Chapter IX. The Heroic Opportunity and Adventure: Jehovah's Witnesses Overseas

 

All invasive moral states and passionate enthusiasms make one feeling- less to evil in some direction. The common penalties cease to deter the patriot; the usual prudences are flung by the lover to the winds. When the passion is extreme, suffering may actually be gloried in; provided it be for the ideal cause, death may lose its sting, the grave its victory. In these states, the ordinary contrast of good and ill seems to be swallowed up in a higher denomination, an omnipotent excitement which engulfs the evil, and which the human being welcomes as the crowning experience of his life. This, he says, is truly to live, and I exult in the heroic opportunity and adventure.-William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

 

IN THE WITNESSES' solipsistic view of human history, World War II was a demon-inspired "global attack on Jehovah's Witnesses" executed by the "Nazi-Fascist-Catholic" coalition, "an international . . . conspiracy to 'get' Jehovah's witnesses." [Yearbook, 1974; Faith, pp. 171-72; JWDP, p. 153] This egocentric view may give rise to justifiable irritation. Nevertheless, the facts demonstrate amply that the Witnesses were persecuted during World War II, that their treatment at the hands of totalitarian or war- threatened governments was barbaric. They suffered, gloried in their suffering, and endured.

 

More recently, revolutionary governments (such as Dr. Banda's Malawi) have seen in them a threat to national unity; emerging nations have regarded their nonparticipation as a drain on the vital energy necessary to make political and economic policies cohere. In Europe and in Latin America, conservative elements of the Church have been happy to align themselves with conservative governments to paralyze or to place constraints upon the work of the Witnesses.

 

On the other hand, the Witnesses have sometimes lent support to conservative governments by refusing (as in South Africa) to protest against injustice; by not bearing witness, like many of us, they have helped in some totalitarian countries, to maintain the status quo.

 

As the Nazis overran Europe, the Witnesses were restrained and their work banned in France, Spain, Poland, Belgium, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Denmark, and Norway, as well as Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, Nigeria, and the Gold Coast.

 

After 1941, their work was proscribed in Japan, the Philippines, Burma, MayIala, the East Indies, Fiji, New Zealand, and Ceylon.

 

Bans were imposed throughout the British Empire. There were 12,000 Witnesses living in the British Isles when war broke out. They were able to continue to preach and to gather together in spite of what they now refer to as "Catholic-inspired action." According to the Witnesses, the English authorities as well as the people among whom the Witnesses lived realized that they had no connection with pacifist groups and were not pacifists themselves. Only the "Catholic-controlled press" pointed them out as subversive.

 

The Witnesses claim to have received three threats from "those maniacs signing themselves as the I.R.A. in the course of four months." [Yearbook, I 1940, pp. 81-82; JWDP, pp.152-53]

 

Over 1,500 Witnesses were sentenced to prison in Britain for failure to join the armed services; 334 female Witnesses received prison terms for failure to perform war duties. Witnesses from Poland, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and France who had come to England before the war were interned in a camp on the Isle of Man for the duration. American and Swiss nationals were deported.

 

The Witnesses regarded their London headquarters as a Luftwaffe target (or a target of "demons"), offering as proof the bombings that took place near the Society's London office. One of the bombs exploded directly across the street from Bethel; another, only seventy yards to its rear. In all, twenty-nine bombs were dropped close to the office within a space of three months. Despite the heavy bombing, the Witnesses continued to preach and push their work forward.

 

An Australian Order-in-Council banning Jehovah's Witnesses in Australia was declared illegal by the High Court of Australia, which ruled in favor of the Witnesses and against the Commonwealth. The Court held that Jehovah's Witnesses were not a subversive organization prejudicial to the prosecution of the war. Chief Justice Latham, speaking for the Court, said:

 

It should not be forgotten that such a provision [for free exercise of religion] is not required for the protection of the religion of a majority. The religion of the majority of the people can look after itself. Section 116 [relating to freedom of religion] is required to protect the religion (or absence of religion) of minorities, and, in particular, of unpopular minorities.

 

It is sometimes suggested . . . that, though the civil government should not interfere with religious opinions, it nevertheless may deal as it pleases with any acts which are done in pursuance of religious belief without infringing the principle of freedom of religion. It appears to me to be difficult to maintain this distinction as relevant to the interpretation of s. 116. The section refers in express terms to the exercise of religion, and therefore it is intended to protect from the operation of any Commonwealth laws acts which are done in the exercise of religion. Thus the section goes far beyond protecting liberty of opinion. It protects also acts done in pursuance of religious belief as part of religion. [Adelaide Company of Jehovah's Witnesses, Inc., v. The Commonwealth (1943)67 C.L.R. 116,124]

 

 

GERMANY

 

Nowhere is the record of suffering by Witnesses more awful than in Nazi Germany. And nowhere is one of their paradoxes more marked: They refused to Heil Hitler (regarding the salute as idolatrous), and to bear arms; and they were assigned to death camps. But, on the other hand, some boast of having received special privileges at the hands of the SS for their docility in the camps; and some consented to work as domestics in the Lebensbornheime, the notorious Nazi breeding farms.

 

(The institution of Lebensfonborn [Fount of Life] was established in 1936, under the auspices of Himmler, in order "to foster fecundity among the SS, to protect all mothers of good blood, as well as to care for them and to look after pregnant mothers and children of good blood. From this endeavor there will arise an elite youth of equal worth both spiritually and physically, the nobility of the future." [Wiener Library Bulletin, XVI/3 July 1962) pp. 52-53, quoted by J. S. Conway, NPC, p. 273] In effect, their very presence at the Lebensbornheime made Witness women the servants of "rank-and-file SS men, [who] were encouraged to enter into promiscuous or even adulterous relationships for selective breeding." Unmarried women of "racially pure stock" were "given comfort and attention in country welfare homes, many of them plundered from the Jews or opponents of Nazism." [Ibid. ])

 

It would be ridiculous to seek to diminish the extent of the Witnesses suffering, and of their commitment and zeal, but one remarks that they offered both their deaths and their "miraculous escapes from death" proof that they are chosen by Jehovah; everything attested to their singularity.

 

Opposition to the Witnesses in Germany was most virulent during the mid-1930s; pressure on them abated somewhat at the height of the war, when the Reich tended to see them as valuable work units. (Himmler is said to have called them "good-natured lunatics.") Toward the end of the war, when Hitler's armies were everywhere in retreat, Himmler

 

expressed admiration for the Witnesses, who, he suggested, once victory had been won, would be a useful group to settle in the vast plains of Russia where they would act as a barrier to Russian ambitions beyond the fringes of the German empire. If they converted the local population, so much the better, since their pacifism would prevent them from taking up arms against the Nazis, and their hatred of both Roman Catholics and Jews would ensure their non-collaboration with those enemies of the Reich. Moreover, they were sober, abstemious and hard- working people who kept their word; they were excellent farmers, and, with their minds set on eternity, they were not ambitious for worldly goods. Like the Mennonites, wrote Himmler, the dedicated Witnesses had characteristics which were to be envied. [Conway, op. cit., pp. 198-99; from Himmler's personal files, quoted in F. Zipfel, Kirchenkampf in Deutschland (Berlin, 1965) p.200; italics mine.]

 

At the very last, when the camps were about to be liberated by the Allies, the Witnesses were included in Himmler's directives that everyone within the camps should be exterminated.

 

Watchtower sources estimate that at any one time, 10,000 Witnesses (known in Germany as Bible Students) were incarcerated, "while equal thousands were free on the outside to maintain underground activity and energetic, though cautious, witness work." [JWDP, p.163] Out of approximately 25,000 Bible Students then active in Germany, 6,019 received prison sentences; 203 of the 253 Witnesses sentenced to death were actually executed - shot or beheaded; and 635 died in prison, most of them of starvation [Aw, Feb. 22, 1975, and Yearbook, 1974, p. 212] According to the same sources, 860 Witness children were forcibly taken from their parents by the Reich.

 

A historian sympathetic to the Witnesses (Conway, op. cit.) offers a different set of figures: He says that "a higher proportion (97%) suffered some form of persecution than any of the other churches" and that "No less than a third of the whole following were to lose their lives as a result of refusal to conform or compromise." (If Conway - who uses Zipfel [op. cit. pp. 175- 203] as a source - is correct, over 8,000 Witnesses were killed in the camps; the Witnesses themselves claim only 838 deaths out of their total number, which they give as 25,000.)

 

 

Opposition to the Witnesses (or Bible Students) began in l933. The German Witnesses were vociferously anti-Communist. That may have one reason they were not viewed, until the ascension of Hitler to full power, as a threat to the Reich. A directive from the Ministry of the Interior, April 19, 1930, circulated among police officers, stated that The I [Watchtower] association at present pursues solely religious objectives and A is not politically active . . . in the future the introduction of criminal proceedings, especially as regards violations of the Reich's Peddling Laws, is to be avoided." [Yearbook, 1974, p.105]

 

By 1933, however, conditions had changed dramatically. The Witnesses were listed first on the List of Proscribed Sects. [NPC, p. 371] In June of 1933, according to Watchtower sources, the American-held property of the Watch Tower Society in Magdeburg was seized; public meetings and literature distribution were banned. Following negotiations between the U.S. State Department and the German government, the property was returned to the American Society in October of 1933. In that same year, Hitler issued an edict to confiscate all Watch Tower literature. Bavaria was the first German state to impose a total ban on all gatherings of Witnesses, including singing and praying in private homes. By 1935, the ban had become national. And Gestapo searches of Witnesses' homes had become routine.

 

Within weeks of the Nazis' ascension to power, ruthless persecution had begun:

 

The danger to the State from these Jehovah's Witnesses is not to be underestimated, since the members of this sect on the grounds of their unbelievably strong fanaticism are completely hostile to the law and order of the State. Not only do they refuse to use the German greeting, to participate in any National Socialist or State functions and to do military service, but they put out propaganda against joining the army, and attempt, despite prohibition, to distribute their publications. [NPC, p. 19; quoted in 14. Buchheim, Glaubenskrise Im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart, 1953), p. 85; Bundesarchiv, Schumacher Akten, vol. 267/1/33)

 

This is Conway's explanation of the persecution of the Witnesses:

 

It stemmed from the Nazi belief that this tiny sect presented a real political danger. In the first place, the international connections of the Witnesses and their reliance on Old Testament apocalyptic prophecies were together taken as "proof" of their being disciples of the Jew Karl Marx and "pacemakers of world Bolshevism." But even more significantly, in the Witnesses' "petit bourgeois" milieu, their messianic message, their fanaticism and readiness to make ultimate sacrifices, and their skillful manipulation of propaganda, the Nazis believed they saw a new form of their own Party organization. Since the Nazis could not credit the reality of the Witnesses' so-called theological beliefs, they believed that these must be only a subtle disguise for much more dangerous political purposes, designed to repeat their own astonishing success in achieving total control of the country within a matter of years. [NPC, p. 197; from a Nazi description of Jehovah's Witness theories titled "The Bible in Service of World Revolution: the political background of the Jehovah's Witnesses," quoted in Zipfel, op. cit., pp. 203 and 36671]

 

And here are some further details of their persecution from Conway's sympathetic (and well-documented) account:

 

When short periods of protective custody failed to deter the Witnesses, orders were issued that persistent offenders should be sent to concentration camps, though in the case of families both parents were not to be arrested at the same time, since the State could not be burdened with the care of the children. [Bundesarchiv, Schumacher Akten, vol. 267/1/35, quoted in Buchheim, op. cit., p. 85] The Witnesses, still undeterred, continued their activities as best they could. When their supporters abroad broadcast the details of their widespread persecution in Germany, the Nazis redoubled their efforts against an intransigence which they feared might infect the public mind. Extended periods of incarceration were ordered by the courts. After 1937, whole families were imprisoned and the children were placed in State homes; when the wife of an official embraced the faith, her conversion became actionable as grounds for divorce. Those who had served a term of imprisonment found re-employment on release difficult or impossible to secure. As a condition for release some were called on to sign an undertaking to have no further association with the Sect on pain of continued incarceration. [Zipfel, op. cit., pp. 193- By 1938, 700 members had been taken into protective custody for refusing to comply with such an undertaking.

 

Many in fact paid the [death] penalty; others were sentenced to enforced service with the troops, while others were consigned to lunatic asylums, and large numbers were transported to Dachau. [NPC, pp. 197-98]

 

In a White Paper (Germany No. 2, Treatment of German Nationals in Germany, issued October 30, 1939) based on a report compiled by Sir Neville Henderson, Britain's ambassador to Berlin until war was declared, it was noted that Bible Students were obliged to wear violet arm badges and that they were allowed no communication with the outside world, but that, the other hand, their rations were not cut down. Sir Neville remarks that they "professed themselves ready to suffer to the uttermost what they felt God had ordained for them." [JWDP, p.155]

 

What God had ordained for them they believed the Catholic Church had arranged for them. In American Watchtower publications during the late 1930's and '40s, representatives of the Vatican and the Nazis were pictured in lurid embrace; Fascists and Nazis and the Vatican were depicted as piling money into and out of one another's coffers. The Witnesses had no doubt that the Roman Catholic Hierarchy instigated all atrocities against them. In a recent publication (JWDP), which refers to the Hierarchy as a bunch of hijackers," they quote a letter purportedly "written by a Catholic priest in Berlin and published in The German Way under date of May 29, 1938":

 

There is now one country on earth where the so-called "Earnest Bible Students" [Jehovah's Witnesses] are forbidden. That is Germany! The dissolution of the sect which, at that time, had found a strong foothold in Germany, did not come to pass under Bruning [Chancellor of the German Reich before Hitler], although the Catholic Church in Bruning's time urged to have this done. However, the "most Catholic chancellor" Bruning answered that he had no law which authorized him to dissolve the sect of the "Earnest Bible Students."

 

When Adolph Hitler had come to power and the German episcopate repeated their request, Hitler said: "These so-called 'Earnest Bible Students' are trouble-makers; they disturb the harmonious life among the Germans; I consider them quacks; I do not tolerate that the German Catholics be besmirched in such a manner by this American 'Judge' Rutherford; I dissolve the 'Earnest Bible Students' in Germany; their property I dedicate to the people's welfare; I will have all their literature confiscated." Bravo!

 

However, the American Episcopate, even Cardinal Mundelein, is not able to have Rutherford's books, in which the Catholic Church is slandered, to be taken away from the book-market in the United States! [JWDP, Chapters 21 and 22]

 

The Witnesses presume that the Church used Hitler as its instrument to destroy the Witnesses, the Vatican is the archenemy that instigated their persecution in Nazi Germany, and the churches were apostate during the war:

 

Awake! (February 22, 1975) asks, "Why could not [the Catholic Church] with all the resources and well over a thousand years to train the consciences of the faithful produce evidence of just one German Catholic among 32 million (.000003 percent) whose conscience would not allow him to fight for the Nazis?" [p. 22, "Pope Pius XII and the Nazis-A Fresh Viewpoint"]

 

The Witnesses' contention that not one German Catholic fought the Nazis deserves attention only as an indication of their state of mind. Very few church historians defend the role of the churches under Hitler. (As Dorothy Day once remarked, the Church - "our mother" - occasionally behaves "like a harlot", and much of the German episcopate remained silent. Still. the churches, hesitant, irresolute, and passive, did have their martyrs. Voices were raised against the persecution of the Jews and against Nazi expansionism, though they were weak and few. The churches, both Catholic and Evangelical, lacked courage. Their history from 1933 to 1945 in Germany was one of compromise and accommodation. The Pope did not speak out against Nazi aggression in Czechoslovakia or Poland (and in fact sent Hitler a letter of congratulation after a 1939 attempt to assassinate him failed). But Hitler in fact loathed "black Catholicism" and the "sly foxes at the Vatican" [NPC, p.295] as much as the Witnesses did.

 

The churches were derelict; but, for that matter, the Witnesses did not raise their voices, though they maintained their integrity by refusing to fight.

 

I have quoted extensively from historian J. S. Conway precisely because he is sympathetic to the conduct of the Witnesses during the war ("No other sect," he writes, "displayed anything like the same determination in face of the full force of Gestapo terrorism." [Ibid., p. 199]) So it seems appropriate to quote him to place the persecution of the Witnesses in context: Hitler used the Church as his instrument and for his purposes, though the Witnesses would have it the other way around.

