[b]The Watchtower do try hard to hide the painful facts about their war history. Tis is from the "researcher" Jolene Chu, from the Watchtower Society:/b]
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The Internet Anti-Fascist: Sunday, 11 January 1997
FTP Supplement #1 (#51): Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nazi Genocide
1) Jolene Chu (Researcher, Watch Tower), post to H-HOLOCAUST list, 30
Dec 97
2) Jolene Chu (Researcher, Watch Tower), post to H-HOLOCAUST list, 6
Jan 98
3) no author, "The Holocaust: Who Spoke Out," _Awake!_, 22 Aug 95
< ftp://ftp.nyct.net/pub/users/tallpaul/publish/tinaf/tinaf51.txt>;
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The following from the ftp address above:
The Internet Anti-Fascist: Sunday, 11 January 1997
FTP Supplement #1 (#51): Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nazi Genocide
______________________________________________________________________
1) Jolene Chu (Researcher, Watch Tower), post to H-HOLOCAUST list, 30
Dec 97
2) Jolene Chu (Researcher, Watch Tower), post to H-HOLOCAUST list, 6
Jan 98
3) no author, "The Holocaust: Who Spoke Out," _Awake!_, 22 Aug 95
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1. post to H-HOLOCAUST list
by Jolene Chu
How many Christians underwent the fate of Schneider for their faith?
Paul Schneider encountered some of them en route to and within
Buchenwald. Claude R. Foster, Jr.'s PAUL SCHNEIDER-THE BUCHENWALD
APOSTLE has several letters and conversations wherein Schneider refers
to Jehovah's Witnesses (aka Bible Students) who were imprisoned on
religious grounds. Although he was at variance with their eschatology,
he wrote: "It must be said that they, as 'friends of God,' remain true
to their principles." Schneider rightly characterized the Witnesses'
victimization as being religiously based: "It is not correct to define
this religious movement, which is Bible-based, as a sect and thereby
justly deserving of persecution." (Foster, pp. 724, 773-4)
The regime could not countenance the Witnesses' position of political
neutrality, since this included their refusal to heil Hitler, join the
Party, and bear arms. Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbruck each
held several hundred Witness prisoners, some of them having been
detained for nearly the entire duration of the regime. Pre-
war,Witnesses accounted for 5-10 percent of the camp population, this
according to Dr. Detlef Garbe, director of the Neuengamme Concentration
Camp Memorial.
The Nazis made both Schneider and the Witnesses a unique offer-freedom
in exchange for a signature. Schneider had to sign a declaration
recognizing the State's right to expel him from the Rhineland and
remove him from the pulpit. The Witnesses, in camps, prisons, and
juvenile detention homes, were to sign a declaration renouncing their
religious affiliation and agreeing to take up arms to defend the
fatherland. Immediate freedom was promised if they would sign the
documents. Neither Paul Schneider nor the vast majority of Witnesses
signed. Over 2,000 Witnesses shared Schneider's fate. Of these, 250
were formally charged and executed for their conscientious refusal to
bear arms.
The Nazi persecution of the Witnesses was clearly on ideological
grounds. As Alex Kimel made clear, the religious faith was slated for
eradication, not necessarily the people as a group. However, because of
the Witnesses' refusal to renounce their faith, they suffered the
treatment familiar to other targeted groups-marginalization,
sterilization, incarceration, torture, and execution.
- - - - -
2. post to H-HOLOCAUST list
by Jolene Chu
Dr. Rohrlich is quite correct. My previous posting gives one clear
example of the disparate Nazi approach to their victims. The Jews and
other victims of the Nazi racial agenda, biological enemies, if you
will, were never dignified with an option for freedom. The Witnesses,
as I stated, were ideological foes. Had the Nazis slated them for
physical annihilation, the plan would have been fairly successful.
Roughly half of the Witnesses, or more than 10,000, were held in
prisons and camps and could easily have been liquidated.
Instead, the Nazis tried to play a psychological game by enticing the
Witnesses to abandon their convictions. In fact, Himmler for one hoped
to transfer their strong religious commitment from Jehovah to Hitler.
(To his convoluted mind, it was a shame to waste a zealous Aryan.)
The Declaration of renunciation went largely ignored by the Witnesses.
Moreover, the Nazis unwittingly granted the Witnesses something that
they sought to strip, not only from their victims, but from the entire
populace-freedom of choice. To the Witnesses, the document became a
rare opportunity to exercise control of one's destiny and conscience.
Frankl, Bettelheim, Staub, and Todorov discuss the process of
depersonalization that marks totalitarianism and that erodes the
exercise of free choice. The Nazis skewed their own strategy.
Incidentally, I discussed the similarities and differences of the
marginalization and victimization of Jews and Witnesses in a paper
presented in October at the Wewelsburg District Museum in Paderborn.
The proceedings of the forum, "Spiritual Resistance Out of Christian
Conviction," will be published (initially in German, later in English)
some time this spring.
In discussing the Witnesses' victimization, it must be remembered that
they were a tiny minority and that their persecutors had different aims
in mind for them. In discussing the Witnesses' response to Nazi
persecution, it is with the realization that others simply were not
offered the options that they were. And as far as the Witnesses were
concerned, they were only doing what any Witness would have done under
the circumstances, as Dr. Littell alluded to. If anything, the Witness
survivors I know are unconcerned with lionization. But they do wish
their story to be known for the lessons it might impart to any of us
who strive to find that difficult balance between strong convictions
(religious or otherwise) and tolerant inclusiveness.
Yakki Da
Kent
"The only difference between God and Adolf Hitler is that God is more proficient at genocide."
Daily News On The Watchtower and the Jehovah's Witnesses:
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