My family was somewhat different, but the result was the same, although knowing there were serious flaws, my family would pick and choose what they privately felt, thinking that God somehow would fix it. The second generation, especially, since it seemed more likely they would live through the Big A. But this family thinking, made me always look at WTS doctrines and policies with some skepticism.
So I heard a lot of private debate about certain doctrines, my family actually looking at the scriptures and seeing the flaws. Three times at least it seemed they were "vindicated" when the WTS changed their position who the "superior authorities" were and that the GT had not started in 1914 and took a hiatus in 1918 to start up again in the near future; rather that it was still in the near future (very soon now as the WTS likes to say). The WTS came out in 1969.
And finally, from 1966 on when the concept that 1975 would be the end of 6,000 years of human history and that only left 1,000 years for the Millennial rule of the Messianic Kingdom over the earth, that humankind was fast approaching the beginning of the GT and its culmination in 1975. My family though had several points that countered that: 1) Jesus knew when Adam and Eve had been created, after all the WTS says that he helped God in that creation (and the angel that became Satan was also there); so Jesus would have known when the end was coming while he was on earth despite his statement that he did not know. 2) Matthew 24:44, Jesus said that whenever you thought the end would come, it would not come. So since the WTS was focusing on 1975, then the end was not coming in 1975. And my family was vindication when the WTS dialed it back in 1975 for those same reasons.
GT did not start in 1914 (as well as several other flip-flop explanations)
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1999323#h=14:0-15:594
However, in later years we have come to see things differently. On Thursday, July 10, 1969, at the “Peace on Earth” International Assembly in New York City, F. W. Franz, then vice president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, gave an electrifying talk. In reviewing the previous understanding of Jesus’ prophecy, Brother Franz said: “The explanation was given that the ‘great tribulation’ had begun in 1914 C.E. and that it was not allowed to run its full course then but God stopped World War I in November of 1918. From then on God was allowing an interval for the activity of his anointed remnant of elect Christians before he let the final part of the ‘great tribulation’ resume at the battle of Armageddon.”
12 Then a significantly adjusted explanation was offered: “To correspond with the events of the first century, . . . the antitypical ‘great tribulation’ did not begin in 1914 C.E. Rather, what took place upon Jerusalem’s modern antitype in 1914-1918 was merely ‘a beginning of pangs of distress’ . . . The ‘great tribulation’ such as will not occur again is yet ahead, for it means the destruction of the world empire of false religion (including Christendom) followed by the ‘war of the great day of God the Almighty’ at Armageddon.” This meant that the entire great tribulation was yet ahead.
SUPERIOR AUTHORITIES (1961/1962)
https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/pc/r1/lp-e/1200027525/8/9
Superior authorities no longer God and Jesus but the secular governments, but relative. Somehow that one little word made it a new concept. So while the WTS was very wrong about the SA being God and Jesus, they felt that misunderstanding protected its members from giving anything to the secular governments, which can show what the status between the WTS and Hitler was combative, especially after the suck-up letters of 1933 and 1934 did not work.
https://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/hitler-nazi.php
Scans of original letter in German and translation
Text of original letter in the 1934 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses
