expelling children. The Supreme Court decision prompted a wave of violence against U.S. Witnesses, mostly in small towns and rural areas, where they were beaten, castrated, tarred and feathered and in some cases killed. More than 2,500 cases were reported from 1940 to 1944. Hundreds of Witnesses were arrested and charged with crimes including sedition. The Witnesses responded with campaigns of mass witnessing, descending on hostile towns in their hundreds, and organizing "information marches", some long, in which members wore sandwich boards and held placards and banners. In Germany, preaching activity was banned and the Watch Tower Society headquarters was seized and closed. Thousands of Witnesses were arrested on peddling charges from 1922. In 1933, following the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, government restrictions were tightened, prompting the public distribution of more than two million copies of a Declaration of Facts in which the Witnesses protested at their treatment and requested the right to preach. It had little effect: Witnesses were fired from their jobs and about 2,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps. Jehovah's Witnesses were the first Christian denomination to be banned and the most extensively persecuted Christian group during the Nazi era. Witnesses in Japan were imprisoned and tortured. Members in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Britain were imprisoned as conscientious objectors. The Witnesses were banned in Germany in 1936, Canada in July 1940 and Australia in January 1941. Under Rutherford's leadership, a legal staff was developed to establish their right to preach and their right to refrain from nationalistic ceremonies. Between 1938 and 1955 the Watch Tower Society won 36 out of 45 religion-related court cases. These legal battles resulted in significant expansions in freedom of speech and religion in both countries. Writers including American essayist Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, William Whalen, Alan Rogerson and William Schnell have claimed the group was complicit in its own victimisation in the United States, often goading authorities with cartoons and books that ridiculed and denigrated church and state and provocative mass assemblies in which the Witnesses flooded towns with preachers. They claim a deliberate course of martyrdom served to attract society's dispossessed and oppressed members and also provided apparent validation of the "truth" of the Watchtower cause as evidenced by the level of opposition from the outside world as they struggled to serve God. 1942–1975 Rutherford was succeeded by Nathan Homer Knorr. Knorr's tenure as president was notable for the