PROVE ME WRONG! JW's were the only religion to oppose Hitler

by truthsearcher 37 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  JWdaughter

  Individuals in EVERY religion opposed Hitler. It didn't take an organized religion to defeat him. In fact, if it was left up to the WT religion as a whole, he would not BE defeated, since no one would have opposed him, and all would have had the WT tell the world to bend over and take it.

  Notably, the WT didn't really oppose Hitler any more than they opposed the US govt, the British Govt, the Italian govt. . .in fact, they didn't oppose any of them, they 'remained neutral' which indicates that they neither opposed or supported his gov. They tried to get Hitler to prefer them for their lack of support and theological opposition to other govt, Jews, religions, etc. If any person can justify their religious affiliation with something as lame as that, then they are grasping.
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  5go

  If a Witness would be foolish enough to tell me the Witnesses were the only religious affiliated group to oppose the German Nazi political party, I'd ask the Witness how the Witnesses could oppose a political party while staying politically indifferent as they teach? And why did they stop opposing the Nazi party?

  I think gary hit the nail on the head. You can't oppose something and remain neutral about it. Neutality is like being a devil's advocate sometimes. Basicaly the society hung them themshelves with this one.
• 

  Mysterious

  But if you are not for something then maybe you are against it. In that way those neutral would be against something. Okay I admit just trying to stir the pot with this one but isn't that something a jdub might say.
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  Confession

  The Watchtower Society has done a marvelous job of revising history. It so happens I'm presently reading the book Scully referred to: "Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich" by M. James Penton. There's a lot to be learned, but let's just consider portions of the "Declaration of Facts" that was prepared by the Society--and "adopted" at a Berlin convention in 1933.

  "It is falsely charged by our enemies that we have received financial support for our work from the Jews. Nothing is farther from the truth. Up to this hour there never has been the slightest bit of money contributed to our work by Jews. We are the faithful followers of Christ Jesus and believe upon Him as the Savior of the world, whereas the Jews entirely reject Jesus...It has been the commercial Jews of the British-American empire that have built up and carried on Big Business as a means of exploiting and oppressing the peoples of many nations... This fact is so manifest in America that there is a proverb concerning the city of New York which says 'the Jews own it, the Irish Catholics rule it, and the Americans pay the bills.'"

  Do you call this "opposition"?
• 

  Stealth453

  In the "Declaration of Facts", which was dated June 25, 1933, the Watchtower Society tried to distance themselves from the Jews and to curry favor and establish common cause with Hitler.

  "It is falsely charged by our enemies that we have received financial support for our work from the Jews. Nothing is farther from the truth. Up to this hour there never has been the slightest bit of money contributed to our work by Jews."

  Okay, so they had not received funding from the Jews. They made their statement. That should have been sufficient. But the "Declaration" continues:

  "We are the faithful followers of Christ Jesus and believe upon Him as the Savior of the world, whereas the Jews entirely reject Jesus Christ and emphatically deny that he is the Savior of the world sent of God for man's good. This of itself should be sufficient proof to show that we receive no support from Jews and that therefore the charges against us are maliciously false and could proceed only from Satan, our great enemy."

  Was that really necessary? If that weren't sufficient, the next paragraph goes even further:

  "The greatest and most oppressive empire on earth is the Anglo-American empire. By that is meant the British Empire, of which the United States of America forms a part. It has been the commercial Jews of the British-American empire that have built up and carried on Big Business as a means of exploiting and oppressing the peoples of many nations.

  This fact particularly applies to the cities of London and New York, the stronghold of Big Business. This fact is so manifest in America that there is a proverb concerning the city of New York which says: 'The Jews own it, the Irish Catholics rule it, and the Americans pay the bills.' We have no fight with any of these persons mentioned, but, as the witnesses for Jehovah and in obedience to his commandment set forth in the Scriptures, we are compelled to call attention to the truth concerning the same in order that the people may be enlightened concerning God and his purpose."

  It seems to me that the previous statements regarding the Jews are there in order to establish common cause with Hitler. Later in the "Declaration", the Watchtower Society goes even further to do that:

  "The people of Germany have suffered great misery since 1914 and have been the victims of much injustice practiced upon them by others. The nationalists have declared themselves against all such unrighteousness and announced that 'Our relationship to God is high and holy'.

  Since our organization fully endorses these righteous principles and is engaged solely in carrying forth the work of enlightening the people concerning the Word of Jehovah God, Satan by subtilty [sic] endeavors to set the government against our work and destroy it because we magnify the importance of knowing and serving God. Instead of our organization's being a menace to the peace and safety of the government, it is the one organization standing for the peace and safety of this land.

