They Did Not Compromise

17. (a) According to one book, how were Jehovah’s Witnesses treated by the Nazis? (b) In meeting the challenge, how did Jehovah’s Witnesses contrast with others?

¹⁷ A recent book entitled Of Gods and Men stated that during Hitler’s Third Reich, Jehovah’s Witnesses were the religious group that suffered “the most extreme opposition.” Jehovah’s Witnesses did not compromise. Those of other religions in Germany followed their military chaplains, thus rendering religious service to the German state and receiving the “mark” of the political wild beast “in their right hand or upon their forehead.” (Revelation 13:16) These gave the active right hand of support to the German political machine and made their stand clearly seen by heiling Hitler and saluting the swastika flag.

18. (a) What record shows whether Jehovah’s Witnesses were “political ‘neutrals’”? (b) How should this historical account affect us individually today?

¹⁸ What position did true Christians there take? The above-mentioned study states: “Only the Jehovah’s Witnesses resisted the regime. They fought tooth and nail and as a result one-half of their number was imprisoned and one-quarter executed. . . . They, in contrast to [other religions], are nonworldly in the sense that they do not seek the approbation or the rewards of the material world and do not consider themselves to be members of it. They are political ‘neutrals’ since they belong already to another world​—God’s. . . . They do not seek or offer compromises. . . . To serve in the army, to vote, or to give the Hitler salute would have meant a recognition of the claims of this world as dominant over the claims of God.” The pursuit of peace and nonviolence by Jehovah’s Witnesses was even recognized in the concentration camps. How so? In that “only Witnesses were allowed to shave the S.S. guards using cut-throat razors, since only they could be trusted not to kill.”

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A Record of Faith, Courage, and Integrity

The book New Religious Movements: A Perspective for Understanding Society makes these further comments on the integrity of Jehovah’s Witnesses in facing up to Nazi persecution:

“In their refusal to comply, the Jehovah’s Witnesses offered a challenge to the totalitarian concept of the new society, and this challenge, as well as the persistence of its survival, demonstrably disturbed the architects of the new order. The more the Witnesses were persecuted, the more they presented a real ideological challenge. The time-honoured methods of persecution, torture, imprisonment and ridicule were not resulting in the conversion of any Witnesses to the Nazi position and were in fact back-firing against their instigators. The Nazis panicked in the face of this unpredictable response.”

“Between these two rival claimants on loyalty, the fight was bitter, even more so, since the physically stronger Nazis were in many ways less sure, less rooted in the firmness of their own conviction, less certain of the survival of their 1,000 year Reich. Witnesses did not doubt their own roots, for their faith had been evident since the time of Abel. Whilst the Nazis had to suppress opposition and convince their supporters, often borrowing language and imagery from sectarian Christianity, Witnesses were sure of the total, unbending loyalty of their members, even to death.”