 

One group within the Nazi hierarchy advocated a flexible policy of persuasion and gradual assimilation, while another pressed for repression and persecution. As the war progressed . . . Hitler increasingly inclined towards the plans for forcible repression which Himmler, Bormann and their associates tried out in certain of the eastern territories. . . . In this process of "final settlement" three stages are discernible: first, the eradication of the Churches' resistance; second, the elimination of any outside interference, including that of the Vatican; and third, the establishment of a new era in Church-State relations, in which the Churches would be subordinated to the German "New Order," the priests stripped of their privileges, and Christianity left to suffer what Hitler called "a natural death." [Ibid., pp.291-92]

 

The evidence is that Hitler conducted a war of attrition against the churches, signing the Concordat with the Vatican in order to lull the Church into a false sense of security and in order not to alienate the large Catholic population. But, in 1942,

 

Hitler announced that only "military reasons connected with the war had deterred him from severing diplomatic relations with the Vatican and from abrogating the Reich Concordat. But, "once the war is over we will put a swift end to the Concordat. It will give me the greatest personal pleasure to point out to the Church all those occasions on which it has broken the terms of it." [Ibid., p. 301, quoting from Hitler's Table Talk, July 4, 1942]

 

The facts prove also that Hitler did everything within his power to stir up anticlerical feeling among the Germans; that the Nazis exerted control over all aspects of church life; that his aim was to crush Christianity, and to substitute state religion. From historians like Conway and Guenter Lewy we learn that while the churches were indeed complicit in their own victimization, Hitler always considered both the Evangelical churches and the Catholic Church to be his rivals; he never considered his aims and theirs identical. The Catholic hierarchy welcomed the signing of the Concordat all too readily in 1933; and it cannot be denied that "By compromising themselves in this way, the Catholic hierarchy was never able to lead the Catholic Church in wholehearted opposition to the Nazis, even after the hostile intentions of the latter were all too plainly revealed." [Ibid., Introduction, pp. xxii-xxiii]

 

One need not deny that "there were churchmen - albeit very few - who had the courage to refuse submission to the Nazis' demands. Their steadfastness was unavailing; but who can say that their sacrifice was in vain? While Pastor Niemoller was awaiting trial in a Berlin prison, he was visited by the prison chaplain, who asked him in astonishment, 'But Brother! What brings you here? Why are you in prison?' To which Niemoller replied, 'And, Brother, why are you not in prison?' "[Ibid., pp. 332-33]

 

Guilty of political quietism, the Church, it has been argued, surrendered. And the churches have admitted their guilt and their shame: Meeting in the ruined city of Stuttgart in October, 1945, the German Evangelical church declared:

 

. . . we know ourselves to be one with our people in a great company of suffering and in a great solidarity of guilt. With great pain do we say: Through us endless suffering has been brought to many people and countries. . . . We accuse ourselves for not witnessing more courageously, for not praying more faithfully, for not believing more joyously, and for not loving more ardently. [Ibid., p. 332; quoted in S. W. Herman, The Rebirth of the German Church (London, 1946), p.137]

 

Too late, one might argue, to acknowledge guilt - after the terrible moral damage had been done. And yet, if we are playing a numbers game, more churchmen suffered and died for their Christian beliefs than did Witnesses - and the Witnesses refuse to honor their suffering. Without seeking to denigrate the Witnesses, it is necessary to point out that the churches, too, had their martyrs; and that churchmen praised God by naming the monster:

 

As early as 1931, Karl Barth, then Professor of Systematic Theology in Bonn, had attacked what he described as hyphenated Christianity, in which the role of Christ himself was linked with nationalist feelings. [NPC, pp. 10-11]

 

In 1933, Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested; he was hanged in Flossenburg Concentration Camp, April 9, 1945. [Ibid., p.400]

 

In the Catholic Church, a number of clear-sighted theologians saw the incompatibility between Christian doctrine and the Nazi ideas of so-called "positive Christianity." In several parts of Germany [in 1930], Catholics were explicitly forbidden to become members of the Nazi party, and Nazi members were forbidden to take part in such Church ceremonies as funerals. The Bishop of Mainz refused to admit Nazi Party members to the sacraments.. In his New Year's message on 1 January 1931, the Presiding Bishop in Germany, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, issued a warning against false prophets and agitators, declaring that extreme nationalism, by over glorifying the Race, could lead only to a despisal of the revelation and commandments of God: "Away therefore with the vain imaginings of a national religious society, which is to be torn away from the Rock of Peter, and only guided by the racial theories of an Aryan-heathen teaching about salvation. This is no more than the foolish imaginings of false prophets." Despite such warnings, fear of "Marxist heresies" became a standard feature in the declarations of Catholic speakers. [Ibid., pp. 6-7; from Hans Muller, Katholische Kirche und Nationalsozialismus (Munich, 1963), p.17]

 

But there were other voices:

 

One was that of Niemoller himself, a pastor of the Evangelical Confessing Church. In his Sermon for the Fourth Sunday before Easter (1934), Niemoller identified Nazism as satanic:

 

We have all of us - the whole Church and the whole community - been thrown into the Tempter's sieve, and he is shaking and the wind is blowing, and it must now become manifest whether we are wheat or chaff! Verily, a time of sifting has come upon us, and even the most indolent and peaceful person among us must see that the calm of a meditative Christianity is at an end.

 

It is now springtime for the hopeful and expectant Christian Church - it is now testing time, and God is giving Satan a free hand, so that he may shake us up and so that it may be seen what manner of men we are! .

 

Satan swings his sieve and Christianity is thrown hither and thither; and he who is not ready to suffer, he who called himself a Christian only because he thereby hoped to gain something good for his race and his nation, is blown away like chaff by the wind of this time. [NPC, dedication page]

 

Niemoller was arrested by direct order of Hitler. By November, 1937, over 700 pastors of the Confessing Church had been arrested. One was Paul Schneider, pastor of a country parish in the southern Rhineland; he arrested because he refused to leave his parish after the Gestapo had ordered him to do so. In November, 1937, he was sent to Buchenwald. He died there eighteen months later. [Ibid., p.209]

 

Bishop Galen of Westphalia also courageously defied Hitler. On August 3, 1941, he delivered a powerful attack against Hitler's euthanasia program, the secret transportation of patients to unknown destinations, the flouting of Catholic doctrine through cremation, and the issuance of false death certificates. For his stand, Bormann declared that Galen deserved the death sentence. It has been conjectured that it was Galen's rigorous defense of the sanctity of human life that aroused public opinion to such an extent that Hitler terminated his euthanasia program; Galen may have saved thousands of lives. [Ibid., pp. 271, 280-81, 2831

 

Hitler could not afford to make martyrs of men like Galen. But Heydrich's hatred of the Catholic Church "bordered on the pathological." "He was obsessed with the idea that the Churches, led by the Vatican, were conspiring to destroy Germany." [Ibid., p. 287] Men like Heydrich and Bormann were convinced that the Catholic clergy were traitorous partners of the intractable elements of the aristocracy. The Gestapo sought to prove that men like Father Alfred Delp (a Jesuit) and Pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier were involved in the plot to kill Hitler. Before his execution on January 11, 1945, Father Delp wrote:

 

The actual reason for my sentence is that I am and remain a Jesuit. It was not possible to establish any connection with the event of 20 July. . . . The air was filled with hatred and animosity.

 

The basic tenet is that a Jesuit is apriori an enemy and an adversary of the Reich. . . . This was not a trial: it was simply a functioning of the will to annihilate. [Ibid., p. 290, from Dying We Live, Gollwitzer, Kuhn and Schneider, eds. (London, 1956), p. 121]

 

Alfred Delp and Dietrich Bonhoeffer went to their deaths because of their moral aversion to Nazism and their unfailing courage.

 

For tactical reasons, Hitler could not exercise his "will to annihilate" the clergy in Germany. But in the occupied countries, thousands of priests and nuns and pastors went to the camps, and to their deaths. In Poland, nuns were forced to discontinue their work of charity. Toward the middle of 1941 about 400 sisters were interned and employed in manual labor at a concentration camp established for them in Bojanowo. In West Prussia, out of 690 parish priests, at least two-thirds were arrested. No fewer than 214 were executed.

 

Almost all of the Evangelical clergymen in the Teschen area of Silesi were deported to concentration camps - Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Oranienburg. The Reverend Karol Kulisz, director of the largest Evangelical charitable institution, died in Buchenwald in November, 1939. and Professor Edmund Bursche, of the Evangelical Faculty of Theology in the University of Warsaw, died while working in the stone quarries ( Mauthausen. [Ibid., pp.29697; quoted in The Nazi Kultur in Poland (London, 1942), pp.30-31]

 

Czech Orthodox Bishop Gorazd was executed.

 

At the outbreak of war, 487 Catholic priests were among the thousands of Czech patriots arrested and sent to concentration camps as hostages. Venerable high ecclesiastical dignitaries were dragged to concentration camps in Germany. It was a common sight on the roads near the concentration camps to see a priest dressed in rags, exhausted, pulling a cart, and behind him a youth in SA uniform, whip in hand. [Ibid., p. 297; from PS-998, International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals (Nuremberg, 1948), vol. XVI, p.474]

 

"At least ninety priests from the diocese of Kulm (Chelm) lost their lives the concentration camps of Stutthof, Grenzdorf, Auschwitz, Sachsenhusen and Dachau." At least fifty priests are known to have died in Soldau (Dzialdovo). [Quoted in M. Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik 1939-45 Stuttgart, 1961), p. 162] "By 1942 there were no fewer than 1,773 Polish priests in Dachau where they formed by far the largest single group of prisoners." [NPC, p.323; see R. Schnabel, Die Frommen in der Holle. Berlin, 1966.]

 

According to a recent collation of the available evidence, 2,771 priests were imprisoned at Dachau alone, of whom at least 1,000 were estimated to have died in the camp from hunger, disease, or ill-treatment between 1942 and 1945. According to one source, no fewer than 4,000 Catholic priests were put to death during the same years, either as "political saboteurs" or, after incarceration in the concentration camps, by hanging, by starvation, by mishandling, from lack of medical aid, or as the victims of medical experiments, including euthanasia. [Ibid., pp.298-99; from B. M. Kempner, Priester vor Hitlers Tnbunalen (Munich, 1966), p.8]

 

We will protect the German priest who is the servant of God, we will wipe out the priest who is a political enemy of the German Reich." - Adolph Hitler [NPC, quoted from M. Domarus, ed., Hitler Reden und Proklamationen, 1932-45 (Wurzburg, 1963), Vol.11, pp. 1,058-61]

 

The Witnesses admit that "some churchmen [were] persecuted"; but they enter the caveat that the persecution of the churches was a result of "anti-Nazi political activity." [Aw, Feb.22, 1975, pp.20-21] This raises the question of how to divorce the political from the moral. Is it a political act to speak out against genocide? against armed aggression? against euthanasia? This dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is the same one advanced by Goebbels and Goering in order to clamp down on the churches:

 

Whereas the Nazi Party, they claimed, had saved the Church from extinction at the hands of the Marxists and had established its status by means of the Reich Concordat, the Church had shown its gratitude by becoming a breeding-ground of political disaffection, creating, by its doctrinal differences, a disunity among the people which was a danger to the unity of the German Reich. The Churches, they maintained, would do far better to concentrate on charitable works than on dogmatic squabbles. Politics must be wholly separate from the Church, and the clergy would do well to remember the words "My Kingdom is not of this world." [NPC, p. 78]

 

It may be argued that the moment a Christian ceases to apply spiritual values to the events of the material world, and to protest against injustice. he ceases to be a Christian and becomes apostate. This is, in fact, exactly what the Barmen Synod declared in 1934: "We reject the false doctrine, as though there were areas of our life in which we would not belong to Jesus Christ, but to other Lords - areas in which we would not need justification and sanctification through him." [Ibid., p.335]

 

The notion that politics does not concern the Church is the Manichaean heresy; it says that the affairs of political and social life are irredeemable. Intent upon maintaining its interior life, the Church in Germany fell into this dangerous subjectivism. The truth is that the churches were not political enough. The churches and the Witnesses also shared the conviction that left-wing programs for social and political activities and reform could not be a vehicle for God's redemptive activity.

 

None of this is said to depreciate the Witnesses' heroic behavior in Germany: it is said merely to point out that the Nazis found the weakness in all men, and exploited it. The Witnesses were silent, as the churches were largely silent, about the sufferings of others. And the Witnesses refused, and continue to refuse, to acknowledge that there were churchmen who protested against Hitler's policies, and suffered: they draw a line between politics and morality, and discount the persecution of the churches on the ground that the churches invited it by their political activities, so that, in their view, the sacrifices made by the few brave men of the Evangelical and Catholic churches become useless sacrifices, of no value to God.

 

The canard that the Vatican used the Third Reich for its purposes is still employed by the Witnesses to enlist nominal Catholics in their ranks. It an important part of their proselytizing work even now. That is one reason it needs to be refuted.

 

As early as 1934, the activities of Catholic lay organizations in Germany were restricted, in order to drive a wedge between the clergy and the people: "Church services were placed under regular surveillance"; "the activities of priests who were suspected of anti-Nazi sympathies were strictly supervised." [Ibid., pp.67, 69; from D. Albrecht, Der Notenwechsel zwischen dem Heiligen Stuhl und der Deutschen Reichsregierung, (Mainz, 1965), vol. I, p 61] "Attempts of Catholic Action to consolidate the work of the Catholic organizations was stigmatized by Goering as demonstrating the existence of ‘a firm block within the Catholic clergy which continues to oppose the aims and schemes of the State.' " [Ibid., p. 79; from Bundesarchiv, Akten der Reichskanzlei, 43, II, 174]

 

In 1934, Himmler decreed that processions and pilgrimages could be held only under strict supervision. Jesuits were particularly feared, their activities reported on. In 1935, Goering issued directives against any kind of “political Catholics." [Ibid., p. 113] Clearly, in spite of the compliance of most churchmen, the Nazis were prepared to tolerate the churches' activities only insofar as they related to the next world. Their aim was the total submission of the churches.

 

In 1935, a new campaign of vilification of the clergy began. Priests, monks, and nuns were accused of violating complicated currency regulations; they were accused of smuggling Jewish capital out of the country. Hitler Youth sang this song:

 

Oh, the cloistered life is jolly

Nowadays, instead of prayer,

Smuggling money is their business;

Forth on this sly sport they fare.

 

Swift they say a Pater Noster

Priest and monk and pious nun.

Swifter then with zealous purpose

Smuggling currency they run.

 

Laden with the goodly specie

Slinks the nun from place to place.

No one would suspect the creature

From her modest pious face.

To monk she slips the packet . . .

 

Priest and nun and holy friar -

What a horror, they're in clink!

From the lahours of their smuggling

To a well-earned rest they sink.

 

To the priest the nun soft whispers,

"Glorious was the task and grand,

Backing up our Holy Father

Smuggling Money through the land."

 

[Ibid., p. 26; quoted from The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the Third Reich;

Facts and Documents Translated from the German (London, I940), p. 268.]

 

In official Nazi organs, in 1936 and 1937, sensational charges of priestly immorality were made. "Immorality trials" were staged in courts.

 

“For reasons of expediency, . . . the Nazis refrained from a head-on clash with the Catholic Church, relying instead on an intensified attack against all Church activities in order to limit its influence on the German people. The Gestapo were to be given free rein to isolate those of the clergy whose activities could be branded as 'hostile to the State.' One by one, the Church's bastions were to be breached until the possibility of resistance was broken forever." [NPC, p.167] Informers, known as V-Manner, reported to the Gestapo from within the Church. (The Nazis - like the Witnesses - had a horror of the Jesuits in particular, whom they regarded as more sinister and cunning than other mortals.) "Church-sponsored courses on domestic science, marriage guidance and baby care were prohibited, since 'the Catholic attitudes to marriage guidance, racial nurture and biological hygiene differ in significant fashion from those of the National Socialist State.' " [Ibid., pp. 173-74; from Glaubenskrise im Dritten Reich; Bundesarchiv, Schumacher Akten, vol. 243/2/I, quoted in Buchheim, op. cit., p.85]

 

In Austria, three months after Anschluss, all Catholic private schools were deprived of recognition and support. Denominational private schools were closed. Church property was confiscated. Priests were no longer permitted to conduct courses of religious instruction - an incredible deprivation to their flocks. [NPC, pp. 182-84; from Persecution, op. cit., p. 137] Youth activities were curtailed; pastoral care in hospitals and in welfare institutions was restricted. In May, 1938, 60 Austrian Roman Catholic priests were arrested on charges of immoral conduct. Property of Catholic organizations was confiscated. [Ibid., p.225]

 

The Austrian Hitler Youth were led along the path of anticlericalism. The following are notes for a propaganda speech. It is deplorable how closely this Nazi harangue against Church history and doctrine resembles, on so many points, the Witnesses' harangues against the Church.

 

. . . The Church always works by violence and terror. Where is the love of one's neighbor and the love of one's enemies? . . . In the Crusades German blood was shed uselessly. . . . The Catholic Church will come to an end. . . . Proof that Christ was not God; Woman, what have I to do with thee?' . . . How Christ dies (whimpering on the Cross). . . . The cult of the saints is ridiculous. When any one had his palm greased or was preeminently filthy he was pronounced a saint. . . . The Virgin Mary. The Immaculate Conception. . . . The Papacy is a swindle. The Pope claims to be God's representative on earth, but after Peter there was no Pope for 150 years. The Popes were always men of the baser sort. . . . The sale of indulgences . . . With the Jesuits all personality is suppressed. They become the blind instruments of the Pope. . . . The Catholic Church provoked the Thirty Years' War. . . . The strength of the Church and its inability to promote peace during the World War . . . The Catholic Church opposes the national movement of the German people. . . If Germany no longer supports the Catholic Church, it is finished. . . . For us Germans the inactivity of eternal life is foolishness. . . . The "infallibility" of the Pope? . . . Predestination, rites of the Church, the divine Trinity, original sin, etc. - what bosh! [Ibid., pp. 226-27; from Micklem, Nathanial, National Socialism and the Roman Catholic Church 1933-38, (Oxford, 1939), pp. 227-29]

 

With the outbreak of war, and the necessity to mobilize the German people behind the war effort, Hitler declared that "no further action should be taken against the Evangelical and Catholic Churches for the duration of the war. [Ibid., p. 232; quoted in a circular from the Chief of the Race and Settlement Headquarters, Sept. 8, 1939, unpublished Nuremberg Documents NG-1392 and NG-1755] Both the Evangelical and Catholic bishops called upon their followers to support the war - in spite of Nazi atrocities against Catholic priests and laypersons in Poland, details of which were broadcast by the Vatican radio. [NPC, p. 235; from Lewy, Guenter, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (Boston, 1964), p.229]

 

However, in 1941, when the Nazis launched a series of new offenses against Eastern Europe, new and more stringent measures began to be taken against the churches: Himmler ordered the complete evacuation of all church properties without compensation. Monasteries and convents were emptied. In Luxembourg, 400 priests were evacuated on Hitler's personal orders. All Church hospitals were declared secular institutions. Catholic orphanages and kindergartens and welfare agencies were placed under the control of the state. The Catholic press was suppressed. Tolerating no rivalry, Heydrich ordered that immediate action be taken against all small sects, including Christian Scientists and the Salvation Army.

 

Hitler was forced to come to some degree of accommodation with the churches by virtue of their vast numbers. But it is manifestly clear from his words, as well as from the actions of the Reich, that he was intent upon a policy of deliberate repression. He loathed what he called the “satanic superstition" of the "hypocritical priests," who, he said, in language reminiscent of that of the Witnesses, were interested "in raking in the money" and “befuddling the minds of the gullible." [Ibid., p.3; from Hitler's Table Talk] Hitler fostered the illusion that he was pious; he never officially left the Church, and he continued to pay compulsory Church taxes. But his determination to avenge himself against the churches is left in no doubt. He combined "implacable hatred with practical flexibility" [NPC, p. 102], envy with respect:

 

I promise you that, if I wished to, I could destroy the Church in a few years; it is hollow and rotten and false through and through. One push and the whole structure would collapse. We should trap the priests by their notorious greed and self-indulgence. We shall thus be able to settle everything with them in perfect peace and harmony. I shall give them a few years' reprieve. Why should we quarrel? They will swallow anything in order to keep their material advantages. Matters will never come to a head. They will recognize a firm will, and we need only show them once or twice who is the master. Then they will know which way the wind blows. They are no fools. The Church was something really big. Now we are its heirs. We, too, are the Church. Its day has gone. [Ibid., p.103; from Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks (London, 1939), p.61]

 

The evil that is gnawing at our vitals is our priests of both denominations. I cannot at present give them the answer they have been asking for, but it will cost them nothing to wait. It is all written down in my big book. The time will come when I shall settle my accounts with them and I shall go straight to the point. . . . I shall not let myself he hampered by juridical scruples. Only necessity has legal force. In less than ten years from now, things will have quite another look, I can promise them. - Adolf Hitler [NPC, p.285; from Hitler's Table Talk, February 9, 1942; The Goebbels Diaries 1942-3, J. Lochner, ed. (New York, 1948), entries for March 20, 1942, and March 9, 1943]

 

Hitler's attitude toward the churches was governed by pragmatism; and the churches, in turn, evolved their own ill-conceived pragmatic response:

 

It appeared likely that the mass appeal of the Nazi campaign might succeed in persuading thousands, even millions, to leave the Church. In the face of such promises, continued opposition could serve only to brand the bishops as the "black-reactionaries" which the anti-clericals had always considered them to be. . . . Opposition would drive the Catholic Church into a sort of ghetto. . . . The bishops believed [the Church] was incapable of surviving such a challenge. . . Perhaps, they felt, Hitler could after all be trusted. Perhaps he could be persuaded of the value of Catholic support in a joint campaign against Communism and moral decadence. Perhaps he might be prevailed upon to accept the assistance of the Catholic Church and its many associated organs, in the reconstruction of an ordered unified society. [NPC, pp. 21-22]

 

Events proved the hierarchy wrong in its estimation of Hitler. But it was the threat to the spiritual and physical well-being of twenty million German Catholics that induced Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) to sign the Concordat with Hitler. The signing of the Concordat effectively eliminated the Church as a potent political force.

 

As Cardinal Pacelli himself acknowledged . . . "A pistol had been pointed at his head and he had no alternative. The German Government had offered him concessions . . . wider than any previous German Government would have agreed to, and he had to choose between an agreement on their lines and the virtual elimination of the Catholic Church in the Reich." [Ibid., p.30; from Documents On British Foreign Policy, Series II, Vol.5, No.342)

 

Hitler signed the Concordat because a subservient clergy was preferable to a host of noisy martyrs.

 

Among the Evangelical churches, which were "politically conservative, patriotic and paternalistic," [NPC, p.9] there was a tendency to welcome the Nazi overthrow "as a first step towards the reintroduction of government by Christian authorities, affirming with St. Paul (Romans 13) that 'the powers that be are ordained of God.' " [Ibid., p. 10] (That scripture, which the Witnesses too have time and again bent to their necessities, has perhaps created more political confusion - and mischief-than any other in the Bible.)

 

How the churches must have felt when the Nazis gave birth to a new heathenism it is not difficult to imagine. Christian doctrines - the fall of man, redemption, salvation, Judgment - were transformed into an ersatz Nazi theology. [Ibid., p.145] The Nazis substituted their own liturgy, their own baptism and marriage and burial services f6r those of the Church. They parodied the Nicene Creed. The blood shed at the time of Hitler's unsuccessful Putsch of November 9, 1923, said Hitler, "is become the altar of baptism for our Reich." [Ibid., p. 149] That blood was celebrated as a sacrament.

 

The Church, having signed the Concordat and lost its moral authority, was silent. It is even more amazing that while official anti-Nazi pronouncements were rare, and while both the Evangelical churches and the Catholic Church hierarchy maintained, for the most part, an official silence, some individuals did not fail. One such was Franz Jagerstatter. And the Witnesses have claimed him as their own.

 

Franz Jagerstatter was an Austrian peasant. He lived in St. Radegund, a small village in Upper Austria, where he was the sexton of the parish church. When Hitler's troops moved into Austria in 1938, Jagerstatter was the only man in his village to vote against Anschluss. When he was greeted with the Nazi salute - Heil Hitler! - he replied, "Pfui Hitler!" Acting on his Christian beliefs, he publicly declared that he would not fight in an unjust war. When he was reminded that other Catholics had found it possible to fight for Hitler - with the approval of their bishops - he replied, “They have not been given the grace" to do otherwise; he declared that this was a matter of individual conscience, between him and the God and the living Church he served. He was adamant that he would not serve the government that was persecuting his Church.

 

Jagerstatter was called to active duty, was imprisoned, and was sentenced o death. After his trial, he wrote his wife: "Only do not forget me in prayer, even as I will not forget you - and remember me especially at Mass. I can also give you the good news that I had a visit yesterday, and from a priest, no less! Next Tuesday he will come with the Holy of Holies. Even here, one is not abandoned by God." He went in the same spirit to his death, knowingly and heroically. He was beheaded after a military trial, August 9, 1943. It is said that he walked to his death in a calm and composed manner. Before his execution, he had written, "I cannot . . . take an oath in favor of a government that is fighting an unjust war. . . . May God accept my life in reparation not only for my sins but for the sins of others as well." He left his wife and three daughters in the hands of God.

 

A Mother Superior of an Austrian convent remembers that Father Jochmann, the chaplain of Brandenberg prison, said to an audience of nuns, after Jagerstatter’s death: "I can only congratulate you on this countryman of yours who lived as a saint and has now died a hero. I say with certainty that this simple man is the only saint that I have ever met in my lifetime." (The above information is taken from Gordon Zahn, In Solitary Witness: The Life and Death of Franz Jagerstatter [New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964].)

 

The Witnesses call attention to the fact that "the courageous stand of [Austrian Bible Students] had some influence on the Catholic Franz Jagerstatter. Gordon Zahn reports that his village pastor noted that 'Franz had often spoken with admiration of their faithfulness,’ and villagers who knew him made much of the fact that he 'spent hours discussing religion and studying the Bible' with his Bibelforscher cousin, the only non-Catholic in the village." [Aw, Feb.22, 1975, p.22]

 

Professor Zahn quite emphatically denies that Jagerstatter's refusal to serve in the army can in any way be attributed to his Bible Student cousin:

 

Those closest to Franz at the time make it quite clear that this was not the case. One close friend introduced the surprising note that Franz had never really liked his cousin. Jagerstatter's wife insisted that his cousin had no influence at all upon her husband. Perhaps the most conclusive testimony on this point was provided by Fr. Furthauer and the woman who was married to the cousin at that time. The priest insisted that in all his discussions with Franz he had never brought up the theological position maintained by the sect. Fr. Furthauer was aware of the close relationship between his sexton and the local Bibelforscher; it is true, he admitted, that they spent a great deal of time together in religious discussions. The fact of the matter was that Jagerstatter was trying to bring his cousin into the Catholic fold. Moreover, he added, the cousin had already been inducted into the Home Guard before Jagerstatter was called into service in February, 1943. [Zahn, op. cit., pp.108-109]

 

The priest's claims might be dismissed as self-serving, but when “the cousin’s former wife was interviewed," she reinforced them:

 

When she was asked to indicate how much influence her husband and his religious beliefs had had upon Jagerstatter and his stand, she answered promptly and emphatically: "None at all." As she saw it, Jagerstatter had studied the Bible on his own until he became "too one-sided" on the issue of the Fifth Commandment and its application - this led him to the independent conclusion that he could not fight in the war. Franz and her husband had discussed this issue at great length, but as for the question of influence, it was Jagerstatter who was always "working on" her husband. Her husband had taken the position that the individual believer should not permit himself to be trapped into a hopeless situation by taking the absolutist stand of refusing all military service; instead, he felt, one should try to get into some limited or noncombatant service. Jagerstatter, on the other hand, always insisted that nothing less than total refusal was required - and even after her husband had left for service - in the Signal Corps, she recalled - Franz continued to insist that his cousin had done the wrong thing.

 

It is quite clear, then, that Jagerstatter's position cannot be traced to the influence of this fundamentalist sect. However, Pastor Karobath did introduce one reservation. He agreed that the sect's theology had no influence upon Franz's action, but he suggested that the example set by the members of that sect in holding fast to their beliefs no matter what sacrifice they were called upon to make might have strengthened his commitment. [Ibid., pp. 108-1 10]

 

The Witnesses find it amazing that a man should bear solitary witness; it is essential to their belief that no one can do without a supportive organization (their organization). The Witnesses, from their fringe position, totally repudiated the world. Jagerstatter believed in the living Church of martyrs; and he believed that that Church - no matter what the hierarchy said - required open civil dissent when secular values threatened spiritual values. He did not divorce morality or religion from politics. And he believed in the communion of saints, even when his Church leaders urged him on to a different set of actions.

 

On October 7, 1934, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society sent this letter to "the officials of the German government":

 

The Word of Jehovah God, as set out in the Holy Bible, is the Supreme Law, and to us it is our sole guide for the reason that we have devoted ourselves to God and are true and sincere followers of Christ Jesus.

 

During the past year, and contrary to God's law and in violation of our rights, you have forbidden us as Jehovah's witnesses to meet together to study God's Word and worship and serve him. . . . There is a direct conflict between your law and God's law, and, following the lead of the faithful apostles, 'we ought to obey God rather than men, and this we will do. . . . Therefore this is to advise you that at any cost we will obey God's commandments, will meet together for the study of his Word, and will worship and serve him as he has commanded. If your government or officers do violence to us because we are obeying God, then our blood will be upon you and you will answer to Almighty God.

 

We have no interest in political affairs, but are wholly devoted to God's kingdom under Christ his king. We will do no injury or harm to anyone. We would delight to dwell in peace and do good to all men as we have opportunity, but, since your government and its officers continue in your attempt to force us to disobey the highest law of the universe, we are compelled to now give you notice that we will, by his grace, obey Jehovah God and fully trust Him to deliver us from all oppression and oppressors. [Yearbook, 1974, pp. l3-37]

 

It would be a mistake to underestimate the bravery this direct challenge to the Reich required; Watchtower publications indicate that among German Witnesses there was some attempt to vitiate the strength of this declaration; but the more resolute won the day.

 

In the United States a massive letter-writing campaign protesting the treatment of the Witnesses was initiated. According to the 1974 Yearbook, "The effect that the letters, and especially the telegrams, had upon Hitler can be seen by a report written by Karl R. Wittig [plenipotentiary of General Luendorffl, attested by a notary public in Frankfurt (Main) on November 13, 1947:

 

DECLARATION - On October 7, 1934, having been previously summoned, I visited Dr. Wilhelm Frick, at that time Minister of the Interior of the Reich and Prussia, in his home office of the Reich, located in Berlin. . . . I was to accept communications, contents of which were an attempt to persuade General Ludendorff to discontinuance of his objection to the Nazi regime. During my discussion with Dr. Frick, Hitler suddenly appeared and began taking part in the conversation. When our discussion obligatorily dealt with the action against the International Bible Students Association in Germany up until now, Dr. Frick showed Hitler a number of telegrams protesting against the Third Reich's persecution of the Bible Students, saying: "If the Bible Students do not immediately get in line we will act against them using the strongest means." After which Hitler jumped to his feet and with clenched fists hysterically screamed: "This brood will be exterminated in Germany!"

 

(The Witnesses add a picturesque detail: a vividly cursing Hitler, tossing an inkpot in an insane rage, screaming that he would wipe the Bible Student ''vermin'' from the Fatherland.)

 

Wittig continues:

 

Four years after this discussion I was able, by my own observations, to convince myself, during my seven years in protective custody in the hell of the Nazis' concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Flossenburg and Mauthausen - I was in prison until released by the Allies - that Hitler's outburst of anger was not just an idle threat. No other group of prisoners of the named concentration camps was exposed to the sadism of the SS soldiery in such a fashion as the Bible Students were. It was a sadism marked by an unending chain of physical and mental tortures, the likes of which no language in the world can express. [lbid., pp.138-39]

 

By their own account and those of others, the Bible Students were hypnotized, drugged, and tortured; some broke under torture, with the result that "the Gestapo was able to obtain information about how the work of Jehovah's witnesses was organized and carried out." [Ibid., p.126]

 

The year 1936 saw massive arrests of Bible Students in Germany. There [were] numerous cases," the 1974 Yearbook reports, "when the Gestapo officials were apparently struck with blindness when they conducted their searches and where they were frequently outwitted by the lightning-quick actions of the brothers, clearly indicating Jehovah's protection and angelic help." [Ibid., pp. 127-28; see also pp. 14~41]

 

Watchtower sources report infiltration of the movement by government spies - similar, no doubt, to the V-Manner who infiltrated the clergy and reported to the Gestapo. Watchtower sources also report that these infiltrators and betrayers frequently went "insane." [Ibid., pp. 159-60]

 

The work of the Society having gone underground, Watch Tower publications were smuggled into Germany (one conveyor was a Bible Student's hollow wooden leg) by way of Switzerland.

 

In 1936, Witnesses worldwide adopted a resolution protesting their brothers' incarceration. Copies were sent to Hitler and his officials, and to Pope Pius XII. The resolution read, in part:

 

We raise strong objections to the cruel treatment of Jehovah's witnesses by the Roman Catholic Hierarchy and their allies in Germany as well as in all other parts of the world, but we leave the outcome of the matter completely in the hands of the Lord, our God. [Yearbook, 1944, p. 155]

 

After 1937, the Gestapo ruled that the Witnesses might be incarcerated in concentration camps without judicial warrant, solely on grounds of suspicion.

 

By all accounts, the behavior of Witnesses held in Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, and Belsen was characterized by extraordinary bravery. The vast majority refused to sign a declaration disavowing their faith - a declaration that would have ensured their release from the camps. The Society contends that those Witnesses who succumbed to torture and threats received poisoned meats from God in return. They were, having "placed themselves outside of Jehovah's protection," imprisoned by the Soviets, starved, raped . . . Those who joined the German military, the Society says, for the most part "lost their lives." [Yearbook, 1974, p. 178]

 

So the Witnesses talk about their martyrs (those who died for their faith), and about those who died because their faith weakened - using both sets of circumstances as proof of divine dispensation. They need to see immediate rewards, immediate punishments, direct consequences to every act - as if faith must pay off promptly with tangible rewards.

 

There were, the Society acknowledges, Witnesses who did sign declarations disavowing their faith; later, before they were actually released from the camps, they had their signatures annulled. And there were others who were released as a result of their disavowal but who, "after the breakdown of Hitler's regime, spontaneously joined the [Witnesses'] ranks." (Commenting on this, the Yearbook reports charitably (and correctly): "Many were comforted by the experience of Peter, who had denied his Lord and Master too, but had been taken back into his favor." [Ibid., p. 178] 1 find this remark from a Watchtower publication refreshing, because it treats tenderly of human frailty and acknowledges that human beings do sometimes act out of human motives and human circumstances - especially since so often what one reads suggests that everything that happens to Jehovah's Witnesses is result of angelic or demonic intervention. It has the sweet taste of the merciful God of the Gospels: we did not need Christ to teach us ethics - we needed Him to understand mercy.)

 

Within the camps, the Witnesses were highly organized - although, according to the Watchtower Society, schisms flourished even under these unlikely conditions. Some Bible Students were rebuked for "having an exaggerated view [of their] own importance." One man with an eidetic memory was reproached by his fellow Witness inmates because he recited past issues of The Watch Tower; he was charged with the sin of pride. [Yearbook. 1974]

 

Whether humility is a virtue in a concentration camp is a good question; that pride should assert itself in a death camp might seem a victory of the human spirit over the forces of oppression. It may be sad, but it is hardly remarkable, that some Witnesses joined their oppressors in order to survive. Some, for example, collaborated with the SS as work-gang leaders. [Ibid.] (The Witnesses, by the way, seem never to have heard of Anne Frank. Her idealism and her egalitarian love would not endear her to them And there is her Jewishness. I remember a Jewish woman with whom I studied the Bible when I was a child. Her family had been wiped out in the camps. When she came to meetings, she insisted, wildly struggling against the Witnesses' smugness, that the Jews too had suffered during the war. But the Witnesses insisted blandly that after all, the Jews had had no choice - they'd been born Jews, and so had not the virtue of choosing their suffering; and the Jews had not, they said, blindly ignoring her pain, suffered for Christ's name's sake. "The thing that made me want to look into Christianity," she said, "was the smallness of the Old Testament God that sent bears to tear children apart when they teased the Prophet Elijah for being bald. And your Christ seems even smaller than that." (They had no idea what she was talking about.)

 

 

The cohesive ideology of the Witnesses - like the cohesive ideology of the Communists - and their communal life and faith in the camps (where they even managed to baptize new converts by total immersion in water) enabled them to survive their ordeals. It is significant that after their liberation from the camps many Witnesses fell away from their faith. It is almost as if their persecution had been the jell that united them to one another and to God, the adrenaline that charged and sustained them. They got through tragedy, with its harsh, sharp focus, together; like most of us, they found common- place muddle harder to deal with.

 

In general, behavior of the Witnesses as a whole in the camps seems to be survival behavior, and Watchtower publications report not only stories of sadistic treatment at the hands of the SS, but the fact that the Witnesses were placed, even in Auschwitz, in "positions of trust":

 

Those brothers and sisters who had been in Auschwitz for a time had positions of trust. Several sisters were allowed to walk to the city without a guard to make purchases for their mistresses. In this way the sisters could contact brothers outside. They cared for a special, hard and dangerous job. They copied whole Watchtower articles into blue paper-covered school notebooks and tried to circulate them. [Yearbook, 1976, p. 40]

 

Again, both sets of treatment - the torture they received and the special treatment they received - are used as proof of God's providence.

 

What appears to have happened is that after 1942, when the Nazis were more concerned with winning the war than with eradicating one small dissident sect, many Witnesses were employed in "projects productive to the economy" and were therefore left alone, since all available manpower was mg mobilized for production. This can be seen from a comment made by SS leader Pohl to Himmler vis-a-vis the camps:

 

The war has brought about a visible change in the structure of the concentration camps and basically changed their function with regard to the use of prisoners.

 

The incarceration of prisoners solely because of security, educational or preventative reasons no longer predominates. The emphasis has swung to the economic aspect of the matter. The mobilization of all prisoners, in the first place, for war-related jobs (increase of armament production) and, secondly, for peace-related matters becomes more and more the predominating factor.

