“A Strength of Character Inspired by Faith”

THE year 1998 saw the release, to much critical acclaim, of a new book in French entitled Les Témoins de Jéhovah face à Hitler (Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Face of Hitler), written by Guy Canonici. In his preface to the book, the highly respected French historian François Bédarida wrote: “This is a most welcome book. Not just because it fills a gap, but because the timing is right. . . . Apart from specialists, who knows of the fate of Jehovah’s Witnesses under the Third Reich? Yet, throughout the 12-year regime, persecution fell on them with unrelenting ferocity and violence. They too experienced the horror of the concentration camps. They too paid a high price for their faith and convictions. Why has history forgotten these Christians? . . .

“Why was there such brutal and systematic persecution of a small, scattered, and harmless sect? This is the heart of the paradox. Not only did the Witnesses in Germany represent only a very small minority of the population​—statistics show them to be some 20,000 for a total of more than 60 million inhabitants—​but they were all peaceful citizens who respected the law and threatened nobody, who only wanted to work and bring up their children properly. . . .

“This persecution came up against the tenacious and victorious spiritual resistance of believers capable of matching the force of external pressures with the internal force of their faith in Jesus Christ, starting with the physical violence of the police State​—to the point of heroism and martyrdom.”

The story of Jehovah’s Witnesses who suffered as martyrs for their Christian faith in the face of religious intolerance is a powerful one. In its review of the book, a leading French Catholic newspaper, La Croix, poignantly added: “Of their little-known history, Guy Canonici has brought together a mass of testimonies that leave one speechless in the face of a strength of character inspired by faith expressed in the simplest of words, faith that right to the end was unbreakable even among children. This commemoration should provide a backdrop to the current debate about the Christian nature of Jehovah’s Witnesses.”