East Germany Bans Jehovah’s Witnesses

EAST GERMANY BANS JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES

On August 30 at Magdeburg in the Soviet zone 60 of Jehovah’s witnesses were arrested and jailed, according to a dispatch in the New York Times, August 31. The report said that for months past the Witnesses “have been imprisoned by the dozens, their meetings broken up and various individuals among them badly beaten by the police on the ground that they constituted a threat to peace. Accusations have been raised against them constantly in the Communist press that they were spies and saboteurs in the pay of the United States ‘imperialists’”.

Then on September 5 the New York Daily News carried a United Press dispatch dated September 4 that reported: “The East German Communist government banned Jehovah’s witnesses in the Soviet zone today, charging the estimated 25,000 members with ‘espionage for a foreign, imperialistic power’ . . . . This was the first formal action against the organization by the Communist government, although it has carried on a propaganda campaign against Jehovah’s witnesses in recent weeks and assigned a small army of men and women to watch the members day and night.” The New York Times also reported this matter, but added: “Yesterday, reliable sources reported from the East that the leaders of the group asserted 500 members had been seized last Wednesday in a secret police raid on the Magdeburg headquarters.”

On September 6 the New York Times published the following Reuters dispatch of September 5: “The East German security police have thrown 1,000 of Jehovah’s witnesses into prison in the twenty-four hours since the East German government banned the sect, a Berlin spokesman for the Witnesses declared today. . . . The ‘illegal pamphlets’, allegedly found in the sect’s offices, were Biblical literature translated into more than ninety languages and available all over the world.”

In Switzerland the Berner Tagblatt, September 4, published on its front page: “A representative of the sect stated that the action taken by the communists against the sect had led to persecution more severe than that of the Gestapo. The Gestapo had labelled the members of the sect as friends of communists and Jews. Today they are charged as being ‘agents of American imperialism’. The sect will never submit to dictatorial pressure. Neither will it cease to preach the gospel in the Soviet zone.”