  In the letter to Hitler that accompanied the "Declaration", the WTS continues this theme:

  "The Brooklyn administration of the Watch Tower Society is and in the past has been outstandingly friendly to Germany. For this reason, the president of the Society and seven members of its Board of Directors in the United States were sentenced to 80 years imprisonment because the president refused to use two magazines published by him in the United States for war propaganda against Germany. These two magazines, 'The Watch Tower' and 'Bible Student' [The Bible Students Monthly] were the only magazines in the United States which refused [to publish] war propaganda against Germany and were, for this reason, outlawed and suppressed in the United States during the war."

  Here, the Watchtower Society resorts to an out and out lie in order to cozy up to Hitler. Rutherford and the rest of the board of Directors were not imprisoned for refusing to use their magazines for propaganda against Hitler. I have never seen any mention of this outside this letter. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, I would love to see it. The letter continues:

  "In a similar manner, the administration of our Society not only refused to participate in the horror propaganda against Germany, but it took a position against it. This is emphasized by the attached Declaration which refers to the fact that the circles which led [in promoting] horror propaganda in the United States (commercialistic Jews and Catholics) are also the most eager persecutors of our Society's work and its administration. These and other statements in our Declaration are meant to serve as a rejection of the slanderous claim that the Bible Students are supported by Jews."

  How did the Watchtower take a position against anti-German propaganda? Again, the Watchtower is obviously trying to establish common cause with Hitler.

  Some Jehovah's Witnesses have expressed doubts as to the accuracy or even the existence of the Watchtower Society's letter to Hitler. However they can rea a section about the letter as well as a partial quote from the letter in their own copy of the 1974 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses, page 111 -

  The conventioners returned home tired and many were disappointed. They took 2,100,000 copies of the "declaration" home with them, however, and made fast work of distributing them and sending them to numerous persons in positions of responsibility. The copy sent to Hitler was accompanied by a letter that, in part, read:

  "The Brooklyn presidency of the Watch Tower Society is and always has been exceedingly friendly to Germany. In 1918 the president of the Society and seven members of the Board of Directors in America were sentenced to 80 years' imprisonment for the reason that the president refused to let two magazines in America, which he edited, be used in war propaganda against Germany."

  So obviously the letter existed and the quote that I posted is accurate. What is inaccurate is what Rutherford told Hitler about the length of and reason for their prison sentence.

  First of all, the length of their sentences - from the book "Jehovah's Witnesses - Proclaimers of God's Kingdom" (Proclaimers) - page 69

  On June 21, 1918, J. F. Rutherford and several of his close associates were sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment, having been falsely convicted of conspiracy.

  and again on page 211:

  Shortly after this, members of the Society's administrative staff were arrested, and on June 21, 1918, they were sentenced to 20-year prison terms.

  On page 652, the Proclaimer's book offers a more complete explanation of their sentences:

  Regardless of all of this, on June 20, 1918, the jury returned a verdict finding each of the defendants guilty on each count of the indictment. The next day, seven of them were sentenced to four terms of 20 years each, to be served concurrently. On July 10, the eighth was sentenced to four concurrent terms of 10 years.

  So evidently in an effort to make their sentences look as bad as possible to Hitler, they mentioned 80 years without mentioning that they were, in fact, four twenty year concurrent sentences.

  Now, regarding the reason they were convicted and sentenced, the Proclaimer's book, on pages 650 and 651 says the following:

  The previous day, in Brooklyn, New York, two indictments had been filed against Brother Rutherford and his associates. If the desired results did not come from one case, the other indictment could have been pursued. The first indictment, which laid charges against the greater number of individuals, included four counts: Two charged them with conspiring to violate the Espionage Act of June 15, 1917; and two counts charged them with attempting to carry out their illegal plans or actually doing so. It was alleged that they were conspiring to cause insubordination and refusal of duty in the armed forces of the United States and that they were conspiring to obstruct the recruiting and enlisting of men for such service when the nation was at war, also that they had attempted to do or had actually done both of these things. The indictment made particular mention of publication and distribution of the book The Finished Mystery. The second indictment construed the sending of a check to Europe (which was to be used in the work of Bible education in Germany) to be inimical to the interests of the United States. When the defendants were taken to court, it was the first indictment, the one with four counts, that was pursued.

  Yet another indictment of C. J. Woodworth and J. F. Rutherford under the Espionage Act was at that time pending in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But, according to a letter from John Lord O'Brian dated May 20, 1918, members of the Department of Justice feared that U.S. District Judge Witmer, before whom the case would be tried, would not agree with their use of the Espionage Act to suppress the activity of men who, because of sincere religious convictions, said things that others might construe as antiwar propaganda.

  So there is nothing there, or in any other history of the Watchtower Society that I could find, about them being asked and then refusing to allow the Watchtower Society's magazines to be used for anti-German propaganda. So, in a further effort to curry favor with Hitler, Rutherford lied about why he and his fellow board members were convicted and imprisoned in 1918.
• 

  truthsearcher

  I found this online at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

  "Founded in the United States in the 1870s, the Jehovah's Witnesses organization sent missionaries to Germany to seek converts in the 1890s. By the early 1930s, only 20,000 (of a total population of 65 million) Germans were Jehovah's Witnesses, usually known at the time as "International Bible Students."
  
