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 m