 

The necessary measures being taken result from this realization, requiring a gradual transfer of the concentration camps from their previous one-sided political design to an organization meeting the economic needs. [Yearbook, 1974, p.195)

 

Because of this new policy, prisoners, including Witnesses, were better fed. The officials were careful, too, not to force Witnesses to work in armament factories, but placed them in shops where the work was suitable to their abilities. For this, the Witnesses praised God in the belief that He had directed their enemies.

 

This is a variation of "God works in strange and wondrous ways": the implication is that the Witnesses' integrity aroused the ire of Satan and their docility and industriousness aroused the sympathy of Satan's agents. And, indeed, except when their faith was directly assaulted, the Witnesses appear to have been docile and cooperative in the camps (they have always prided themselves on being model prisoners); they were thus more valuable to the state alive than dead.

 

That they were not exterminated owes something to the fact that, as the war progressed, they were not high-priority state enemies - and something. perhaps, to Himmler's personal physician, the Finnish masseur Kersten. who sought to moderate Himmler's bloody fanaticism toward all concentration camp inmates. Kersten secured work releases for several Witness women incarcerated in the camps in order for them to work as domestics at his home. He was impressed by their dutiful industry; he liked them. As an apparent result of Kersten's experience with the Bible Students and his intercession, Himmler wrote the following letter to SS leaders Pohl and Mueller:

 

Enclosed is a report about the ten Bible Students that are working on my doctor's farm. I had an opportunity to study the matter of the Earnest Bible Students from all angles. Mrs. Kersten made a very good suggestion. She said that she had never had such good, willing, faithful and obedient personnel as these ten women. These people do much out of love and kindness. . . . One of the women once received 5.00 RM as a tip from a guest. She accepted the money since she did not want to cast aspersions upon the home, and gave it to Mrs. Kersten, since it was prohibited to have money in the camp. The women voluntarily did any work required of them. Evenings they knitted, Sundays they were kept busy in some other way. During the summer they did not let the opportunity pass to get up two hours earlier and gather baskets full of mushrooms, even though they were required to work ten, eleven, and twelve hours a day. These facts complete my picture of the Bible Students. They are incredibly fanatical, willing people, ready to sacrifice. If we could put their fanaticism to work for Germany or instill such fanaticism into our people, then we would be stronger than we are today. Of course, since they reject the war, their teaching is so detrimental that we cannot permit it lest we do Ger- many the greatest damage. . . .

 

Nothing is accomplished by punishing them, since they only talk about it afterward with enthusiasm. . . . Each punishment serves as a merit for the other world. That is why every true Bible Student will let himself be executed without hesitation. . . . Every confinement in the dungeon, every pang of hunger, every period of freezing is a merit, every punishment, every blow is a merit with Jehovah.

 

Should problems develop in camp in the future involving the Bible Students, then I prohibit the camp commander from pronouncing any punishment. Such cases should be reported to me with a brief description of the circumstances. From now on I plan on doing the opposite and telling the respective individual: "You are forbidden to work. You are to be better fed than the others and you do not have to do anything.”

 

For according to the belief of these good-natured lunatics merit ceases then, yes, to the contrary, previous merits will be deducted by Jehovah.

 

Now my suggestion is that all of the Bible Students be put to work - for example, farm work, which has nothing to do with war and all its madness. One can leave them unguarded if properly assigned; they will not run away. They can be given uncontrolled jobs, they will prove to be the best administrators and workers.

 

Another use for them as suggested by Mrs. Kersten: We can employ the Bible Students in our "Lebensbornheime," . . . not as nurses, but, rather, as cooks, housekeepers, or to do work in the laundry or similar jobs. In cases where we still have men serving as janitors we can use strong women Bible Students. I am convinced that, in most cases, we will have little difficulty with them.

 

I am also in agreement with suggestions that Bible Students be assigned to large families. Qualified Bible Students who have the necessary ability should be found and reported to me. I will then personally distribute them among large families. In such households they are not to wear prison garb, however, but civilian clothes. . . .

 

In all these cases where prisoners are partially free and have been assigned to such work we want to avoid written records or signatures and make such agreements with just a handshake. . . . [Ibid., pp. 19~97]

 

 

Witness women were subsequently sent to work in SS households, in truck gardens, on estates, and in the Lebensbornheime.

 

The SS were willing, according to the Watchtower Society, to take the Witnesses into their homes because the Nazis had become wary of their servants, fearing death by poison or some other method. Two Witnesses, Max Schroer and Paul Wauer, were called upon to act as barbers because the SS knew Witnesses would not cut the throats of their enemies. Because of this trust, visits to and from relatives - even vacations of several weeks - were allowed to Society members working outside the camps.

 

They were chosen to supervise and direct workers on SS officers' private estates. One Witness reports that he was permitted to have his accordion sent from home, and that often in the evenings he and other Witnesses would go out onto Lake Wolfgang (Austria), where the songs and light music they played entertained not only their brethren but local residents, including the SS officials in whose charge they were.

 

The Witnesses were apparently able, in the words psychiatrist Rollo May uses to describe "constructive schizoid behavior," "to live and work with the machine without becoming machines." [Rollo May, Love and Will (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p.32, "Our Schizoid World"] It would be fair to say of a German Witness that he found it "necessary to remain detached enough to get meaning from the experience, but in doing so to protect his own inner life from impoverishment." [Ibid.] They were not entirely indifferent to the suffering of others: The Yiddish New York daily Der Tag (July 2, 1939) reported that "when like an epidemic all kinds of food stores began to post the well-known signs 'Juden unerwunscht,' Witnesses frequently provided their Jewish neighbors or mere acquaintances with food or milk without asking any reward for it." [quoted in Aw, Feb. 22, 1975, p. 22] Their apathy arose from the fact that, inasmuch as they saw themselves as the only focus of all events, they were (in the words Rollo May applies to alienated personalities) basically "uninvolved, detached, unrelated to the significant events." [May, op. cit.] As individuals, they were able to extend human kindness to individual Jews; as a group, they were obliged to declare that the suffering they sought to alleviate as individuals had no value and no significance.

 

May describes the healthy person in whom love and will function creatively as being "in the process of reaching out, moving toward the world, seeking to affect others or the inanimate world, and opening himself to be affected; molding, forming, relating to the world, or requiring that it relate to him." [Op. cit., Foreword, p. 9, p. 276] The Witnesses "reached out, or moved toward the world" insofar as their proselytizing was an outreach; but their full genuine embrace was extended only to converts. They did not "open themselves up to be affected"; they lived within their own constructs and their own community. Nevertheless, it is possible to conjecture that their behavior in the camps was characteristic of what May calls "the constructive schizoid personality"; it enabled them to survive.

 

"Dr. Bruno Bettelheim," May says, "finds the same supremacy of the aloof person - whom I would call schizoid - in his experiences in the concentration camps during World War II."

 

Bettelheim:

 

According to psychoanalytic convictions then current . . . aloofness from other persons and emotional distance from the world were viewed as weakness of character. My comments . . . on the admirable way in which a group of what I call "anointed persons" behaved in the concentration camps suggest how struck I was with these very aloof persons. They were very much out of contact with their unconscious but nevertheless retained their old personality structure, stuck to their values in the face of extreme hardships, and as persons were hardly touched by the camp experience. . . . These very persons who, according to existing psychoanalytic theory, should have had weak personalities apt to readily disintegrate, turned out to be heroic leaders, mainly because of the strength of their character. [Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 2~2l; quoted in May, Op. cit., pp.32-33]

 

In the early 1900s, Pastor Russell pointed out that the Witnesses ought to reap their greatest rewards in Germany, for it was there that the Society had gone to its greatest expense to spread the word. He added the caveat, however, that the large numbers of the "consecrated" might have been diminished by immigration to the United States.

 

The work Russell started in Germany, a country for which he had a great affinity, has not fared badly. In 1975, there were, in West Germany, over 100,000 Witnesses - or one Witness in every 597 West Germans. [Yearbook, 1976] And the many Catholics in the councils of the West German government have not troubled to place any obstacles in their way.

 

AFRICA

 

Malawi:

 

They are not Jehovah's Witnesses, they are the Devil's Witnesses. - Dr. H. K. Banda, President of Malawi, 1972 [reported in Newsweek, May 10, 1976, p.106]

 

The determination of Jehovah's Witnesses to remain aloof from politics has brought them into conflict with African nationalism - particularly in Malawi.

 

On October 23, 1967, Jehovah's Witnesses were officially listed, in The Tines of Malawi, as an "unlawful society." In 1972, contending that the 30,000 Malawian Witnesses hindered the country's political and economic development, the Malawi Congress Party is reported to have adopted the following resolution:

 

Resolved that all the members of these fanatical religious sects employed in commerce and industry should be dismissed forthwith, and that any commercial or industrial concern that does not comply with this resolution should have its license cancelled.

 

Resolved that all the members of these fanatical religious sects employed by the Government should be dismissed forthwith and that any member of these sects who is self-employed, either in business or farming, have his business or farming activities discouraged.

 

Resolved that all the members of these sects who live in the villages should be chased away from there, and appealed to the Government [sic] to give maximum possible protection to members of the party who deal with the adherents to these sects. [Aw, Dec. 8, 1975, p.6]

 

Newsweek reported:

 

A series of pogrom-style persecutions has apparently decimated the sect [in Malawi]. Newsmen have been banned from Malawi, but numerous eyewitness reports of torture and murder have leaked out of the small southeastern African nation. Jehovah's Witnesses have reportedly been hacked to death, gang-raped and forced to walk with nails through their feet. Thousands of Witnesses have fled to neighboring Zambia and Mozambique only to be deported back to Malawi. "There are still 12,000 to 15,000 of our members in Malawi," says Jehovah's Witness leader Keath Eaton in Salisbury, Rhodesia. "Most are being persecuted and about a third are in concentration camps. [Op. cit., p.106]

 

According to Amnesty International's Report on Torture (1973):

 

Well-substantiated reports indicate that both in 1967 and in 1972 the Young Pioneers [the youth wing of the Malawi Congress Party] and their supporters inflicted torture on the Jehovah's Witnesses in the form of rape, beatings, shaving with broken bottles and burning. In the autumn of 1972, these persecutions caused a number of deaths and the migration of some 21,000 Jehovah's Witnesses to Zambia, where several hundred died in an inadequate refugee camp.

 

The Witnesses were expelled from the Zambian camps in December, 1972; unable to practice their religion in Malawi, they fled to refugee camps in neighboring Mozambique. From 1973 to August, 1975, 20,000 Witnesses lived in the Mozambique camps. According to Amnesty International:

 

In June 1975 the FRELIMO government took power in Mozambique, and shortly thereafter a number of highly placed officials in the FRELIMO government began to attack the Jehovah's Witnesses. . . . Probably as a result of this the refugee camps. in the Vila Coutinho/Mlangeni area appear to have been closed during the month of August. From independent witnesses, Amnesty International knows that Jehovah's Witness refugees in large numbers were seen on the Malawi/ Mozambique border in late August [1975], apparently confused as to where to go next.

 

The Witnesses' offense in Malawi was to refuse to purchase a 25-cent membership card in the Malawi Congress Party.

 

On May 31, 1976, Dr. Philip A. Potter, of the World Council Churches, appealed to Dr. Banda to release Witnesses detained in camps and urged that they be sent back to their villages to lead a "normal life." In his letter to Dr. Banda, Dr. Potter wrote:

 

We are not unaware of the difficulties that have existed during the last several years between the Jehovah's Witnesses in your country and the political authorities there. We also realize that their teachings on, and attitude to, the state have in part at least contributed to this tension. The World Council of Churches, as you are aware, has al- ways encouraged participation by all Christians in the welfare of the countries in which they live.

 

But the fundamental human right of such participation also involves the freedom to dissent as well as the freedom to refuse to join any particular political grouping or party. We, therefore, feel that your country's apparent policy of compulsory membership in the Malawi Congress Party is a curtailment of human rights and that punitive measures against those who do not take membership are unjustifiable. The WCC has attempted to uphold human rights everywhere and for all and we express our deep concern abut the Jehovah's Witnesses in Malawi, especially those who are reported to be in detention or under arrest for refusing to buy membership cards in the Congress Party. [quoted in Aw, Dec. 8,1976]

 

A massive letter-writing campaign initiated by American Witnesses resulted in statements of concern from Senator Frank Church and from Representatives George Brown, Paul Tsongas, and Tom Hartkin.

 

When, in the summer of 1975, Portugal relinquished control of Mozambique to the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), the 7,000 Witnesses of that newly independent country became subject to mass arrests and, according to a story in Awake! of January 8, 1976, to harassment and torture. FRELIMO propaganda organs denounced them as gents left behind by Portuguese colonialism," "former 'Pides' [Portuguese secret police] whose aim was to upset the social order." [Noticias, Oct. 9, ~75] A Tribuna [Oct. 22, 1975] accused them of "a religious fanaticism" hat permitted them "not to show respect for the social order and to annihilate the mobilization and organization of the people."

 

"When we were tied and beaten by Portuguese colonialists, where were these Witnesses of Jehovah?" Mozambique President Samora Machel asked. [Noticias, op. cit.]

 

The Witnesses' response is that they too were imprisoned - by the Pides. This, as published in Awake! of January 8, 1976, is their account:

 

In 1935, when Antonio Salazar ruled Portugal and Mozambique with an iron fist, two white South African Witnesses entered Mozambique "to cooperate with the Mozambican Witnesses in their activity." They were deported, as were other foreign missionaries, in 1938 and 1939. Native Mozambicans who received The Watchtower magazine were also arrested, and some were deported to the penal colony of Sao Tome; others were assigned to work camps in the northern part of Mozambique.

 

When a British Witness was sent to Mozambique in the 1940s to seek official recognition of the work of the Society, the secret police accused him of being a Communist: "Though the interview convinced the official that Jehovah's witnesses are not Communists, he told [the Society's representative John Cooke: 'Nevertheless, you people are against the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church is our church. She helped us to build up the Portuguese Empire!' Cooke was given forty-eight hours to leave the country."

 

The main charge leveled against the Witnesses by the Portuguese authorities and the secret police had been that they refused to take part in fighting against FRELIMO. But in 1973, when another wave of persecution hit the Witnesses, they were accused of having been supporters of FRELIMO. And when FRELIMO took full power, the revolutionary government accused them of "obscurantism." Radio and press dispatches repeated that "Mozambique is not Jehovah's country"; "these fanatical 'Jehovahs' must be reeducated." Beatings, torture, and mass arrests have followed; Witnesses have been separated from their children, and their property has been confiscated.

 

It is extremely difficult to get outside corroboration for this account. George Houser, Executive Director of the American Committee on Africa, visited Mozambique in October, 1975. He reports that Marcelinos Dos Santos, vice-president of FRELIMO, regarded Jehovah's Witnesses as a vexing problem: "What to do with them?" Dos Santos asked. "They are not cooperating. We have organized new productive communal villages - and they do not take part in the life of the community." According to Dos Santos, Mozambican Witnesses are being assigned to "re-education centers."

 

Willis Logan, of the Africa Office of the National Council of Churches, agrees that the treatment meted out to the Witnesses is harsh: "They refuse," he says,

 

to work in any way to support struggling governments; they withhold their allegiance from countries that are struggling for survival; they do not participate in the civic or civil affairs of the country. Religious tolerance as we know it does not exist in many of the emerging nations. Governments like that of Mozambique can't be convinced that their refusal to vote and to become members of the party is not a result of foreign interference. Their leaders have always been white - and white South Africans, in particular. FRELIMO is bound to take a jaundiced view of this. And the priority of a country like Mozambique is its own development and survival; religious liberties become a casualty of the national will to survive. Jehovah's Witnesses pressure the Council of Churches to protest in their behalf, even though they never show any ecumenical spirit in return, and in fact denounce the spirit of ecumenicism. We know they are harassed; we don't know to what extent they are harassed.

 

Meanwhile, Jehovah's Witnesses are buoyed by the belief that "they have he firm guarantee by God that they will be rewarded with the opportunity for eternal life in his new order. For this reason they rejoice, knowing that the 'tested quality' of their faith, 'of much greater value than gold that perishes despite its being proved by fire, may be found a cause for praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.' " [1 Peter 1:7, NWT; Aw, Dec. 22, 1975]

 

They can also take pleasure in the fact that while Mozambique oppresses them, Portugal, the country that formerly oppressed Mozambique, now officially recognizes them. On December 18, 1974, Jehovah's Witnesses were legally recognized by Portugal's revolutionary government, which restored civil liberties after almost a decade of totalitarian rule. The same government that gave Mozambique independence gave Jehovah's Witnesses free reign. There were, as of September, 1976, 18,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in Portugal - which makes them the second-largest religion in that Catholic country.

 

And to all charges that they endanger the spirit of nationalism and the mobilization of energies necessary to emerging nations, the Witnesses reply that on the contrary, they are industrious, reliable, and honest; that they pay their taxes; and that they have helped hundreds of thousands to "overcome sexual immorality, alcoholism, drug addiction and similar degrading habits" [Aw, Jan. 8, 1976, p.24]; that they have aided the cause of literacy. In Mozambique, they claim, 4,000 people achieved literacy through the Witnesses' efforts (and through their handbooks- the sole vehicle by which illiterate would-be converts are taught). Similar claims are made for the Witnesses' work in Mexico, where, according to the Watchtower Society, 48,000 persons learned to read and write through their efforts in the past twenty-eight years; and for Nigeria, where, the Witnesses say, they have taught 5,000 people to read and write in 1974 and 1975. [Ibid.] The Witnesses further argue that they "have helped the people to gain a progressive, practical approach to life and its problems, contributing to the forming of united families, responsible workers, and considerate peaceful neighbors" and have "helped Africans of all tribes to become free from all kinds of superstitious beliefs [including] the practice of witchcraft, enslaving rituals, fears, and tribal taboos." [Ibid., p.25]

 

It is true that African countries that have been colonized, whose fight for independence has been arduous and bitter, interpret the Witnesses' history of political "neutrality" as a kind of passive resistance to progressive change. The Witnesses themselves argue that they have been a "stabilizing element" in the native populations that were oppressed by imperialist regimes. What some newly independent African nations (whose use of force against the Witnesses is not, of course, justifiable, while it may be understandable) feel about Jehovah's Witnesses is not unlike what Jesus said to his erstwhile followers: If "you are not for me, you are against me; if you are neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, I will spit you out of my mouth."0

 

Zambia:

 

Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, for example (himself a devout Christian and a believer in Gandhian nonviolence), must find it hard to love the Witnesses when he remembers that their role in pre-independent Northern Rhodesia was, in effect, to be "good natives":

 

One incident involving the brothers that took place in 1940 shows the good effect the truth was having on them. Mine workers at Rhokana Corporation's Nkana Mine went on strike, but the brothers employed at the mine continued to present themselves for work, since soldiers had been called in to prevent picketing. It began to be realized by employers that Jehovah's witnesses were in fact a stabilizing element in the population. [Yearbook, 1972, pp.238-39]

 

Another edition of the Yearbook says blandly, speaking of a 1940 "riot" in the Copper Belt, that "the ringleaders were all Roman Catholic." [Yearbook, 1976, p.155]

 

The Witnesses were not officially recognized in Northern Rhodesia until after l946 - although they were generally perceived to be "good natives." There were, in fact, no white Northern Rhodesians who were Witnesses until 1944, though the Society's branch depot and the administration of the local Witnesses were in the hands of a white South African, Llewelyn Phillips. During World War II, Phillips was arrested by government authorities for refusing to surrender Watchtower publications and for refusal to join the army. A ban was placed on Watchtower activity by the Solicitor General.