  Even before 1933, despite their small numbers, door-to-door preaching and the identification of Jehovah's Witnesses as heretics by the mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches made them few friends. Individual German states and local authorities periodically sought to limit the group's proselytizing activities with charges of illegal peddling. There were also outright bans on Jehovah's Witnesses' religious literature, which included the booklets The Watch Tower and The Golden Age. The courts, by contrast, often ruled in favor of the religious minority. Meanwhile, in the early 1930s, Nazi brownshirted storm troopers, acting outside the law, broke up Bible study meetings and beat up, individual Witnesses.
  
  After the Nazis came to power, persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses intensified . Small as the movement was, it offered, in scholar Christine King's words, a "rival ideology" and "rival center of loyalty" to the Nazi movement. Although honest and as law–abiding as their religious beliefs allowed, Jehovah's Witnesses saw themselves as citizens of Jehovah's Kingdom; they refused to swear allegiance to any worldly government. They were not pacifists, but as soldiers in Jehovah's army, they would not bear arms for any nation.
  
  Jehovah's Witnesses, in Germany as in the United States, had refused to fight in World War I. This stance contributed to hostility against them in a Germany still wounded by defeat in that war and fervently nationalistic, attempting to reclaim its previous world stature. In Nazi Germany, Jehovah's Witnesses refused to raise their arms in the "Heil, Hitler!" salute; they did not vote in elections; they would not join the army or the German Labor Front (a Nazi affiliate, which all salaried employees were required to join after 1934).
  
  Jehovah's Witnesses were denounced for their international and American ties, the apparent revolutionary tone of their millennialism (belief in the peaceful 1,000 year heavenly rule over the earth by Christ, preceded by the battle of Armageddon), and their supposed connections to Judaism, including a reliance on parts of the Bible embodying Jewish scripture (the Christian "Old Testament"). Many of these charges were brought against more than 40 other banned religious groups, but none of these were persecuted to the same degree. The crucial difference was, the intensity Witnesses demonstrated in refusing to give ultimate loyalty or obedience to the state.
  In April 1933, four months after Hitler became chancellor, Jehovah's Witnesses were banned in Bavaria and by the summer in most of Germany. Twice during 1933, police occupied the Witnesses' offices and their printing site in Magdeburg and confiscated religious literature. Witnesses defied Nazi prohibitions by continuing to meet and distribute their literature, often covertly. Copies were made from booklets smuggled in mainly from Switzerland.
  
  Initially, Jehovah's Witnesses attempted to fend off Nazi attacks by issuing a letter to the government in October 1934, explaining their religious beliefs and political neutrality. This declaration failed to convince the Nazi regime of the group's harmlessness. For defying the ban on their activities, many Witnesses were arrested and sent to prisons and concentration camps. They lost their jobs as civil servants or employees in private industry and their unemployment, social welfare, and pension benefits.
  
  From 1935 onward, Jehovah's Witnesses faced a Nazi campaign of nearly total persecution. On April 1, 1935, the group was banned nationally by law. The same year, Germany reintroduced compulsory military service. For refusing to be drafted or perform war–related work, and for continuing to meet, Jehovah's Witnesses were arrested and incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps. In 1936 some 400 Jehovah's Witnesses were imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
  
  In 1936 a special unit of the Gestapo (Secret State Police) began compiling a registry of all persons believed to be Jehovah's Witnesses, and agents infiltrated Bible study meetings. By 1939, an estimated 6,000 Witnesses (including those from incorporated Austria and Czechoslovakia) were detained in prisons or camps. Some Witnesses were tortured by police in attempts to make them sign a declaration renouncing their faith, but few capitulated.
  
  In response to Nazi efforts to destroy them, the worldwide Jehovah's Witness organization became a center of spiritual resistance against the Nazis. An international convention of Witnesses, held in Lucerne, Switzerland, in September 1936, issued a resolution condemning the entire Nazi regime. In this text and other literature brought into Germany, writers broadly indicted the Third Reich. Articles strongly denounced the persecution of German Jews, Nazi "savagery" toward Communists, the remilitarization of Germany, the Nazification of schools and universities, Nazi propaganda, and the regime's assault on mainstream churches.
  
  The children of Jehovah's Witnesses also suffered. In classrooms, teachers ridiculed children who refused to give the "Heil, Hitler!" salute or sing patriotic songs. Classmates shunned and beat up young Witnesses. Principals expelled them from schools. Families were broken up as authorities took children away from their parents and sent them to reform schools, orphanages, or private homes, to be brought up as Nazis.
  
