As a result, the couple moved back to Schwerin, where Johannes Rose set up a thriving
haulage business.

On 11 February 1948, he received his certificate as a ‘victim of fascism’ there. Following the ban on the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the GDR, he fled with his family to West Berlin on 14 September 1950, narrowly escaping arrest. Just a few days later, he was stripped of his status as a ‘victim of fascism’ by the Mecklenburg Regional Committee of the VdN. The reason was his religious affiliation, which is why, on 27 April 1951, he was sentenced in absentia ‘for incitement to boycott democratic institutions, a crime under Article 6 of the Constitution and Control Council Directive 38, Section II, Article III A III”, by the Grand Criminal Chamber of the Schwerin Regional Court. Johannes Rose was one of 24 survivors from an extended family of 180 people. 156 of his relatives were murdered by the Nazis
– most of them in Auschwitz, including his stepmother and his four half-siblings. Wilhelm Rose, his father, had lived in Berlin for a long time under an assumed name without being recognised
. However, a careless letter revealed his true identity, with the result that he was beaten up in the street by Nazi henchmen. Shortly afterwards, he died in hospital on 8 September 1942.

The struggle for ‘reparations’ in West Berlin brought further worries for Johannes Rose, his wife and his four children. The application process was cumbersome and the financial compensation to which they were entitled was paid out only very slowly. His health also deteriorated, forcing him to give up the textile business he had founded three years earlier in Berlin-Kreuzberg in 1954, and the family fell into poverty.

In 1962, Johannes Rose died at the age of 53 following a heart attack.