 

Still, as Watchtower publications point out, the services of black Witnesses were in great demand: "The Society's adherents have the best reputation of any in this [labor] Corps and it is well known that farmers and other employers specify that they specially want them." [Yearbook, 1944] "The official mind is one of non-recognition still, but individually there are some encouraging instances of a definite respect for the cleanliness, decency and industry of Jehovah's witnesses." [Yearbook, 1946]

 

After World War II, when the Witnesses were no longer seen as a threat to national security, they were permitted to go about their work unmolested. They were, in fact, as agitation for independence accelerated, viewed by colonial administrators as a stabilizing influence. The Witnesses cite with pride a pre-independence newspaper editorial that remarked that “ those areas in which Jehovah's Witnesses are strongest among Africans are now . more trouble-free than the average. Certainly they have been active against agitators, witchcraft, drunkenness and violence of any kind.” [Yearbook, 1972] The newspaper also eulogizes their middle-class propriety:          the Witness families [are] easily recognized in their meetings as little clusters of father, mother and children." [Ibid.] The political passivity that endeared them to colonialists made them the targets for attack by African political nationalists and activists; just prior to independence, African militants seeing in their docility and cooperation with the state an implicit threat to independence and national freedom - harassed and persecuted them. Kenneth Kaunda - then head of the United National Independence Party - implored all regional party members to put a stop to the violence and terrorism directed against them. But with the coming of independence and the need to consolidate and unify the new nation - referred to by the Witnesses as "a patriotic hysteria" [Ibid.] - Witness children were expelled from school for not saluting the flag around which the new nation proudly rallied. Foreign Witnesses were deported. Violence against the Witnesses again broke out; rapes and beatings were reported. Kaunda's government spoke out against these atrocities; but President Kaunda felt constrained to ban the work of the Witnesses temporarily.

 

I met Kenneth Kaunda in New York in the hard and heady days prior to independence. He struck me - as I think he strikes most observers - as a man of impressive dignity and scrupulous conscience. Many political observers think that Kaunda's influence alone may keep Africa from exploding into black-white violence. I can imagine that it grieved him deeply to see the fervor of his people translated into acts of brutality against the Witnesses and that his banning the work of the Witnesses was conceived as a way to defuse a situation which he deplored.)

 

When there is internal stability, the Witnesses are usually unmolested, their work placed under no restraints; according to the 1977 Yearbook, this is the case today with the more than 57,000 Witnesses now in Zambia. It is not surprising that a sect that does not practice a social gospel, and that has had white men as its leaders, has given rise, among black Africans who tend to view white missionaries as partners of white imperialists, to fear and suspicion.

 

Southern Africa:

 

To be a Christian in South Africa - if one understands Christianity to mean not only obeying the awesomely difficult injunction to "love one another" but performing the equally difficult task of "bearing witness” - is not easy.

 

The Witnesses have proselytized in the face of enormous difficulties in South Africa and maintained their neutrality in the face of bloody racial conflict; but their construction of "neutrality" precludes the kind of savage/compassionate outrage against racial injustice that men like Father Huddleston and Alan Paton have found it their duty to express. As the Church hierarchy did not vehemently attack the treatment of the Jews in Hitler's Germany, the Witnesses do not attack and expose the treatment of black South Africans.

They carry no man's cross but their own. If they deplore, say, the massacre at Sharpville, their modest indignation is no different in tone from their derision of rock music; both, for them, are proofs that the Devil rules the world. Their anger does not burn hot; indeed, they reserve their scathing attacks for members of the clergy who do denounce racial atrocities - because, according to them, those churchmen have entered the secular arena, in which they themselves claim to have no part.

 

They do, however, love one another. When a drought in Lesotho in 1970 created a severe food shortage, South African- Witnesses provided relief maize and cash; and acts of charity like this convince black Witnesses that their white brothers love them: "We reached the point where we had nothing in our house, not even ten cents to buy some mealie meal. Then the money for food arrived from our white brothers in South Africa. I could only cry and not say anything." - Report from a black Witness in Lesotho [Yearbook, 1976, p.212]

 

The section dealing with South Africa and neighboring territories in the 1976 Yearbook reads more like a travel brochure written by a public relations firm than an account of the land of apartheid and bloody racial uprisings:

 

Come with us to a land of intriguing contrasts - bustling cities and remote places in the bush, modern dwellings and humble African huts. Walk among people of many races. Listen and you will hear millions speak English or Afrikaans (derived from Old Dutch). Others of this land's 26,000,000 inhabitants are at home with such tongues as Xhosa and Zulu. . . . Many a modern African, though driving a late- model car, occasionally sacrifices a goat to appease the spirits of his dead ancestors. [pp.67-69]

 

The Witnesses' own account of their history in South Africa is fascinating, particularly as it reveals the sect's antipathy to social reform and reformers, and its almost rabid wish to disassociate itself from "indigenous” nationalistic Watchtower movements.

 

The proselytizing work of the Witnesses in South Africa began at the turn of the century when, according to the 1976 Yearbook, "South Africa’s population was smaller, the pace slower, and life more simple . . . [and] the time proved ripe for the good news to reach this fascinating field." [p.69] Russellite literature was carried into the Transvaal in 1902 by a Dutch Reform missionary. In 1906, two Scottish Bible Students began to collect subscriptions for Zion's' Watch Tower in Durban.

 

It is at this point - when there were forty subscribers to the Watch Tower in South Africa - that the man cast by the Witnesses as a villain enters the “simple” life of the country. In 1907, Joseph Booth, an Englishman who had been a sheep farmer in New Zealand and an entrepreneur in Australia before he found his vocation, "appeared on the stage of the Kingdom drama" [p. 70] in Southern Africa. In the last decade of the 19th century, Booth, who had allied himself with various adventist sects at different times, came to Nyasaland (now Malawi) as an independent missionary. (Booth moved around in adventist sects so much that he was described as a religious hitchhiker.) He was outspoken in his espousal of African equality; and his slogan - "Africa for the Africans" - put him in bad odor with government authorities, with whom he was soon persona non grata.

Knowing nothing of this, Pastor Russell interviewed Booth in 1906, and as a result the Society underwrote his missionary activities for a time, under the impression that he would open up wide new fields for the brethren. Unfortunately for the Society - and for Russell - Booth's activities merely increased its difficulties and brought its name into disrepute.

 

Booth took off for South Africa, where he acquired a fervent disciple, an African miner named Elliott Kamwana, who had been educated at the Livingstonia Mission on Lake Nyasa. Soon Kamwana was distributing Russellite tracts among Africans in Johannesburg and Pretoria. He claimed to have baptized over 9,000 Africans in Nyasaland in one year, 1909, alone.

 

But Booth and Kamwana, while they appear to have used Watch Tower literature to some extent, were at least as much interested in social justice and equality on earth as they were in preaching a heavenly reward. The 1976 Yearbook reports that while Bible Students in Durban sang "Free from the Law" (no doubt referring to the Mosaic Law), Booth stationed himself outside their meeting hall and sang, in protest, "Not free from the law" (meaning, no doubt, South Africa's discriminatory racial laws). p.73]

 

("Actually," says the Yearbook, "neither Booth nor Kamwana had really left Babylon the Great, or false religion; they never became Bible Students or Jehovah's Christian witnesses. Their relationship with the Watch Tower Society was short and superficial." [Ibid.])

 

When Kamwana got back to his native Nyasaland - carrying Booth's social gospel with him - he was deported to the Seychelles Islands. He was not permitted to return to his homeland until 1937. Upon his return, he became the leader of an indigenous "Watch Tower movement" - one of many that proliferated in the Rhodesias, the Congo, and South Africa; they sprang, it is likely, from seeds sown in Nyasaland by Booth and Kamwana; and the schismatic Watch Tower movement was carried from Nyasaland by Africans emigrating for work.

 

Kamwana, who called his sect "The Watchtower Mission," used some of Russell's ideas and more of his own. He regarded the American Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society as a European organization.

 

Russell was nervous; in 1910, he sent European Bible Students in good standing with the Society to oversee the work in Southern Africa. But the indigenous Watch tower movements continued to flourish - and to cause grave concern to the American Society, which had no wish to be associated in the public mind, with the indigenous religious/socialist/nationalist- groups, many of which refused to pay taxes and engaged in other acts civil disobedience.

 

 

So many groups were going around calling themselves "Watch Tower” people that there was understandable confusion about who was who. In January of 1915, there was an uprising - quickly crushed by African troops under European officers and European volunteers - in Nyasaland. It was led by one John Chilembwe.

 

“Subsequently,” according to the 1976 Yearbook,

 

accusations were made that the Watch Tower Society had something to do with the revolt. In fact, the official History of the Great War refers to Chilembwe as a "religious fanatic . . . of the so-called 'Watch Tower sect." Careful investigation has since proved that those in Nyasaland who were interested in the truth, and even those of Kamwana’s movement, a false 'Watchtower movement,' as such, had no direct connection with or responsibility for the rioting. The book Independent African examines the evidence on this very thoroughly and, on page 324, comes to this conclusion: "Chilembwe himself had no apparent connection with the American Watch Tower movement and attempts to link his insurrectionary projects with this organization in the United States seem misguided." Of course, since Chilembwe had been one of Booth's converts, and Booth once had some connection with the Society, enemies of the truth used these facts to make accusations and turn the Society into a scapegoat In actual fact, Chilembwe and his lieutenants were members of the highly respected orthodox missions. These, too, came in for a lot of criticism from the government.

 

The book Independent African, page 232, also has this interesting comment to make regarding the false accusation that the Watch Tower Society's publications influenced some Africans to take part in the uprisings; "But it must also be noted that nowhere in the Russell volumes was it suggested that the believers in his teachings should take active steps to hasten the overthrow of these institutions in preparation for the Millennial Age: rather they were recommended to wait patiently for divine intervention." [p.81]

 

Religious historian and ethnologist Vittono Lanternari takes the story of the indigenous Watchtower movements further:

 

Sometime after 1910, in the small South African village of BulIboek, near Queenstown, "a prophet named Enoch Mgijima, whose gospel was similar j that preached in Rhodesia by John Chilembwe," had a vision in which he saw two great colonial powers, which he identified as the Netherlands and Britain engaged in battle first with each other, "and then suddenly being both annihilated by an enormous monkey, which the prophet recognized as representing the African people, destined to destroy their white rulers." Inspired by his vision, Mgijima formed a new sect called the Israelites, proclaiming himself "bishop, prophet, and guardian." The Israelites rejected the New Testament "as a hoax perpetrated by the missionaries"; they regarded themselves as the chosen people of Jehovah, who would not fail to come to their aid when the time was ripe for throwing off the foreign yoke." The South African government ordered the sect dispersed and the village of Bullboek razed to the ground. "A massacre ensued in which 117 villagers of the 500 who had resisted at Mgijima's side were killed. The incident . . . forced the government to retreat from its intransigent position against recognizing the native churches, and to appoint a Native Church Commission, which, in 1925, published norms for their official acceptance." [The Religions of the Oppressed (New York: New American Library, 1965), pp.42-43]

 

In the 1920s, a native of Nyasaland named Tom Nyirenda, who called himself Mwana Lesa, or "Son of God," traveled from village to village in Northern Rhodesia, proclaiming himself a prophet of the "Watchtower movement" and declaring that Africa belonged to the Africans and the white man ought to be chased out.

 

According to the 1976 Yearbook, Nyirenda-taking a page from Foxe's Book of Martyrs - labeled his political enemies "witches," tied them to a dunking stool, and drowned them. The Yearbook quotes an account by Scott Lindberg in The Sunday Times of July 1,1934:

 

[Nyirenda] called the headmen together and told them that he had been sent by God to cleanse the tribe of witchcraft, and that every man, woman and child must be baptised in the river.

 

The superstitious natives were decoyed to a place where a swift river forced its way through a winding ravine among the hills, and there, on top of a boulder in the middle of the river, stood Tom, dressed in long white robes.

 

He told the people that God had sent him to separate the sheep from the goats. He then baptised each person by immersion in the river, with the help of [an ally and his supporters], who held their enemies under the water, with their heads upstream, until they were drowned.

 

The people sang hymns as they stood gazing at each lifeless victim, and all night long the forest echoed the frenzied exhortations of lwana Lesa.

 

Having drowned twenty4wo natives that night, Tom decided to cross the border and settle in the Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo, where the Rhodesian authorities would not be able to get him. [pp.95-96]

 

Nyirenda was at last arrested by the Northern Rhodesian police, and after trial and conviction, he was hanged in Broken Hill Prison Square in the presence of native chiefs. He is reported to have been received into the Roman Catholic Church and granted absolution while in prison.

 

The Watchtower Society's account is basically that of the colonial authorities. Lanternari's more sympathetic account of Nyirenda's activities underscores his contention that

 

native Christian movements are never a "passive" imitation of their European models; . . . they are an active force, which stimulates the indigenous people to seek emancipation and to build religious organizations of their own, as substantial as the Christian missions themselves. The label of "heretical" or "dissident" with which the missions tag the native churches is quite unrealistic. . . . The native churches testify to the successful penetration of Christian teaching, their diversities being proof of the universal character of Christianity. [Op. cit., pp. 59-60]

 

Nyirenda, Lanternari says, introduced the Kitawala or Kitower sect into the mining areas of Katanga, "where clashes between natives and whites were frequent and bitter." [p. 37] (Kitawala and Kitower are corruptions the English word Watchtower.) Lanternari contends that Watchtower beliefs appealed to Africans because they were antimilitarist. Nyirenda and other African leaders bent Watchtower teachings to their nationalist wil1s:

 

Confronted with the possible disintegration of native culture at the hands of the white man, the preachers of Kitawala, traveling through Rhodesia, Kenya, Nyasa, and Uganda, publicly accused the missionaries of distorting the Bible. . . . They maintained, for example, that since polygamy, a cornerstone of African society, had been regarded as a legitimate practice in the Old Testament, the missionaries had no right to insist that under the Christian dispensation it had to be wiped out. [Ibid.]

 

Colonial authorities . . . accused [Nyirenda] of having killed "baptized people," by which they meant "white Christians." . . . His death infused the movement with an even greater determination to survive and caused it to spread into the Belgian colonies and into territories under French and British rule, where it fomented uprisings and attacks upon foreigners. . . . Kitawala's preachers prophesied the imminent end of all foreign religious and political bodies and disseminated a Pan-African ideology based on the expectation of a day when justice would prevail in the name of Jesus Christ. [Ibid., p.38]

 

 

Seen in this light, the Kitawala was a response to cultural and spiritual crisis, "for which a solution was being sought through new religious movements." [Ibid., p. 39] (One must also wonder if the dunking/drowning story so eagerly taken up by the Witnesses, was a colonialist prevarication to dispose of a nationalist leader.) It

 

point[s] to the fact that when native peoples strive to renovate their religion and their society in the midst of pressures from without and from within, their efforts often take them back to traditional forms and ancient myths. Although their actions are sometimes puerile and confused, they always reflect the instinctive reaction of the native people to the events and experiences caused by these pressures. [Ibid.]

 

Kitawala

 

remains one of the most forceful nativistic religious bodies in Africa. When a group of kitawala followers organized an anti-British revolt in Uganda in 1942, their cry was: "We are the children of God and therefore not bound by the laws of man. The times have changed; we shall no longer obey the secular laws, for to obey man means to obey Satan." [Ibid.]

 

The Watchtower Society is determined to imprint on the official mind its separateness from any indigenous African-run movements; the way in which it has done this is to insist, for the public record, that it represents no threat to the status quo.

 

Their being good natives does not ensure that Witnesses will be treated benevolently in times of national unrest or total mobilization. Before the outbreak of World War II, Watch Tower literature was impounded in Southern Rhodesia. The Supreme Court of South Africa (The Magistrate, Bulawayo v.          Kabungo, 1938 S.A. Law Reports 304-316) held that Watch Tower publications did not violate the Sedition Act of Southern Rhodesia. The court ordered that the literature seized and retained be returned to the Witnesses. After the war, they were permitted to carry on their work without disturbance in South Africa and in fact were granted exemption from draft up to 1972. But with increasing racial unrest, after 1972, the Witnesses who refused to undergo military training became subject to arrest. Any Witness who refuses to take military training is now sentenced to detention barracks for one year, after which he is exempt from service.

 

In 1975, there were almost 30,000 active Witnesses in South Africa. (No breakdown is available as to how many of these were "European," how many "Colored," how many "Black," and how many Indian. But from figures given of attendance at conventions of Witnesses in South Africa, it would appear that black South Africans outnumber white South Africans approximately four to one. [Yearbook, 1976, p. 30]

 

1n looking at the Witnesses in South Africa, we are again confronted with moral ambiguity and anomalies. Here is a small sect, brave, willing to suffer for its beliefs, nonviolent - but unwilling to bear witness to the suffering of others, to give powerful voice to that indignation which Simone Weil called "the fiercest form of love."

