¡Despertad! de 1998 recoge que los críticos dicen que en la asamblea de Berlín se exhibieron banderas con la esvástica y que el acto se abrió con el himno nacional alemán, y responde a ambas cosas. Afirma que las fotografías no muestran esvásticas en la sala, que aun así pudo haber banderas en el exterior del edificio después de que una unidad de combate nazi usara la sala el 21 de junio y de que se celebrara cerca una fiesta del solsticio el 24 de junio, y que la canción inicial fue “Zion’s Glorious Hope”, compuesta sobre una melodía de Haydn que el gobierno alemán adoptó para el himno nacional en 1922.

Awake!, “Jehovah's Witnesses—Courageous in the Face of Nazi Peril”

8 de julio de 1998 · p.14 · Awake! correspondent in Germany · Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society

“According to the account in the 1974 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses, some German Witnesses were disappointed that the language of the “Declaration” was not more explicit in tone. Had the branch office manager, Paul Balzereit, weakened the text of the document? No, for a comparison of the German and the English texts shows that this is not the case.”

Part of a section answering specific criticisms. The article also states that photographs of the convention “clearly show that they displayed no swastikas in the hall” while conceding that “it is possible, however, that there were flags on the building’s exterior”; that the convention began not with the national anthem but with “Zion’s Glorious Hope”, whose Haydn melody the German government adopted for the national anthem in 1922; and that “a ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany had been issued on Saturday, June 24, 1933, just the day before the Berlin convention”. The article does not say that the ban of 24 June was a Prussian decree; that comes from the United States diplomatic record.

Fuente oficial ↗ (se abre en una pestaña nueva)