Posted on 04/25/2013 2:16:56 PM PDT by count-your-change
"Unlike Jews and others targeted by the Nazis, the Witnesses were prisoners of conscience. They could have bought freedom by signing a declaration card that renounced their faith and pledged allegiance to Hitler. Few took the offer. Most stayed, and many died.
Why Hitler bothered to single out such a minor group - and the tenacity with which the Witnesses resisted him - is what makes their story significant, says Michael Berenbaum, director of the Research Institute at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington. "The Jehovah's Witnesses were literally the only martyrs of the Holocaust," Mr. Berenbaum says."
(Excerpt) Read more at centralprint.net ...
It's a story that should become more widely recognized and told.
It is utterly disgusting that someone named ‘Michael Berenbaum’ should be the person who diminishes the sacrifices and losses of Jews and Christians in the Holocaust by pronouncing Jehovah’s Witnesses as the only martyrs of that horrible crime.
But regardless, this statement "The Jehovah's Witnesses were literally the only martyrs of the Holocaust," Mr. Berenbaum.
I want to vomit.
... It is telling that even an evil man like Hitler knew the Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult. Man!
The Jehovah’s Witnesses were literally the only martyrs of the Holocaust,” Mr. Berenbaum says.
Well no, that statement couldn’t possibly offend anyone. Let alone, those whose families found themselves amongst the counted dead of some nearly 6million.
There’s a local group of Jehova’s Witnesses that comes around regularly. Not trying to convert me, they know my fiance is Jewish. Just standing around discussing the world. Rhey’re eager for knowledge, I lend them books and they leave me stacks of magazines.
Works out well :).
That’s because the JWs think they are only the special ones on EArth.
I think that what he meant was “the only group that resisted until martyrdom”.
Not the best phrasing.
Even that restatement is so far outside reality to make me want to vomit - again.
Mr. Berenbaum disgusts me. I’m not the most educated person in the world and I still know how to check the facts.
And there’s thousands of them:
http://www.yadvashemusa.org/martyrdom__resistance.html
I thought I was going to get a story of how the Nazis would come a knocking on a JW’s door, and the JW’s wouldn’t let them in.
You seem to have a reflux problem, as well as a mental one.
You sure you’re not a wahab?
Millions of Jews who refused to renounce or lie about their faith who died at the hands of the Nazis are not "martyrs"?
But that wouldn't be accurate either. There were die-hard, born-again Christians who organized and opposed Hitler and the Nazis.
One well-known martyr was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. But there were MANY who gave their lives for their faith in resistance to the horrors of the Nazi Party. So if they meant what you said - they were still just as flawed.
I have a problem with this guys claiming JWs were the only martyrs during WWII, I also have a problem that you don’t think his statement is vile.
True, but they were subgroups.
Now, of course, there are lots of subgroups out there with justifiiable pride in their resistance.
But as a percentage of total mainstream Protestants or Catholics in the Third Reich, their numbers were small.
The article says:
"The Jews were victims because their experience was not a matter of choice. But the Witnesses did have a choice. They are people to be respected for not giving in."
I think he makes a technical distinction by saying Jews had no choice in the matter whereas JWs could have saved themselves by bowing down and worshiping Hitler, something they by and large refused to do.
The author's point was the Jews had no choice in the matter, their fate was sealed. JWs on the other hand did have a choice. They could save themselves by bowing down and worshiping Hitler, something they largely refused to do and something that cannot be said of most mainstream Christians in Weimar Germany, or the Third Reich.
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