I have known James Penton for over twenty years now; I know of him personally and his acedemic background, writings and teaching credentials. Slim, who "evaluated" Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich, is obviously someone who doesn't know the difference between a review and an ad hominem attack. Penton does know German. He has told me that while he is not fluent in the language, my understanding is that he can read it. But that's not the point; he certainly makes it clear that he did have a good deal of help from many people in both Europe and North America. It doesn't seem that Slim has read carefully what Penton has written. Penton also gives English translations for all or practically all of the documents he included in his book, and those documents speak pretty clearly for themselves. That is especially true of the Declaration which Slim doesn't mention.
Although he is pretty sharp with certain academics, Penton does give credit to both King and Garbe. But he does take them to task for failing to recognize certain things about the JWs. Among other things, he gives Garbe a bad time for saying that the JWs weren't anti-Semetic when after 1931 when they clearly were. Penton documents that fact.
Slim's statement that Penton devotes only about fifty pages to the Witnesses in Germany is simply silly. but where he really gets out of line is when he dismisses Penton's account of Rutherford and his antics. There is now plenty of information that Rutherford was a drunk. He is often called "Booze Rutherford." Besides that, anyone reading Watchtower stuff written by him can see what a goof he was. It is also pretty clear that the Moyle trial and much other informantion that he was a dictator of the worst sort. How Slim can defend Rutherford by saying Penton is simply promoting an apostate agenda is beyond me. It's pretty obvious that Slim is just listening to his mater's voice and coming up with the sort of nasty personal attacks on anyone who doesn't bow down to the "faithful and discreet slave." Too many of us have suffered at the hands of the Society to take anything written by it or its defenders as serious.
wonder52