The Witnesses do not, as does the Catholic Church, actively challenge apartheid; it may be argued that their religion serves as an opiate to keep non-Europeans satisfied with their painful earthly lives. The Witnesses would counter that they do genuinely enjoy fellowship when, within context of the law, it is possible.

 

Mass assemblies held in South Africa are, of necessity, held in separate auditoriums for Coloreds, Blacks, and Europeans. In stadiums where the government permits mixed groups to meet, each group is obliged to sit separately.

 

 An exception to this arrangement occurred on January 6, 1974, at Rand Stadium in Johannesburg. (Convention delegates from outside the country were in many cases refused visas because the Department of Interior was exercised over the refusal of South African Witnesses to comply with draft laws.)

 

On that occasion segregation was not practiced. Regardless of color, all worshiped together, and many chose to sit with their brothers of other races. Those who spoke Portuguese could sit where they wished, as could Zulu-, Afrikaans-, Lesotho-, and English-speaking individuals. The group was happily integrated; they were so joyful that applause had to be held down, and for many of the company it was the most joyous occasion in their experience.

 

Luckily (according to the Witnesses, "under divine guidance and without realizing it"), the Witnesses had convened in the only Johannesburg stadium used for international, interracial meetings for which no permit was necessary for a single gathering.

 

The Witnesses point out that the European brethren do what is regarded as "native" work in South Africa: housekeeping, janitorial, and laundry du ties; while the Africans take care of the office work and do the typing. Working together on a building project in South Africa brought all the races together - white, African, Colored, Indian - and achieved a unity they regard as unknown in the secular world.

 

The Witnesses do not pray that the world may achieve it. They long for the day when God will erase all outside noises; they yearn for Armageddon, when, in one bloody swoop, Jehovah will wipe away all the blood and all the anguish. It is an understandable, if ultimately dangerous, withdrawal from worldly defeat.*

 

 * Here is a partial listing of the Witnesses' status in African countries as of September. 1976. (A table listing the activities of Witnesses in all countries where they are currently active appears on pages 336-38.)

Benin (formerly Daborney): Banned; as of April 30,1976. From the Benin newspaper Ehuzu: “All real estate used in the past by the representatives and followers of the said sect will be inventoried by the local authorities and will be used for purposes of public benefit. . . . The representatives of the said sect, and more precisely the expatriates of whichever nationality they may be, have only a few hours to leave the country after the publication of the present measures. [Aw., Sept. 8, 1976, p.7] Minister of Interior Martin Dohou Azonhiho is reported to have said, in a speech on April 16, 1976: "If they do not change their attitude these expatriates will be expelled from our national territory. . . . If by the end of the month, Jehovah's Witnesses do not shout the revolutionary slogans, do not sing the national anthem, do not respect the flag, I am going to expel all the expatriate representatives of Jehovah's Witnesses, these licensed agents of the C.I.A." [Ibid., p.4]

Cameroon: Banned.

Ethiopia: An unspecified number of Witnesses imprisoned, "due to the hostile action of the Ethiopian Church." [Yearbook, 1975, p.7]

Kenya: Short-term ban on Witness activity lifted in 1973.

Morocco: Banned.

Nigeria: There are more Jehovah's Witnesses active in Nigeria than in any other country save the United States-l 12,164.

Rhodesia: No impediments have been put in the way of their proselytizing. The most severe hardship endured by the 12,000 Witnesses in Ian Smith's Rhodesia is that they are obliged, by Watchtower edict, not to engage in any form of tobacco production and distribution.

Togo: Permitted to proselytize, but not to hold mass meetings.

Uganda: Idi Amin has placed no obstacles in the way of the 158 Witnesses in Uganda.

Zaire: No outright persecution; but large assemblies are banned. The Society claims that schoolchildren have been expelled for failure to salute the flag.

 

 

QUEBEC

 

 

The history of Jehovah's Witnesses in Quebec is a raucous and colorful one. The Witnesses, on the one hand, secured civil liberties by their precedent-setting Supreme Court cases - a victory for all Canadians - and, on the other hand, surpassed themselves in clergy-baiting in this French-Canadian province, provoking hysteria, responding to abuse with more abuse. Their principal antagonist in Quebec was Maurice Duplessis, grand seigneur, petty tyrant, Premier of Quebec from 1936 until his death in 1959 with the exception of a one-term hiatus from 1939 to 1944. Duplessis' allies, during his long reign, were conservative elements of the Church, farmers, the reactionary English-speaking elite. The Witnesses' allies, in their long legal struggle, were the French and English liberal press and eventually the Supreme Court itself. In their accounts of their victories and defeats in Quebec, the Witnesses ignore the essential political reality that provided the context for their struggles: the tension between French and English Canadians, the drive for French separatism, the social turmoil and unrest, and the economic dissatisfactions of French Canadians.

 

Jehovah's Witnesses were incorporated as a charitable organization in Canada in 1925, under the name International Bible Students Association of Canada.

 

Their history, after a temporary ban was imposed on them during World War I, was uneventful until the 1940s. During the '40s and '50s,

 

Jehovah's Witnesses were virtually outlawed in Quebec. Arrests and prosecutions took place by the hundreds - in fact, a total of 1,775 prosecutions were instituted - the biggest volume of litigation on any one subject in the history of the British Empire! It was a reign of terror. Mobs, beatings, violence, discrimination, loss of jobs - the whole gamut of official and private harassment of a minority was brought to play. [Aw, March 8, 1975, p.16]

 

The Church wielded great secular power over matters of state in French Canada during the years of the Witnesses' persecution; and the Witnesses compare their "confrontation" with "a powerful, rich and politically entrenched Catholic Church" to the confrontation of early Christians with Nero. [Ibid., pp.21, 25]

 

By August, 1946, over 800 cases against the Witnesses were pending in the courts - where Witnesses had been brought on charges of violating laws such as peddling without a license. The Witnesses complain of "clergy-inspired" riots and mob violence in rural Quebec. They countered in 1946, with the publication and distribution of a tract called "Quebec’s Burning Hate for God and Christ and Freedom Is the Shame of All Canada." The pamphlet featured, on its cover, a map of Canada with the Province of Quebec represented by a black area on which was superimposed a massive cathedral. One million copies were printed in English; 500,000 copies were printed in French, and 75,000 in Ukrainian. In addition, 110 missionaries who'd been given crash courses in French were dispatched from New York to "priest-infested Quebec" to share in the distribution of the tract. [JWDP, p.241]

 

For sixteen days, the Witnesses distributed the pamphlet from one end of the country to the other. They accuse the "Hierarchy" of counterattacking with "lies, violence and the pressure of Quebec's corrupt political machine upon the law enforcement bodies." [Yearbook, 1948; JWDP] In the vicinity of Montreal 260 arrests took place. Maurice Duplessis, whom the Witnesses characterized as "fascist-minded" and a "tool of the Church," went to the extreme of destroying the flourishing business of one of their members because he put up bail for one of those jailed. This, however, brought adverse publicity to Duplessis, and the press called him a "Sawdust Caesar," a “minor-league Franco," and "the focal point of fascism." In addition. protest meetings were organized, resolutions were passed, and Canadians were thoroughly aroused.

 

A new pamphlet, "Quebec, You Have Jailed Your People," was got up in three languages and circulated nationally. Arrests continued, until by February more than thirteen hundred cases were awaiting hearings. Charges of "sedition" and "seditious conspiracy" were leveled against sixty-four Witnesses. So inflammatory were the tracts that they had to be distributed in this manner:

 

We flew around the countryside over the cold winter snows, often with the police in hot pursuit. In the middle of the night a carload of Witnesses would dash into a village with a supply of leaflets. Each of us would run to the assigned houses, deliver the leaflets, dash back to the car and away we went! While the police were searching that village, we would be on to another. - Janet MacDonald, Witness missionary [Aw., March 8, 1975, p.20]

 

This is what Commonweal, the American liberal Catholic magazine, had to say about these events:

 

 

The Witnesses within the last few years have really begun to make their weight felt in the Province of Quebec, which is a region nearly ninety percent Catholic. Here, also, they have invaded the privacy of people's houses and have been pretty much public nuisances. The unfortunate reaction has been a number of cases of mob violence as well as numerous arrests and tines and jail sentences. Then, a few weeks ago, the Witnesses published over a million and a half broadsides entitled "Quebec's Burning Hate for God and Christ and Freedom Is the Shame of All Canada." This production was issued in English, French, and Ukrainian. It is addressed to all people, and is not so much an appeal for conversions as it is an indictment of Quebec for its treatment of the Witnesses. In old-fashioned Orangeman style it speaks of "that benighted, priest-ridden province." It goes on: "Quebec, Jehovah's Witnesses are telling all Canada of the shame you have brought on the nation by your evil deeds. In English, French and Ukrainian languages this leaflet is broadcasting your delinquency to the nation. You claim to be for God; you claim to be for freedom. Yet [when] it is exercised by those who disagree with you, you crush freedom by mob rule and gestapo tactics. . . .”

 

It can be imagined what was the reaction of French Catholics to such a broadside. Had the Witnesses expressly wanted to stir up trouble, they could have used no more effective means. . . . The Province immediately started . . . wholesale arrests - of doubtful legality - and then capped the climax [by suspending) the liquor license of a Montreal restaurateur named Frank Roncarelli, who was using his private means to supply bail for the arrested Witnesses. The result is the most wonderful hullabaloo and more free publicity for the followers of the late Judge Rutherford than they have perhaps ever received in a single area. A few of the French Canadian papers approved, but a great many of them did not - especially those with Liberal political sentiments who loved a chance to get a dig at a politician not of their party. The English press came out strong for freedom. The Montreal English Catholic paper, professing to find diabolism in the "Watch Tower Movement," said ,..."We cannot combat devilish forces by vituperation, violence, or hate, for these are all the Devil's own instruments, and the Bible has warned us against the folly of trying to cast out Beelzebub with Beelzebub." When Mr. Roncarelli was deprived of his license, the same Canadian Register said: "By forcing an arbitrary power of the Quebec Liquor Commission to subserve a frankly punitive purpose, the Provincial Government has rightly drawn upon itself a storm of protest from all sections of the community. Nothing could be more dangerous than unnecessarily to divorce punishment from trial, and to place power to inflict it in the hands of the executive authority. The cause of justice cannot be served by illegal means."

 

Harry Lorin Binsse, the author of this Commonweal article, adds a poignant final note, which reflects the torment of the Church during the years:

 

There are two sentences in the New York Times's brief account of this whole fracas which stick in my mind: "Mr. Roncarelli is a convert from Catholicism, as a result, he says, of an experience in Italy. He had gone to Italy on a pleasure trip, and when he heard Benito Mussolini described from the pulpit as 'a man sent from God,' he says, he lost faith and apparently ran into difficulties by publicly denouncing Mussolini as anti-religious." [Commonweal, Jan.10, 1947]

 

The Commonweal article implicitly disputes the Witnesses' contention t' all of Catholic Quebec was monolithically opposed to them. Catholic liberals were, on the contrary, happy to have the opportunity to snipe at Duplessis. And it is illustrative of the fact that feelings about the Witnesses were very much colored and informed by nationalistic feelings: French speaking Canadians were more inclined to oppose them than were English speaking Canadians. And Commonweal also raises an interesting question, one that has been raised by civil-libertarians in the United States (and that it is impossible to answer with any degree of authority): did the Witnesses contribute to their own oppression, or intensify it, to gain publicity?

 

It is useless to conjecture. We can only deplore - as Commonweal and the liberal Catholic Canadian press deplored - the fact that they were persecuted. And we must be grateful that the Witnesses' Supreme Court victories secured civil liberties for millions of Canadians, Catholic and Protestant, French- and English-speaking.

 

One of the ways in which the Witnesses served the cause of civil liberties in Quebec was to broaden the right of appeals to the Supreme Court. Prior to the publication of their tracts, they had been arrested and charged with violating bylaws, such as the one against peddling. The Supreme Court kept these cases under the jurisdiction of the provincial courts. After publication and distribution of "Quebec's Burning Hate," Quebec authorities began to pile sedition and libel charges on them - and the gravity of these charges obliged the Supreme Court to hear arguments.

 

Time and again, the Witnesses, denied protection in the lower courts had appealed to the Supreme Court, and their cases had been thrown back into Quebec's municipal Recorder's courts. Actions, appeals, writs, motions, and special remedies proved unavailing until, in 1949, the Supreme Court accepted jurisdiction in the case of Aime Boucher, a Witness who had been arrested and tried for the distribution of "Quebec's Burning Hate." Boucher was charged with publishing seditious and defamatory libel, and convicted. Justices of Quebec's appellate courts condemned the conduct of the trial-court judge; and five judges of the Supreme Court in Ottawa heard arguments from May 31 to June 3, 1949. The decision, handed down on December 5, 1949, went against the Witnesses 3 to 2. An application asking for a reargument of the case before a full court of nine judges was granted.

 

The decision, handed down on December 18, was 5 to 4 for acquittal the deciding vote was cast by a member of the original five-judge court who reversed himself; he was an Irish Catholic. One of the judges voting for acquittal said, in his opinion:

 

The incidents as described, are of peaceable Canadians who seem not to be lacking in meekness, but who, for distributing, apparently without permits, Bibles and tracts on Christian doctrine; for conducting religious services in private homes or on private lands in Christian fellowship; for holding public lecture meetings to teach religious truth as they believe it of the Christian religion; who, for this exercise of what has been taken for granted to be the unchallengeable rights of Canadians, have been assaulted and beaten and their Bibles and publications torn up and destroyed, by individuals and by mobs. . . .

 

The conduct of the accused appears to have been unexceptionable; so far as disclosed, he is an exemplary citizen who is at least sympathetic to doctrines of the Christian religion which are, evidently, different from either the Protestant or the Roman Catholic versions: but the foundation in all is the same, Christ and his relation to God and humanity. . . . .

 

It is not challenged that, as they allege, whatever they did was done peaceably, and, as they saw it, in the way of bringing the light and peace of the Christian religion to the souls of men and women. To say that is to say that their acts were lawful. [Boucher v. The King, (1950) S.C.R. 265, 285, 291; JWDP, pp. 243~4]

 

The achievement of the Witnesses was to have written into law what had previously "been taken for granted." Canada had no Bill of Rights; religious freedoms were a matter of tolerance and sufferance and precedent. The Boucher case changed that.

 

 

In 1953, the Witnesses scored another victory for civil liberties. In 1933, Quebec City had passed a bylaw that forbade the distribution of any literature in Quebec without the written permission of the Chief of Police. (Many Witnesses circumvented this law by preaching orally from house to house, using only the Catholic Douay Bible.) The Supreme Court, on December 9, 1952, heard arguments as to the legitimacy of this law. [Saurnur v. The King (1953)2 S.C.R. 299] Because Canada had no written Bill of Rights on which the Witnesses could rest their case, they enterprisingly unearthed and presented to the Court a Freedom of Worship Act that had been passed by the Canadian Parliament in 1852:

WHEREAS the recognition of legal equality among all Religious Denominations is an admitted principle of Colonial Legislation; . . . be it therefore declared . . . That the free exercise and enjoyment of Religious Profession and Worship, without discrimination or preference, so as to the same be not made an excuse of acts of licentiousness, or a justification of practices inconsistent with the peace and safety of the Province, is by the constitution and laws of this Province allowed to all Her Majesty's subjects within the same. - Statute of 1852 of Old Province of Canada [JWDP, pp.245-46]

 

This Freedom of Worship Act had not appeared on the statute books of Ontario for forty years. Ironically, the original intent of the Act was to protect French-speaking Canadians from religious persecution similar to that which they had experienced in England during the Seven Years War.

 

Now, while the Court had been asked to rule on a bylaw relating to the distribution of literature, the real issue before the Court was whether Jehovah's Witnesses were a religious denomination; prosecuting attorneys argued that they were not, and that their distribution of literature could not be considered an exercise of worship protected by law. (Quebec's attorneys also argued that the Witnesses had defamed the Catholic Church and were guilty of “acts of licentiousness" and that their refusal to honor the bylaw was inconsistent with the protection and safety of the Province.")

 

The decision, handed down on October 6, 1953, went in favor of the Witnesses, the justices voting 5 to 4 in their favor. In Canada, as in the United States, unorthodox religious acts and the promulgation of religious doctrine by minority groups outside of the pulpit and the churches were deemed by law to be the right of all citizens.

 

(A personal footnote: I was living and working at Watchtower headquarters in Brooklyn when this test case was won after a six-year legal battle. I remember the jubilation when the victory was announced one morning at breakfast. I also remember an anecdote F. W. Franz, then the Society's vice-president, told us about the trial, at which he had given testimony: In the lower courts, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish clergymen had been brought in as experts to define what was or what was not a religious organization. Franz was interrogated by prosecuting attorneys in an effort to prove that the Witnesses were not a religion in the normally accepted use of the term. One of the prosecuting attorneys, in an attempt to discredit Franz asked the International Bible Students, asked Franz what reincarnation meant. Franz drew a blank: "Well, now," he said to us at breakfast, "I didn't know!" As I remember it, he confused the Eastern belief in reincarnation with the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. I don't know how he got himself out of that blunder, but it was not, in any case, sufficiently prejudicial to influence the Court's decision. He laughed a lot when he told us about this, and we laughed heartily with him.)

