I find Google to be a great way to research especially if there is no one to do it for you immediately handy.
Religion, oppose, hitler (great way to start)
PROVE ME WRONG! JW's were the only religion to oppose Hitler
by truthsearcher 37 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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rockhound
Here is something that may be of interest:
I found this here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_7_132/ai_n15660325
Polish Catholics and their church were left to suffer in isolation, and their suffering intensified until 1942. The Germans, knowing Catholicism to be a sacramental and hierarchical religion, attacked the church at these levels. Thirty-nine of western Poland's forty-six bishops were deported, imprisoned, or otherwise put down. Priests were jailed or sent to concentration camps--2,800 to Dachau alone, of whom all but 816 died. In one diocese, 291 of 646 priests were killed. By mid-1942, only 10 priests remained in the diocese of Gnesen to administer the sacraments to 359,000 Catholics. A staggering 20 percent of Poland's clergy failed to survive the war.
Because he believed the war effort required internal unity, Hitler did not allow high-ranking subordinates such as Himmler and Martin Bormann to persecute the church to this extent in Germany. But no such restriction inhibited them in Poland, where the hierarchy were suppressed through deportation and arrest, and where religious communities were suppressed. The Nazis closed innumerable churches and used many as barracks, garages, or warehouses. They shut down seminaries, forbade ordinations, and banned Catholic organizations. Administering the sacraments was strictly limited, especially Sunday Eucharist and confession. Or, if confession was allowed, the penitent was not allowed to receive Communion (at the time, the two sacraments were usually taken together). Thus did the Nazis attempt to disrupt religious life entirely in occupied Poland.
Killing was widespread as well. Gauleiter Arthur Greiser, the Nazi administrator of the Wartheland, killed thousands of Catholics in northwestern Poland. Throughout the war, hundreds of thousands of Poles were shipped to Germany as forced laborers. The bodies of those who died in transit were thrown into roadside ditches. The Germans also sterilized young Polish men and women by using x-rays on their reproductive organs. And as they had done earlier in Germany, they killed patients in Polish mental hospitals. At a facility in Chelm, 428 children were given morphine, then shot. Many patients in medical hospitals were simply thrown out. Initially, most of those imprisoned or murdered by the Nazis were Catholic leaders in the business, political, academic, and religious realms. Until 1942, for example, there were more Catholic prisoners in Auschwitz than Jews.
ROCKHOUND
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Sheri
I was back home visiting family I found in an old book an article from 1937 newspaper that had been ripped out about something unrelated to your post, but what was interesting is that on the same page was article about a bishop in the catholic church that was writing about the wrong of the Nazi regime and Hitler did not like this. I remember thinking here is real proof that not just JWs were speaking out and not all catholic bishops remained quiet. Next time I am back home I will make a copy of it if I can remember which book it was in.
Love & Peace,
Sheri
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JWdaughter
Rockhound, I have read this before and forgotten the details. Thanks for 'digging' it up for us. Very informative.
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shadow
The actions of JW's do stand out among other denominations under Nazi Germany.
Those trying to revise this history are close cousins to the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has described the Holocaust as "a myth".
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undercover
Rockhound
I was gonna post on that but you beat me to it and did a better job.
I learned about the Polish priests at the Holocaust museum. I was a bit taken aback by that because I had been under the JW assumption that all Catholics had pretty much fallen in line with the Nazi party. Afterwards I did some more research and was surprised by what I learned.
Another instance of being duped by the WTS to believe something that wasn't entirely true.
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jschwehm
I learned about the Polish priests at the Holocaust museum. I was a bit taken aback by that because I had been under the JW assumption that all Catholics had pretty much fallen in line with the Nazi party. Afterwards I did some more research and was surprised by what I learned.
You might find the story of Maximillian Kolbe quite inspiring. The Nazis hated this priest and he was eventually murdered by the Nazis.
Also you might find the following document by Pope Pius XI written in 1937 interesting.........compare it to the JWs' Declaration of Facts. Here is the link:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/ENCYC/P11BRENN.HTM
Jeff S.
P.S. Years ago I had a discussion with some JWs who were in the Student Union at The University of Arkansas distributing their literature. (Yes, there is a JW student association at the University of Arkansas when I was a graduate student there in the 1990's.) One of them said that only the JWs stood up to the Nazis. So, I told them about the Declaration of Facts. I even tried to give them a copy of the Declaration of Facts. Anyway, the JWs that read it were extremely shaken up by it and, of course, after they read it they said that it was a phony document filled with lies. So, I suggested that they look for a copy of it in their Kingdom Hall library or write the Watchtower Society for a copy like I did. However, for most of the JWs at the Student Union that day, that was not an option that they would consider. Their response to me was to say that I was not sincere in wanting to know the "truth" so they were not going to waste their time with me anymore. However, one young man was quite curious and a bit more open to doing some research on his own than the ladies he was with. I think that perhaps a seed was planted that day.