  After 1939 most active Jehovah's Witnesses were incarcerated in prisons or concentration camps. Some had fled Germany. In the camps, all prisoners wore markings of various shapes and colors so that guards and camp officers could identify them by category. Witnesses were marked by purple triangular patches. Even in the camps, they continued to meet, pray, and make converts. In Buchenwald concentration camp, they set up an underground printing press and distributed religious tracts.
  
  Conditions in Nazi camps were generally harsh for all inmates, many of whom died from hunger, disease, exhaustion, exposure to the cold, and brutal treatment. But, as psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim and others have noted, Witnesses were uniquely sustained in the camps by the support they gave each other and by their belief that their suffering was part of their work for God. Individual Witnesses astounded their guards with their refusal to conform to military-type routines like roll call or to roll bandages for soldiers at the front. At the same time, Witnesses were considered unusually trustworthy because they refused to escape from camps or physically resist their guards. For this reason, Witnesses were often used as domestic servants by Nazi camp officers and guards.
  According to Rudolf Höss, Commandant of Auschwitz, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler often used the "fanatical faith" of Jehovah's Witnesses as an example to his own SS troops. In his view, SS men had to have the same "unshakable faith" in the National Socialist ideal and in Adolf Hitler that the Witnesses had in Jehovah. Only when all SS men believed as fanatically in their own philosophy would Adolf Hitler's state be permanently secure.
  In the Nazi years, about 10,000 Witnesses, most of them of German nationality, were imprisoned in concentration camps. After 1939, small numbers of Witnesses from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland (some of them refugees from Germany) were arrested and deported to Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and other concentration camps. An estimated 2,500 to 5,000 Witnesses died in the camps or prisons. More than 200 men were tried by the German War Court and executed for refusing military service.
  
  During the liberation of the camps, Jehovah's Witnesses continued their work, moving among the survivors, making converts."

  Do you think this article was written by a JW for the museum? There is no mention of the use of the national anthem's tune in Kingdom Halls or the previous '33 letter.
• 

  truthsearcher

  This is the link to the previously posted article to which I referred. Also, I should clarify, I used the PROVE ME WRONG part to get your attentions! The rest, however, was what was said to me proudly by a JW.

  http://www.ushmm.org/education/resource/jehovahs/jehovahsw.php?menu=/export/home/www/doc_root/education/foreducators/include/menu.txt&bgcolor=CD9544
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  frozen one

  Opposing anything requires action. Did JW's print anti-Hitler literature and distribute it? Did JW's participate in any attempts to overthrow or assassinate Hitler? What action did JW's take in their opposition to Hitler? Opposing one thing generally means supporting something else. Hitler was a politician. What German politician did JW's support during Hitler's rule?

  Saying "JW's were the only religion to oppose Hitler" is a bit like saying "vegetarians are the only eaters to oppose pork."
• 

  garybuss

  Indifference can't be opposition to a Witness. If indifference were opposition, all a Witness would have to do to oppose Satan's organization would be to sit at home and say their indifference was active opposition.
  
  If indifference were opposition, everybody who ignores the Witness people would be opposers. They don't identify indifference towards them as opposition against them.
  
  If opposers against the Witnesses are "active" against the Witnesses, that means for the Witnesses to "oppose" a political party, the Witnesses had to be "active" against the political party, and to be active against a political party is to be "politically active".
  
  So, which is it? Do the Witnesses want to claim they were politically active in opposing the German Nazi Party? Or do the Witnesses want to claim they have a history of being politically indifferent? They can't have it both ways.
  
  I say the Witneses were politically active during World War One and that's why the Society was shut down and the directors thrown in prison in Sedition charges. Sedition is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state. Inciting rebellion against the authority of a state is political activity, not political indifference.
  
  The Witnesses did the same thing in Germany. The Witnesses got their trouble in Nazi Germany because of their political activity, not because of their political indifference. Their mass tract distribution of the "Declaration" was nothing less than a political action that was a clear act of rebellion against the authority of a state. The Witnesses put in print that they disrespected the Catholic Church, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Jewish people, and by their confrontational style and political activity the Witness people showed that they disrespected the Nazi party and the German Chancellor.
  
  The tract campaign was designed to target the Witness people as political activists and political enemies of the state, not to protect them as humble politically indifferent Bible students. The campaign was successful and the German Witness people suffered while Rutherford rode around in his Cadillac and wintered in San Diego California in his custom built mansion.
  
  The German Witness people suffered doing as they were told and the Watch Tower Publishing Corporation prospered. The German Witnesses were set up just as Witness people are set up today. The Watch Tower Publishing Corporation is still exploiting the personal losses of the German Witnesses today.
  
  
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  AK - Jeff

  Penton wrote a book about it - and with all the refs listed here - I think you can prove the guy wrong.

  Jeff