Jehovah's Witnesses—Proclaimers of God's Kingdom, ““Objects of Hatred by All the Nations””
“During 1933, the very year that a concordat between the Vatican and Nazi Germany was signed, Hitler launched a campaign to annihilate Jehovah's Witnesses in Germany. By 1935 they were proscribed in the entire nation. But who instigated this?”
From chapter 29 of the 1993 official history, which runs pp. 642-677 and deals with persecution, including the Nazi era. The chapter goes on to attribute the ban largely to the German Catholic episcopate and to Protestant church leaders.
Source officielle (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet)
Note de provenance et de vérification for Jehovah's Witnesses—Proclaimers of God's Kingdom, “Objects of Hatred by All the Nations”
Note sur la fiabilité. The whole chapter was opened on the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and searched; the sentences quoted stand on p. 659, taken from the pageNum markers. Neither this chapter, nor the book’s chronology, mentions the Berlin convention of 25 June 1933 or the “Declaration of Facts”; the word “Berlin” occurs twice in the chapter, once of orders sent to a camp and once of the Berlin-Plötzensee detention centre. A full-text search of the Watchtower Online Library for the phrase “Declaration of Facts” returns seven results: the 1955 Watchtower, the 1998 and 1999 Awake! items, and four entries in the organisation’s own indexes for 1930-1985 and 1986-2026. This book is not among them.
Notes. The chapter and the book’s chronology were both read in full; neither names the Berlin convention of 25 June 1933 or the Declaration of Facts, and the phrase does not occur anywhere in this book in a full-text search of the publisher’s own library.
Date de consultation. 19 septembre 2026 · Identifiant de la source. src-de33-jv-chapter29