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shadow
A page from the sterling record of Catholicism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Pavelic
Pavelic remained in Italy until the beginning of World War II. In 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded and conquered and he became the leader (Poglavnik) of the so-called Independent State of Croatia - a puppet state of Nazi Germany proclaimed on April 10, 1941.
As the leader of the Ustaše he directly ordered, organised and conducted a campaign of terror against Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and communist Croats. The extent of this campaign reached the proportions of genocide. Pavelic's Ustaše regime was the most murderous Nazi client state in the entirety of occupied Europe [1] [2] . Numerous surviving testimonies from the Nuremberg Trial and the German and the Italian war archives bear witness to bestialities perpetrated against the civilian population of the state. According to these testimonies, the Nazi officers themselves were horrified by the scenes of atrocities committed by his Ustaše, forcing them to stop the bloodshed (Jasenovac, 1941), arrest one of the most notorious Ustaše (Fra Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, Banja Luka, 1942) and disarm an Ustaše detachment (Eastern Bosnia, 1942). These atrocities were recorded in novelistic literature and poetry: Malaparte's Kaputt Basket of oysters chapter, inspired by the widespread practices of Ustaše's gouging out the eyes of Serbs; Kovacic 's Jama (The Pit), where Ustaše tied Serbs with barbed wire and dropped them into pits; Oljaca's Kozara; Svetina's Volcici (The Wolf Puppies). As far as the Serb population of the puppet state was concerned, the stated aim was the extermination of a third of their numbers, exile for another third, and a forced conversion to Catholicism for yet another. The Ustaše succeeded in reaching their first goal, exterminating close to one third of the Serbs and possibly more. Pavelic's regime was not officially recognised by the Vatican, but at no point did the Church condemn the genocide and forced conversions to Catholicism perpetrated by the Ustaše. [3] Soon after coming to power in April 1941 Pavelic was given a private audience in Rome by Pope Pius XII, an act for which the Pope was widely criticised. A British Foreign Office memo on the subject described Pius as "the greatest moral coward of our age" for receiving Pavelic. [4]
[ edit ] Post-war
In May 1945 he fled via Bleiburg to Austria, where he stayed for a few months before transferring to Rome, where he was hidden by members of the Roman Catholic Church (as is documented in de-classified US Intelligence documents) [1]).
His stay in Rome was known to the American Counterintelligence Corps, but they apparently were not interested in the arrest of any non-Communists from eastern parts of Europe. Six months later, he fled to South America. Upon arriving in Argentina via the ratlines, he became a security advisor to Juan Peron. Peron issued 34,000 visas to Croatians: both the Nazi collaborators and the anti-communists that fled from the new communist government led by Josip Broz Tito.
In April 1957 he was shot twice in an assassination attempt. The operation was attributed to the Yugoslav intelligence services, although the possibility that this was an attempt at revenge by a Chetnik activist was not dismissed. Pavelic was subsequently forced to flee Argentina to avoid arrest and extradition, and he found refuge in Spain, where he died in Madrid in late 1959, from complications of his wounds.
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GermanXJW
According to Detlef Garbe, another religion that opposed Hitler as a group an refused military service was the "Seventh-day Adventist Church, Reform Movement". They were even smaller than the Bible Students.
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Kenneson
The following link indicates that not only Jehovah's Witnesses, but Pentecostals as well were for the most part all in concentration camps at one time or another. It also discusses the persecution of Catholics and Protestants. The discussion on Jehovah's Witnesses and Pentecostals can be found on page 5 under "The Christian Sects."
http://org.law.rutgers.edu/publications/law-religion/publications/nazimasterplan02.pdf
This link is also of interest.
http://users.binary.net/polycarp/piusxii.html
Also, a debate on the topic can be found at
http://www.topix.net/forum/who/jehovahs-witnesses/TH61JHPQ6C9QBF8PI
One guy there tried to say that the Jews are a race and not a religion. He also argued that JWs were the only ones (religion wise) who had to wear a badge (purple triangle). My thought was did it make someone of a religion less persecuted if he didn't have to wear a badge?