 

The English-speaking press was almost unanimous in its praise of the Court's decision:

 

A VERDICT FOR FREEDOM OF WORSHIP

In upholding the right of the Witnesses of Jehovah to distribute literature in the streets, without restriction, the Supreme Court of Canada has lifted a load from the conscience of this country. Liberal- minded citizens of all religious affiliations and both major language groups have long been uneasy about tendencies toward indirect persecution of opinion. In Quebec especially, this decision . . . should result in the dismissal of some 800 similar cases involving charges under municipal bylaws. It means that no community anywhere in Canada can require advocates of religious views to be licensed. The ruling is one of several court decisions in recent years by which civil liberty has been clarified within the provinces or throughout the country. . . . In a free country, the few must be allowed to try to change the opinions of the many, whatever the issue. Canadians can be proud that their courts are showing themselves vigilant against the intolerance that would whittle freedom away.- Evening Citizen, Ottawa, Ontario, Oct. 7, 1953 [JWDP, p.246]

 

FREEDOM OF BELIEF

The Supreme Court of Canada, in a majority opinion of considerable significance, has established an important principle underlying civil liberties in Canada. . . . the judgment asserted that no inferior jurisdiction, such as province or municipality, may abridge the rights and liberties which constitutionally belong to every citizen of the country, regardless of residence. . . . A very important point was made by Mr. Justice Kellock when he said that the bylaw was so openly drawn that it might be applied in many different ways. . The same bylaw could be applied against political parties and news- papers. . . To grant such broad powers to a single municipal official would be a gross infringement of elemental civil rights, whether or not the power was ever used. - Globe and Mail, Toronto, Ontario, Oct. 8, 1953. [Ibid., pp.246-47]

 

FREEDOM OF RELIGION

An important principle, that a man must be allowed to practice his religious beliefs, is upheld in the supreme court's close ruling in an- other case involving the Witnesses of Jehovah. . . . To interfere with a man’s worship is evil. The fact that the sufferer may adhere to beliefs not generally popular is beside the point.-Herald, Montreal, Quebec, Oct. 7, 1953. [Ibid., p.247]

 

The response in Canada to the Witnesses civil-libertarian victories was similar to the way in which liberals in the United States had responded to the Witnesses' victories before the United States Supreme Court: They saw that it was to their own advantage. If the rights of one minority could be abrogated, so could the rights of another; and who knew whose turn would come next? And the press, in particular, understood that any abridgment of freedom of speech would ultimately damage a free press.

 

 

The Witnesses won a further substantial victory on January 7, 1959: the Supreme Court ruled that Duplessis had to pay Frank Roncarelli (the Witness bail-provider whose liquor license he had suspended) over $33,000 in damages, plus court costs, for a total of over $50,000 for what the Witnesses called Duplessis' "spiteful Catholic action." [Ibid., p.249] Awake! magazine comments laconically, "Three months after the judgment was paid, Duplessis was dead."

 

And, it adds: "Quebec of the 1960s really began to shed the old image of clergy domination and isolationism It started to reach out for the North American life-style as it is found in the rest of Canada and the United States." [March 8, 1975, pp.21-22]

It's true that with the death of Duplessis, Quebec - previously isolated and introverted - passed "from a state of virtual feudalism to a new stage of social transformation known as the Quiet Revolution. It also coincided with a new period of nationalist awakening, focused on the creation of an independent socialist Quebec state." [Ann Charney, Ms. magazine, March 1976 p.27] A great many reforms were to take place. In 1940, for example, Quebec women won the right to vote in provincial elections, and in 1964 the oppressive Napoleonic Code - based on the principle that a married woman has no personal rights - began to be replaced by legislation that gave women legal protection.

 

In 1945, at the height of their troubles, there were only 356 Jehovah's Witnesses in Quebec. There are now over 7,000. [Aw, March 8, 1975, p. 27]

 

 

COMMUNIST COUNTRIES: CHINA, VIETNAM, SOVIET UNION, KOREA, EAST GERMANY

 

China:

 

Zion's Watch Tower magazine was first introduced to China in 1883. In 1898, a Baptist missionary resigned from his church and began to proselytize for the Bible Students in Protestant missions. In 1912, C. T. Russell paid a brief visit to Shanghai. Very brief; in an article headed " 'Pastor' Russell's Tour Exposed" in the Brooklyn Eagle (Oct. 14, 1912), an interviewer chats with Russell, who, among other things, thought Nippon was a city in Japan; Russell, who had been on what appears to have been a 107-day cruise around the world, seems quite eager to prove that he spent one full day on solid ground in Shanghai, where, by his own admission, he did not meet a single missionary. In any case, in 1939, two years after the Sino- Japanese War broke out, three German Witnesses were assigned to Shanghai by the Society's Swiss branch. "Since Japan became partners with Germany [the missionaries] had little trouble getting in" to China. [Yearbook, 1974, p.44]

 

By 1956, although there was no official ban placed on Watchtower publications, supplies of literature had stopped reaching the country. Expediency had led the three German missionaries to leave; in 1958, two remaining European missionaries were, according to Watchtower sources, placed under arrest and labeled "reactionaries." One of them, the Society reports, served a seven-year prison sentence. No statistical reports of Watchtower activity have come out of China since 1958. The last available evidence is that there were, at that time, fewer than 150 Witnesses in all of China.

 

For several years after Mao's victory, the Witnesses were undisturbed. There were only 25 of them, which may have had something to do with the Communists not becoming too much exercised over their work. The Witnesses do complain, however: There was a spy in their midst, they say; they were "required to study 'the thoughts of Mao.' During and after working hours they would find the doors locked so that no one could leave. They must listen to the expounding of Communism for up to four hours at a time." [Ibid., p.54] But they were still permitted to go to meetings, and to go from door to door without molestation. They had to register - as all religions that were not Chinese-financed had to register.

 

 

Vietnam:

 

The Watchtower Society was officially recognized in South Vietnam in 1973. [KM, June, 1973, p.4] After the Communist victory, the Vietnamese branch of the Society was placed under supervision of the Paris branch. Watchtower sources estimate that there are 100 Witnesses remaining in Saigon. Before what the Yearbook [1976] refers to as the Communist "takeover," Watchtower President N. H. Knorr visited Saigon to present "photographic slide shows of the work of God's people in different parts of the world." After what the Yearbook refers to as the "fall" of Saigon, all communications between Vietnamese Witnesses and Brooklyn headquarters ended. American Watchtower missionaries left the country. However, a missionary couple continued their work in a refugee camp in California. There they held regular meetings, finding Witnesses they had known in Vietnam as they visited each tent to press scriptural readings on the refugees.

 

 

Soviet Union:

 

The Witnesses are not permitted to organize; relationships with the headquarters organization have been severed.

 

It is interesting to learn . . . [from] an extended denunciation in Pravda, that the sect of Jehovah's Witnesses has become almost as much of a headache to the rulers of Communist Russia as it was to the rulers of Nazi Germany. It seems that the Witnesses have been making converts all over the Soviet Union, even in such distant places as Siberia and Kurgan, and that they now constitute a formidable movement of underground resistance to the regime.

 

The editors of Pravda affect to believe that the whole movement is being subsidized by "the most reactionary elements of American capitalism" and that its purpose is to infect the Soviet masses with a spirit of meekness and resignation that will frustrate or delay the world- wide triumph of the revolutionary proletariat. The organizers of the movement are described as "former war criminals, Fascist collaborators and Gestapo informers" who were indoctrinated and trained for the work in German concentration camps.

 

The assertion that they were indoctrinated in concentration camps may not be without an element of truth. Nearly all survivors of those camps have testified to the courage and obduracy of the Witness prisoners and to their ability to withstand intimidation and even torture. It would not be surprising, then, if many Russian prisoners, who had hardly less reason than the German Witnesses to identify the state with the reign of antichrist and no less reason to accept an apocalyptic view of history, were much impressed by this example.

 

At any rate, the chiliastic doctrine of the Witnesses . . . has had an immense appeal to people who live under the more totalitarian and tyrannous forms of government. Thus one can readily accept the estimate of the Witnesses themselves that the number of their converts beyond the Iron Curtain is more than 100,000. One can also believe the complaint of Pravda that in the collective farms and factories of the Soviet Union the Witnesses are resisting the coercive influences of communism . . . with quite as much stubbornness as their brethren in the United States have shown in refusing military service and perfunctory homage to the flag. [The Washington Post, March 21, 1959, p. A8;JWDP, pp. 280-81J

 

(Watchtower sources report that 300 Russians and Ukrainians were baptized, during World War II, in Ravensbruck concentration camp. Soviet dissident Pavel Litvinov has the impression that "Russian intelligentsia in the camps were drawn to an ecumenical Christianity, while non-privileged people were drawn to 'Jehovahists.' ")

 

In 1956, from reports that reached Watchtower headquarters, the Society estimated that there were 64,000 Witnesses active behind the "Iron Curtain"; the number had grown to over 123,000 by 1959. In 1975, the official yearly report of the Society estimated that one-seventh of all the Witnesses active in the world were "behind the Iron Curtain." ("The Society does not publish figures for the individual countries behind the Iron Curtain now, so that the respective governments will not know how many real Christians reside in their territory." [JWDP, p.279])

 

In 1956, seven directors of the Watch Tower Society sent a petition, adopted at conventions by 462,936 Witnesses, to Soviet Premier Bulganin. The petition (which went unanswered) read, in part:

 

There are or have been some 2000 of Jehovah's witnesses in the penal camp of Vorkuta; at the beginning of April of the year 1951 some 7000 of Jehovah's witnesses were arrested from the Baltic States down to Bessarabia and were then transported in freight trains to the distant region between Tomsk and Irkutsk and near Lake Baykal in Siberia; there are witnesses of Jehovah kept in more than fifty camps from European Russia into Siberia and northward to the Arctic Ocean, even on the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya; and a number of these, especially of the 7000 mentioned above, died of malnutrition the first two years of their sojourn in Siberia. [Ibid.)

 

The petition requested

 

 

that an objective government investigation be made and that the witnesses be freed and authorized to organize themselves according to the way they are in other lands. Also that the witnesses in Russia be permitted to establish regular relations with their governing body in the United States and be allowed to publish and import such Bible literature as they need for their ministry.

 

The directors of the Watch Tower Society further proposed

 

a discussion between the representatives of the governing body of Jehovah's witnesses and those of the Russian [sic] government [and suggested that] a delegation of witnesses be permitted to proceed to Moscow for this purpose, as well as for the purpose of visiting the various camps where the witnesses of Jehovah are interned. [Ibid.]

There is no evidence that the petition was acknowledged by the Soviets. Father Arkadei Tyschuk, representative of the Moscow Patriarchate in the United States, with whom I spoke at the suggestion of the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, confined his remarks about the Witnesses to his own experience. There were no Witnesses that he knew of in his home city of Vladimir (east of Moscow), he said. He professed not to know if the Witnesses were "outlawed." (An American-born Russian Orthodox priest, who did not want his name used, said that he knew they were outlawed in the Soviet Union, "because they are not loyal citizens anywhere.") The Soviet Constitution (Statute 125) permits the churches to attract members - as Father Tyschuk said - "within the framework of the constitution through church services. The Russian Orthodox Church, the Baptists, Muslims, and Old Believers [whose theology is similar to that of the Orthodox Church] are tolerated. . . . They are permitted to hold church services, but not to aggressively proselytize." (The American-born Russian 0rthodox priest who worked in the office of the Moscow Patriarchate had a slightly divergent point of view: "No church," he said, "has the right, in the Soviet Union, to promote its own well-being.")

 

Korea:

 

During World War II, the work of the Witnesses was banned. In l948 American-trained missionaries were sent to proselytize in what was essentially virgin territory. When war broke out, the missionaries were evacuated to Japan, and most Korean Witnesses fled to the cities of the South. (No figures are currently available for North Korea.) [JWDP, p.277; KM, June, 1973, p.4]

 

East Germany:

 

Many of the same Witnesses who had been incarcerated in Nazi Germany were imprisoned by East German authorities. The Society's sources report that over 1,000 men and women have been sentenced to prison terms averaging six years. Fourteen were reported killed as of 1953. Nevertheless, the Witnesses seem to have more than a little mobility in East Germany: thousands of East Germans were able to attend assemblies held in West Germany. [Yearbook, 1954, p. 161; 1959, p. 126;JWDP, p.278] The number of Witnesses currently active in East Germany is not known (or, if known, not published by Watchtower sources).

 

No statistics are available for Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania - all countries in which the Watchtower Society's work is banned.

 

 

LATIN AMERICA AND EUROPE: CHILE, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, GREECE, SPAIN

 

 

Chile:

 

The Watchtower Society's accounts of its activities in Chile speak for themselves. This is how the Society describes the days of revolution, junta, and CIA activity (and, by omission, the death of Allende - which served the Witnesses well):

 

When the 1974 service year began, paralyzing strikes, violence, and unrest were part of day-to-day living in Chile. In every city there were long lines of people waiting to buy bread and other necessities; housewives spent an average of six hours a day in such lineups. Well, before the time for the “Divine Victory International Assembly" there was a change of government. . . . Although difficulties and trials of many sorts have pressed in on our Chilean brothers, they have felt secure because of their reliance on Jehovah. [Yearbook, 1975, pp.22-23]

 

The tides of change have contributed to the spiritual catch.

 

For a long time, Chile enjoyed one of the most stable political atmospheres in all of South America. Suddenly this changed. In five years the Chilean people have seen three forms of government, each radically different from the others. The political turmoil has produced disillusionment. As a result, many people find the Bible's message about a perfect government in the hands of Jesus Christ both appealing and reasonable.

 

When the arrest of Communist activists in factories and industries left critical vacancies, witness employees were often put in key positions. In one case, on the morning of the coup, soldiers arrived at the home of a witness and asked how long it would take him to put the local oil refinery into operation. No other qualified man could be trusted!

 

Spot searches for firearms and the like were made of neighborhoods at the break of dawn. Often, known witness homes were simply passed by. One soldier, taking the publication The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life out of a bookcase, commented: "If everyone read and practiced what is in this book, we would not have to make these searches."

 

. . . Jehovah's witnesses in Chile . . . are . . . determined to take advantage of these swarming "waters" to continue in catching men alive so that these may gain life everlasting. [TW, Oct. 1, 1976, p.591)

 

There are now over 15,000 Witnesses active in Chile.

 

 

Dominican Republic:

 

The fortunes of Jehovah's Witnesses have undergone many changes in the Dominican Republic. They were banned for a time under Trujillo; and then, in the early 1960s, when the Church began to raise its voice against Trujillo - pastoral letters warning the government against excesses were read in all the churches - the ban was removed. Even when their proselytizing work was banned, the Witnesses were regarded as valuable workers on sugar estates. Imprisoned, they were model prisoners; they boast of having the respect and trust of prison guards . . . the witness prisoners were allowed to enter the communications center where Trujillo had equipment and recorders for monitoring other Latin-American radio stations. . . [They were] trusted with jobs on which even soldiers were not used." [Yearbook 1972, p. 153]

 

When the Witnesses were banned in the Dominican Republic, they managed to smuggle Watchtower magazines in. One missionary says that she never had any problem getting the magazines through customs, in spite of an airport fluoroscope machine that checked all luggage: "I often wondered what the staples on the magazines looked like on the machine. But, over the years, no literature was ever discovered. . . . It appeared that Jehovah blinded them in the way the men of Sodom evidently were blinded." [Ibid.. p.156]

 

This is the Witnesses' response to the popular revolution of 1965 and the arrival of U.S. Marines on Dominican soil:

 

In the city lawlessness and disorder prevailed. Issues arose that put the Christian conscience to the test. Neutrality had to be maintained. Oppression and injustices could influence a person to lean one way or another. It was a time to remember that both sides were part of this system of things and that both had Jehovah's disapproval. American Marines occupied certain homes, or set up machine guns on roofs or balconies. At least one brother had to go to the American officials to request the removal of the Marines and their weapons from his premises. Taking advantage of the absence of law, poor people took possession of vacant lots and built on them. Would our Christian brothers do that? Partially burned warehouses were opened by the revolutionaries and people were permitted to loot them, even being invited to do so. The test was on. Would the brothers join the people in doing these things? How far would they be guided by Christian neutrality? [Ibid., p. l6.~]

 

(That they were to be "guided by Christian neutrality" was a logical conclusion, since “Jehovah disapproved of both sides.")

 

One sees, in the Dominican Republic, a familiar pattern. During the years of external hardship, the organization flourished. When the situation stabilized, "immorality and materialism" [Ibid., p. 170] cost the Witnesses many members: "When violent methods fail, Satan tries other methods. . . . Materialism and immorality continue to raise their ugly heads, each contributing to the fall of some of the brothers who stood so faithfully through times of persecution." [Ibid.] Many who had served time in prison were excommunicated for "immoral conduct" when they were free. Perhaps even more than other human beings, the Witnesses rise to tragic or extraordinary occasions, and are reduced by commonplace ones. They are the most secure when they are the most threatened.          

 

There are now approximately 6,000 active Witnesses in the Dominica Republic.

 

 

Greece:

 

The Witnesses have, at various times, been accused of being Communists, anarchists - and most recently, when George Papadopoulos was premier, of being agents of "international Zionism." "Jews control nine-tenths of the riches of the world," Papadopoulos' government is reported to have said; so, according to government sources, it followed that only Jews could afford to finance the work of the Witnesses. [The New York Times, June 4, 1970]

 

On November 13, 1970, the Ministry of Interior ordered the country's Registrars not to register marriages of Witnesses, or the children of such marriages, "because the religion of Jehovah's Witnesses is an unknown one." [Aw, June 8, 1975, p.25] In 1974, when Constantine Karamanlis took power and civil liberties and a constitutional government were restored in Greece, the Witnesses were permitted to convene publicly for the first time in seven years; and in July, 1975, marriages between Witnesses were pronounced legal, and the children of those unions pronounced legitimate.

 

The Witnesses continue to wrestle with the Greek Orthodox Church, however. In 1976, priests in Crete tried to stop a convention of Witnesses in Heraklion, because, they argued, the "Millennialists" were agents of "international Zionism." [Aw, Nov.22, 1976, p.23] The Witnesses received the full protection of the law and were permitted to assemble.

 

There are now 18,000 Witnesses in Greece.

 

They are subject to imprisonment for failure to join the military.

 

 

Spam:

 

In 1949, there were only 34 Witnesses active. [Yearbook, 1949] There are now 30,000. Legal recognition was granted to the "Association of Jehovah's Witnesses" in 1970. Observers in Spain have commented that the Church in Spain was for a long time obdurately opposed both to the Witnesses and to the Seventh-day Adventists, seeing in both sects a denial of true religion a threat to patriotic values. The appointment of a liberal cardinal and the ascension of liberal bishops (even before the death of Franco) swung Spain in the direction of religious liberties. This is the Witnesses' version of these events:

 

There has been an easing up of the grip of Roman Catholicism in Spain. The clergy themselves have caused many individuals to turn away from the Catholic Church. People notice, for example, that priests become involved in politics. Some have turned to the liberal “left” in a display of favor toward the working classes. However, this belated tactic has not fooled the majority of the people. A lady re- marked. to one of Jehovah's witnesses preaching near Nijar, Almeria: "The priests make us lose faith by their conduct. They show up with their sleeves rolled up, their shirts all open - and smoking. They themselves stop us from believing in them." [TW, Aug. 1, 1975, p. 458]

 

In the past, the perceived rigidity of the Church, and its material glory, turned many Catholics away - straight into the arms of the Witnesses, who were perceived as less remote, less magisterial, and more concerned and involved in the intimate details of their hard daily lives. Since Vatican II, the increasing openness of the Church, its commitment to the oppressed. and the consequent ferment in which it finds itself have turned many Catholics away - straight into the arms of the Witnesses, whose apparent simplicity and "neutrality" have represented a relief from the yeasty changes taking place in a living and evolving Church. The Church - the religion of slaves, which has too frequently oppressed the oppressed (while at the same time being a sanctuary for the oppressed) - has always been the victim of its own paradoxes.

