Jehovah’s Witnesses Again Endure Totalitarian Hate
Communism in East Germany relights the Nazi fires of persecution
COMMUNISTS may hate the Bible, but they prove its prophecies true. Their furious onslaughts against Jehovah’s witnesses are a part of the fulfillment of Jesus’ words to his followers: “Ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake.” (Matt. 24:9) In blazing forth against these followers of Christ, the Communists prove themselves footstep followers of the Nazis. The Reds relight the fires of persecution once stoked by Hitler’s hordes. And, like the Nazis, the Communists seek to cover their basic hate of true Christianity with a torrent of lies.
The Communist-dominated East Germany press continually spews out distortions against the Witnesses. It falsely accuses them of advocating immorality. It claimed that a Witness murdered his wife as a sacrifice to Jehovah, and that he was intending to kill his children to imitate Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. It charges the Witnesses with anti-Semitism because they Scripturally teach that Jews no longer comprise a consecrated, holy nation, but are on an equal footing with all men before God. But the favorite distortion is that the Witnesses are spies for American imperialists. The evidence? Why, they get literature from America, distribute CARE packages from America, refuse to sign the Communist appeal to outlaw the atom bomb, and preach that the destructive war of Armageddon is inevitable. Communist propaganda argues that the Witnesses refuse to sign the appeal outlawing the atom bomb because through this bomb America will win the battle of Armageddon. How ridiculous!
Hiding hateful religious persecution behind false charges of subversion and sedition was not new with the Nazis, and is not new with the Communists. The same false charges of sedition and weakener of national morale were brought against Jehovah’s servants before Christ, against Christ, and against his followers. Note this for yourself by reading Ezra 4:15, Nehemiah 2:19, Esther 3:8, Jeremiah 37:13-15; 38:4, Luke 23:2 and Acts 24:5. Such faithful servants of God suffered torture and death in ancient times. They do today also. Read the following translation of a dispatch appearing in the newspaper Stockholms-Tidningen, September 18, 1950:
“JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES IN EASTERN ZONE SUFFERING TERRIBLE TORTURE
“HANNOVER, Sept. 17.—(ST) Having arrested nearly 1,000 of the more noted among Jehovah’s witnesses in the Eastern Zone, the People’s Police are now searching high and low for all members of this so strongly resistant sect in order to definitely liquidate the sect as such. Their leading preachers have been sentenced to 25 years of hard labor, and so have the members of their families, and one has to face the possibility that, so long as the Communist government is in power, all of Jehovah’s witnesses will disappear into prison.
“Academy students who have fled from the Eastern Zone are reporting about all that which the authorities have done, but hitherto without success, to break the open and fanatical opposition of the sect against the Communists. Jehovah’s witnesses have been ill-treated and tortured in the most horrible way without renouncing their faith, which is to the effect that Christ is to be acknowledged as the highest and only authority and that they do not want to submit to any human power.
“With the mass-arresting of Jehovah’s witnesses these people have now, for the second time within a couple of decades, donned the martyr’s crown—and they know what that means. Already during the Hitler regime about 1,000 Jehovah’s witnesses were executed as traitors, because they not only refused to serve in the war but openly opposed Hitler’s authority. Another 1,000 of Jehovah’s witnesses died in prisons and concentration camps, and all who have afterwards been describing life in those camps have in their books given Jehovah’s witnesses the very highest recognition.
“Jehovah’s witnesses have now been acting under the Communist Quisling regime just as they acted during the Hitler regime, and in the Eastern Zone the sect had of late been getting such a following, especially among the women and the youth, that it became too frightening to the regime. The preachers of the sect have never hesitated to openly state what they think of the Communist regime. They have branded the Eastern Zone elections as fraudulent and the Communist regime itself as ‘a Satanic rule’.
“Taking shelter behind the scripture, ‘All power in heaven and in earth is given unto me,’ Jehovah’s witnesses refuse to accept any kind of earthly authority. Normally they are fighting neither the state as such nor its laws, and the only thing which they have been considering themselves entitled to claim in ordinary, honest, democratic states is to be exempted from serving in war. But, exactly as in the Hitler Reich, in the Eastern Zone they have got into a mortal struggle with the regime only because of their publicly proclaiming their faith. As they, before 1945, used to refuse to salute Hitler’s swastika flag and to say ‘Heil Hitler’, so they are now refusing to salute the Red ensigns. And to the Eastern Zone movement of resistance against the Communist regime they have, because of their uncompromising attitude, become the factor around which to rally. To the masses of Germans in the Eastern Zone the unsophisticated witnesses of Jehovah, in their implicit faith, have become a great example, and hence very dangerous to the Communist regime.
“The Communists have an easy job in rounding up Jehovah’s witnesses, by reason of the new questionnaire: ‘Are you willing to sign or subscribe to the Stockholm Appeal against the atom bomb?’ . . . Hitherto they have refused to sign, all of them, and for this refusal they are now all going to prison. In view of Jehovah’s witnesses’ almost supernatural power of resistance, one may take it for granted that, should the Communist regime in the Eastern Zone stay in power much longer, they will never return from the prisons alive.”
To this revealing account is added the United Press dispatch of October 4, from Berlin: “Nine members of the Jehovah’s witnesses sect were sentenced to long prison terms today by the Supreme Court in Communist East Germany for spying in the Russian zone for the United States. Willi Heinicke and Friedric Adler received life terms. The others were sentenced to from eight to fifteen years. All were convicted of charges of sending military and other data to ‘an espionage center in Brooklyn’. They were charged also with sabotage in connection with the Communist campaign to outlaw the atomic bomb and ‘defamation of the people’s elections’ scheduled to be held in the Soviet zone October 15.”
Through all trials Jehovah’s witnesses today hold staunchly to the inspired conviction of the apostle Paul: “Who will separate us from the love of the Christ? Will tribulation or distress or persecution or hunger or nakedness or danger or sword? To the contrary, in all these things we are coming off completely victorious through him that loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor governments nor things here nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth nor any other creation will be able to separate us from God’s love that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 8:35, 37-39, NW) Communism cannot succeed where Nazism failed. Human ruling isms will end at the latest in Jehovah God’s battle of Armageddon. To those who endure the hate and persecution from all nations for Christ’s name’s sake the promise applies: “He that has endured to the finish is the one that will be saved.”—Matt. 24:13, NW.