effort was embarked upon, to eliminate Jehovah’s witnesses from the German national scene. In the course of the dark years that followed thousands of witnesses were arrested, falsely convicted and put in prisons and concentration camps where many of them suffered unspeakably. Some two thousand witnesses lost their lives in this struggle to keep faithful integrity to Jehovah. But as warned in the global flood of cablegrams and telegrams of October 7, 1934, Hitler, the fighter against God, was no more in the land of the living eleven years later, when it is claimed he committed suicide in Berlin in 1945. Nevertheless, some 8,000 witnesses survived his demonized, torture-chamber concentration camps to live to take up again their preaching work and freely worship their loving God Jehovah.

Britain, too, saw an expansion of theocratic interests. In the early 1930’s the field organization attained a steadiness as to size and distribution of Bible literature. By 1931 there were 365 congregations established and functioning for service with about four thousand regular workers, including 196 pioneers, distributing annually between one and a half to two million books and booklets.k However, in 1937 a special call to wakefulness was sounded that stirred the British announcers of Jehovah’s kingdom to greater efforts and growth. The report for the next year, 1938, indicated five thousand ministers participated in the field service, placing 4,308,710 pieces of literature. During 1939 this was amazingly expanded to 6,185,937 books and booklets by 6,861 ministers, 511 of which were pioneers. This expansion rolled on into 1940 with a distribution of 6,200,282 Bible publications by 9,860 publishers, including the remarkable number of 1,037 pioneers.l In spite of total war conditions the increase continued to mount, 12,436 partaking in the monthly service in 1942, with 1,488 full-time ministers among them.a The British witnesses became a united solid organization, spiritually up to date to withstand the ordeals of the long dark war years.

British activities were not conducted without opposition. Theirs as well was the experience of opposition from Catholic-inspired sources as was their brothers’ in other parts of the world, but not to the same extent. Several Catholic-Fascist attacks were withstood in 1938 and 1939 at such points as London, Glasgow, Clydebank, Oldham, Newbridge, Hebburn on Tyne, Folkestone, Camberley, Leicester, Dundee, Ebbw Vale and Northwich, where, in some cases, priest-led mobs assaulted the witnesses and in other instances meetings were interfered with.b There were 71 cases of assault reported for 1940.c The London Catholic Herald on October 14, 1938, published a libelous attack on the witnesses and Judge Rutherford, falsely charging that their activities were subversive. The Catholic Herald was promptly compelled to publish a humiliating retraction on the front page of its issue for November 25.d

In 1938, too, on September 10 and 11, London was the key city for the Watch Tower Society’s first multicity convention. Fifty assemblies of Jehovah’s witnesses met simultaneously in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the United States and Australia. All fifty cities were tied together by radio-telephone public-address facilities so that the two principal addresses delivered at London’s Royal Albert Hall by Judge Rutherford were excellently heard by all the overseas audiences as well as audiences at the other cities in the British Isles. On Saturday the hour’s talk was on the striking subject “Fill the Earth.” On Sunday (September 11), for the public talk, at the fifty-city convention 150,000 persons heard Rutherford’s direct original delivery of his stirring lecture “Face the Facts,” warning the democratic peoples of the approaching Catholic-Fascist bid for world control. This was a remarkable assembly.e Within twelve months thereafter World War II had started, with the Nazis and Fascists feverishly making an all-out effort for world domination, as warned.

In advertising the “Face the Facts” public lecture extensive sandwich-sign parades were used in the convention cities in both hemispheres. Later, when this and other lectures were reproduced by recordings at smaller public gatherings, single-file lines of publishers with such advertising signs suspended over their shoulders would march along heavily traveled streets handing out leaflets to advertise such meetings. This spectacular feature of street witnessing became known as ‘information marching.’f Subsequently 12,000,000 copies of this lecture “Face the Facts” in booklet form were distributed in all the earth.g A mighty prewar testimony was this.

(To be continued)

More Evidence of the Bible’s Accuracy

An American archaeologist, Dr. Nelson Glueck, has uncovered an enormous amount of evidence confirming the historical accuracy of the Bible. Of the many scriptures that he has shed archaeological light on, one of the most interesting is the verse that tells of the Jordan Valley in ancient times as follows: “So Lot raised his eyes and saw the whole district of the Jordan, that all of it was a well-watered region before Jehovah destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, like the garden of Jehovah.”—Genesis 13:10, New World Trans.

Critics said this was imaginary writing. They said all evidence leads to the conclusion that at the time of Lot, about 2,000 B.C., the Jordan district was an uninhabited desert. No civilization, they said; no irrigation; no farming. “The Valley,” announced George Adam Smith in his famed Historical Geography of the Holy Land, “has never been populous. It has deserved the name of wilderness.”

Along came Dr. Glueck, who refused to believe what the so-called authorities said, because his past discoveries had all confirmed the Bible. Into the wilderness to study the wastelands went the archaeologist. There he found shattered pottery and other items that shed light on the wilderness. When he returned he had scientific evidence that startled the critics, evidence that changed the maps of ancient Palestine.

Again his discoveries confirmed the Bible’s accuracy. Declared the archaeologist: “The Jordan Valley was not only one of the first settled sections of the country, but it was also one of the richest parts of all ancient Palestine and Transjordan . . . truly, a Garden of God.”—Coronet, March, 1955.