The 1998 Awake! records that critics say swastika flags were displayed at the Berlin convention and that it opened with the German national anthem, and answers both. It states that photographs show no swastikas in the hall, that flags may nevertheless have been on the building’s exterior after a Nazi combat troop used the hall on 21 June and a solstice celebration was held nearby on 24 June, and that the opening song was “Zion’s Glorious Hope”, set to a Haydn melody that the German government adopted for the national anthem in 1922.

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

8 July 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.

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