 

In countries where the Witnesses are felt to be a threat to national security or stability, they are persecuted. In countries where the Church and the State are symbiotically joined, they are persecuted. Otherwise, they are tolerated. (Paradoxically, this is also true in Italy, where the Witnesses have prospered and increased - 10,000 converts in 1975 alone. But then, it is difficult to imagine the Italians - those cynical and sanguine people who can juggle Catholicism and Communism with humor and grace - doing more than shrugging their shoulders tolerantly over this interesting phenomenon in their midst.)

 

Report of Activities of Jehovah's Witnesses Worldwide 1976 (adapted from the 1977 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses):

 

COUNTRY OR TERRITORY            WITNESSES

Abu Dhabi            11

Afars & Issas Terr.            7

Afghanistan            9

Alaska 1268

Algeria            23

American Samoa 89

Andorra            70

Angola 3822

Anguilla            16

Antigua            170

Argentina            33503

Aruba  357

Australia            29101

Austria            12514

Azores 248

Bahamas            519

Bangladesh            2

Barbados            1231

Belgium            19745

Belize  584

Benin  2372

Bequia 25

Bermuda            217

Bolivia 2476

Bonaire            35

Botswana            283

Brazil   106228

British Isles            80544

Brunei 845

Burma 151

Burundi            12269

Cameroon            12269

Canada            1128

Canary Islands            1

Cape Verde Rep.     60       

Carriacou            27

Cayman Islands            16286

Central Afr. Rep.     1802   

Chad    5104

Chile   6

Colombia            16286

Comoro Islands            2

Congo  1802

Cook Islands            48

Costa Rica            5104

Curacao            681

Cyprus 846

Denmark            14611

Dominica            226

Dominican Rep.     6540

Dubai  24

Ecuador            5995

El Salvador            6010

Ethiopia            1903

Faroe Islands            82

Fiji       640

Finland            13402

France 65827

French Guiana            200

Gabon  344

Gambia            9

Germany, West    102044

Ghana 22381

Gibraltar            87

Gilbert Islands            2

Greece            18711

Greenland            94

Grenada            324

Guadeloupe            2580

Guam  136

Guatemala            5259

Guinea            255

Guinea-Bissau 5

Guyana            1415

Haiti    3569

Hawaii 4872

Honduras            3226

Hong Kong            576

Iceland            165

India    4687

Indonesia            4264

Iran     38

Iraq      28

Ireland            1891

Israel   276

Italy     60156

Ivory Coast            1156

Jamaica            6765

Japan  38367

Jordan 76

Kenya  1973

Korea   32561

Kuwait 18

Lebanon            1827

Lesotho            672

Liberia            1060

Libya   2

Liechtenstein            21

Luxembourg            819

Macao  7

Madagascar            805

Madeira            252

Malawi            5631

Malaysia            433

Mali     32

Malta   91

MalYinas Islands            3

Manus Island            9

Marshall Islands            182

Martinique            1105

Mauritania            2

Mauritius            380

Mexico 84356

Montserrat            29

Morocco            188

Mozambique            15692

Nepal   17

Netherlands            29723

Nevis   47

New Britain            200

New Caledonia            359

Newfoundland            1146

New Guinea            492

New Hebrides            47

New Ireland            51

New Zealand            7442

Nicaragua            3246

Niger   61

Nigeria            114029

Niue    16

North Solomons            49

Norway            7543

Okinawa            921

Pakistan            192

Palau   32

Panama            3028

Papua  731

Paraguay            1414

Peru    12103

Philippines            77248

Ponape            196

Portugal            18119

Puerto Rico            16620

Reunion            514

Rhodesia            12951

Rodrigues            13

Rwanda            46

St. Helena            107

St. Kitts            147

St. Lucia            271

St. Martin            48

St. Pierre & Miquelon            2

St. Vincent            159

Saipan 26

San Marino            56

Saudi Arabia            4

Senegal            337

Seychelles            49

Sierra Leone            1217

Singapore            344

Solorrion Islands            610

South Africa            29098

South-West Africa  349

Spain   34954

Sri Lanka            545

Sudan  101

Surinam            911

Swaziland            689

Sweden            16444

Switzerland            10193

Syria   203

Tahiti  385

Taiwan            1233

Tanzania            1575

Thailand            732

Tobago 133

Togo     2668

Tokelau IsIs.            4

Tonga  27

Trinidad            2935

Truk    41

Tunisia            48

Turks & Caicos Isis.            19

Tuvalu Isis.            5

Uganda            166

U.S. of America            577362

Upper Volta            65

Uruguay            4771

Venezuela            13749

Virgin Is. (Brit.)   83

Virgin Is. (U.S.)   479

West Berlin            5620

Western Samoa 128

Yap      39

Zaire   19327 

Zambia            57885

196 Countries            2058241

14 Other Countries            190149

GRAND TOTAL            2248390

                  

 

 

Nathan Homer Knorr became the third president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society in 1942. Unlike his flashy predecessors, he was a dull, rather plodding man, unfanciful - nothing like the lyrical con artist Russell, and nothing at all like the pugnacious, publicity-seeking "Judge” Rutherford. He had little flair, but a certain genius for organizing. Russell's sexual and monetary appetites were scandalous, and Rutherford's abrasiveness and litigious nature were legendary.

 

Knorr, the quiet president, had appetites of his own: "World-wide expansion was now the order of the day." By the end of World War II, there were three times as many Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide as there had been before the outbreak of war. Knorr saw to it that the varied parts of his empire became one united whole, under the tight control of Brooklyn headquarters. In order to do this, he set off on a world tour in 1947 to determine what was needed to strengthen and tie together the outposts of the Society. His personal observation of the varied activities of Witnesses in all branches gave him the insight and knowledge necessary to help them in whatever way was most useful, most especially in training those in the field.

 

In 1944, two years after Knorr became president, there were 128,976 Witnesses preaching worldwide. [JWDP, p. 312; Yearly Reports, 1928-58] There are now 2,248,390 [Yearbook, 1977, p.30]

 

While the 1976 figures represent a 3.7-percent increase over the number of proselytizers in 1975, there is this anomaly to consider: the number of hours spent preaching decreased, as did the number of full-time preachers. The Watchtower Society ascribes this to "economic pressures." I wonder if it might not have something to do with the fact that so many Witnesses expected Armageddon to come in 1975.

 

In 1976, the Watchtower Society had ninety-seven branch offices, where almost 4,000 workers produced and shipped literature, handled correspondence, maintained "Bethel" homes (or residences), and, in addition, preached. To maintain its special representatives abroad, the Society spent $11,519,454.32 in 1976. [Yearbook, 1977, pp. 10, 23]

 

Missionaries, trained at the Brooklyn missionary school called Gilead (literally, "heap of witness"), are provided with a place to live and a cost-of- living allowance: $40 a month to cover all meals and transportation, all necessities (and probably very few luxuries). They are expected to preach 1,200 hours a year. [Information received orally from William Arthur, Gilead spokesman]

 

They don't have much time for sight-seeing, and they have neither the time nor the inclination to soak up local culture. When they get to their assignments, they must study the native language eleven hours a day the first month and five hours a day the second month (in addition to preaching from house to house with the minimal language skills they have brought with them). I once knew a missionary who'd been in Rome for three months and had yet to see the Fountain of Trevi or the Pincian Gardens; and I knew an American missionary in Delhi who'd been in India for six months without finding the time to travel the short distance to Agra to see Taj Mahal.

 

 The phrase "culture shock" is not in the vocabulary of the Witnesses; but most all the Watchtower missionaries I have known have suffered culture shock to some degree. (Maybe if they were told that culture shock was a common phenomenon, they'd be prepared for it, feel less guilt when they experienced it. Instead, in the pep talks given to Gilead graduates, the Holy Spirit is made to sound like a windy Midwesterner who'll keep them free of all jarring encounters.) Because of the restraints placed on their activities, the denial of opportunity to insinuate themselves gently and exploratively into foreign cultures (or to allow foreign cultures to color their perceptions), they remain, however long they stay in their overseas assignments, alien and other. They look lost and perpetually out of place. They become defensive and insular, surrounding themselves, in their missionary homes, with familiar artifacts, consuming familiar food, never absorbing - or being absorbed into - the life of the country, where their aim is not to understand, but to persuade. There must be something between coming to a foreign culture as a blank slate and coming armed with tablets of law written on stone; they haven't found that middle way. A Watchtower elder describes them as "respecting [native] customs, although in their own homes they are free to maintain American or European standards as much as is practicable." [Faith, p.198]          4

 

Sometimes the unexpected happens - a child is born to a missionary couple, for example. I knew missionaries to whom this happened, in Guatemala, at a time when the Society made no provision for children of missionaries. They were - as are all missionaries to whom the unexpected happens - forced to fall back on their limited resources, and they lived in a wasteland of unhappiness and alienation. They had been obliged to leave the missionary home when their child was born. I met the wife one day. She was teaching at a private school run by an expatriate married to a Guatemalan. She was dancing - if such spiritless movements as she made could be called dancing - with little children in a circle: "Here we go 'round the mulberry bush . . . This is the day we go to church/Go to church, go to church/This is the day we go to church/So early Sunday morning." For a woman who had come to Guatemala to tell people not to go to church, making a living this way must have been agony - and the agony was reflected in her listless, worn face. Her husband had a small jewelry-repair shop in their spartan house in one of Guatemala City's dreary downtown streets. It was sad. They must have come with very high hopes; and they were reduced to graceless lower-middle-class life in a strange country. doing things they did not love to do, among people they did not love and could not understand.

 

Sometimes desperation takes different forms. I knew another missionary. a Midwestern woman assigned with her husband to Rome, who rang a doorbell on the Piazza Navona one day and never came home again: a man answered, and she fell into his bed and into his life. The Witnesses said "the demons" had gotten her. (I think Italy, and perhaps happiness, had gotten her.)

 

When I lived in Bombay, Watchtower missionaries occasionally called on me - I was the only American living in an apartment building largely inhabited by Gujaratis. I offered them tea - which they accepted. They rejected my sympathy. They didn't like me very much, I could see, but I was the only person in the building who'd open the door to them. Their efforts were thankless: they wanted to give, and nobody received them. It didn't occur to them that someone - or India itself - might have had something to give them. Their missionary home, which I visited one day, was in a remote suburb of Bombay. It was starkly modern (except that, in Bombay, everything starkly modern begins to look mildewed and patinaed with green mold and age after the first monsoon), and inside it was a replica of Watchtower headquarters in Brooklyn - plastic aspidistras, and pastel paintings of flowers that had never grown on Indian soil. I used to wonder what it was like to venture forth from that sterile (but familiar) world into the life of the bazaars - to get up after a hearty American breakfast and a reading from Deuteronomy and be greeted (or assaulted) by a burnt-out leper or a naked holy man. It must have been like being plunged alternately into hot and cold baths. The extremes of India are hard enough to bear even if you've willed yourself to bear and experience them; a lot of Europeans survive by cauterizing their senses. But the Watchtower missionaries were there to change things they had never entered into or experienced, to alter people and cultures whose values they despised without understanding or feeling them. Hard work. Hard work to close yourself off from what you're obliged to influence: a kind of spiritual imperialism; they are spiritual colonialists.

 

(When the missionary women visited me in Bombay, I asked them what they thought of Mother Teresa, that extraordinary woman who sweeps the dying off the streets of Calcutta and gives them clean sheets, holds their hands, and comforts them and makes their dying a less brutally lonely thing. They had never heard of her.)

 

I'm not saying that many Watchtower missionaries do not feel fulfilled and happy to see their work flourish and to gain converts. I am only saying that a system that impels them to keep essentially aloof and remote from the people they proselytize is bound to produce casualties. There are casualties among missionaries of all denominations; but when Watchtower missionaries break down, it is, it seems to me, not because of any fatal flaw in their characters, but because it is the implicit policy of their governing elders to keep them estranged, detached, in no significant way related to the events that swirl around them. Their insularity sometimes works to protect them and preserve them; and it sometimes works the other way - their enforced alienation becomes anguish. They are always strangers in strange lands. I knew another missionary who spent six months in a prison in Aleppo, Syria, before the Society and the U.S. State Department had her released. I don't even want to think about what a Syrian jail must be like. When I asked her what it had been like, she said, in a drifty, dreamy kind of way, “Oh,, it was all right. Pleasant." It was as if nothing that had happened to her had happened to her.

 

Everywhere I go," wrote a Society director, "I find the family arrangement is always the same amongst those who are really a part of the New World society. . . . When they get up in the morning they always have the morning text read, then perhaps a brief discussion. . . ." [Faith, p. 2 12] There must be something very comforting in knowing that all over the world - from Brooklyn to Benares - your people are behaving in the same way; and something strangely disassociative, too.

 

The Church . . . in establishing [Christ's] kingdom takes nothing away from the temporal welfare of any people. Rather does it foster and adopt, insofar as they are good, the ability, riches and customs of each people. Taking them to itself, it purifies, strengthens, elevates and consecrates them. - Constitution on the Church, No. 13

 

I'm always suspicious of people who don't see the symbolic and ritualistic importance of food (a consequence, no doubt, of growing up among Italians and Jews, for whom food offerings were love offerings). I read in Awake! magazine (Nov.22, 1976) that Witnesses were discouraged from celebrating Thanksgiving, not only because "Jesus commanded but one celebration . . . to memorialize his death" but also because "for a growing majority, having a special meal is the extent of 'celebrating' Thanksgiving." I thought how, once again, they’d missed the point. The point being that tangible and tactile, visible symbols are the flesh of the soul's belief. The same issue of Awake! asks rhetorically, "Is there a visible symbol of Christianity? Do you think of the cross? What about the figure of a fish, which appears on some ancient artifacts associated with Christians?" What the Witnesses think, of course, is Nothing doing. No cross in the Witnesses' worship (because the cross was introduced, they say, by Emperor Constantine in his sun-worshiping days); and the emblem of the fish (for which the Greek word is ICHTHYS, thought to be a cipher for lesous CHristos THeou Yios Sotir, or "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior"), is despised by the Witnesses because it often appears 'in ancient pagan symbolism, possibly to represent duty, power, and fecundity."

 

If the local customs have no narrowly defined "religious" significance, the natives are permitted by the Witnesses to hold on to them: "Becoming one of Jehovah's Witnesses," says Awake!, "does not require persons to abandon customs of their land that are not in conflict with the Holy Bible." [July 22. 1974] In that same issue, the first example of the latitude permitted converts - and I can't believe this is an accident - is one that demeans the dignity of half the human race: "Most Christian women in India, in harmony with local custom, will not eat their meals with their husbands. Only after the husband has eaten will the wife eat. Also, when men enter the presence of women, the women cover their heads with their saris." No crosses and no Thanksgiving gorging are allowed; but it's perfectly in harmony with "Christian principles" to treat women as if Christ had not come to redeem them as well as their mates. Easter bunnies are more to be deplored than the servitude of oppressed women.

 

Some missionary societies obtain converts by setting up establishments for feeding and clothing the natives, but . . . a full stomach doesn't make a man a Christian. . . . [Jehovah’s Witnesses] have endeavored to teach these people how to live by God's standards, to clean up their lives and their homes. . . This changed outlook enables them to improve their own living standards, and they learn to stand on their own feet and not depend on some foreign society for continued handouts. - Faith, p. 198

 

The work is more important than talking and writing about the work. It has always been through the performance of the works of mercy that love is expressed, that people are converted, that the masses are reached. -Dorothy Day, Meditations New York: Newman Press), p.21

 

Come - inherit the kingdom. You have my father's blessing. For I was hungry and you fed me. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink, a stranger and you welcomed me. was sick and you cared for me, naked and you clothed me, imprisoned and you came to me.-Matthew 25:3~36

 

Although their names appear on the lists of Amnesty International among those tortured and wrongfully imprisoned, the Witnesses will not join their efforts with those of Amnesty International to free other men and women illegally arrested or tortured. Although they ask the National Council of Churches for help to protest the treatment they have received in Malawi, they denigrate ecumenicism as a tool of the Devil.

 

They are very very proud of producing "genuine Christians, . . . not’ rice' Christians, 'bought' with material things, as those are called who turn their children over to be raised by Christendom's missionary establishments in exchange for food. Those hearing the good news receive spiritual sustenance." [Aw, Nov. 8, 1974, p. 25J

 

One day the Watchtower missionaries in India called on me just after I'd returned from a small village in Andhra Pradesh, where/I'd met a priest who'd spent the best part of twenty years curing infants of roundworms. (A most unglamorous job; but roundworms are killers.) "Do you try to convert these people?" I'd asked him. "I baptize them," he said, /'and I try to keep them alive, and I say Mass, and I pray for the grace of the Holy Spirit on us all. . . . It's hard to love God on an empty stomach.” That day, the priest had another visitor - an Indian doctor (an atheist) who lived and worked in a nearby leprosarium. When they met, they embraced.

 

I told the Watchtower missionaries this story, not knowing myself exactly what the point of telling them was; and they said, "But the priest isn't preaching the good news of the kingdom. . . . And Jehovah will cure lepers in his New World." Across the way from the veranda where we were sitting, a new luxury high-rise building was going up. Tribal people from Northern India had been brought in as construction workers. They lived - ate, cooked, drank, made love - on the girders of the building. The week before, a worker had fallen to his death before my horrified children's eyes. His widow had been given 25 rupees in compensation - just enough to cremate her husband. I told the missionaries that story too; and they said, "If we knew her language, we would tell her the wonderful hope of the resurrection." They had a cup of tea and talked about God's loving-kindness.