Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, “Austria”
“A Resolution was passed concerning the Declaration which Brother Rutherford wrote while in Europe, and this is now being distributed to counteract the influence of the enemy.”
Not the Year Book’s own editorial voice: the sentence stands inside a block of smaller type introduced on the same page by the words “The local manager’s report contains the following:”, in the Austria section of the 1933 branch reports. The Switzerland report at p. 183 of the same volume is likewise an extract from the local manager’s report and speaks of distributing 4,000 “Declarations, which Brother Rutherford wrote while here in Europe”.
Scan of original (opens in new tab)
Provenance and verification note for Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, Austria
Confidence note. Read on the page image of p. 102 (leaf 98) on 19 September 2026, whose own running head reads “102 Year Book”, and confirmed word for word; the name is printed “Rutherford”, and the “Butherford” of the optical character recognition is a misreading of the type. The Switzerland passage at p. 183 was read in the per-page optical character recognition only and its page image was not opened, so it is given in the context note rather than quoted here.
Scan provenance. Scan of the 1934 Year Book of Jehovah’s Witnesses held by the Internet Archive as item “1934-JwYearbook”. The item was uploaded to the Internet Archive in January 2012 by a private account; its “creator” field reads “watchtower”, but the upload is not by the publisher and the Internet Archive is not the publisher. The scanned title page names the corporate publishers as the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Peoples Pulpit Association and International Bible Students Association, Brooklyn, New York, and carries the notice “Copyright 1933”. The volume is the Year Book for 1934: it carries the branch reports for the 1933 service year, and it is dated here by its edition year, the form in which the organisation’s own publications cite it (“1934 Yearbook, pp. 127-146”, The Watchtower, 1 August 1955, footnote h).
Corroborated by. src-de33-yb74-convention
Notes. These two branch-manager reports are the organisation’s own attribution of the Declaration’s authorship to J. F. Rutherford, the Society’s president. The two reports word it differently and neither is the Year Book speaking in its own voice.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-de33-yb34-austria-authorship