One Voice in the Midst of Silence
FIFTY years ago a monster was slain. When the world finally drew aside the curtain to look on the fallen Third Reich, the ghastly sight was too much of a nightmare to comprehend. Soldiers and civilians alike could only stare in silent horror at the gruesome remains of a monstrous killing machine.
Earlier this year thousands celebrated the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps by quietly tramping through their desolate grounds. They struggled to fathom the enormity of the crime. Why, some 1,500,000 people had been killed in the death camp at Auschwitz alone! It was a time for silence, a time to reflect on man’s inhumanity to man. Haunting questions echoed in the cold ovens, in the empty barracks, across the undisturbed mountains of plundered shoes.
Today there is horror; there is outrage. The Holocaust, during which several million were systematically murdered, reveals what a monstrous evil Nazism was. But what about then? Who spoke out? Who did not?
For many, their first knowledge of the mass slayings came only at the close of World War II. The book Fifty Years Ago—Revolt Amid the Darkness explains: “The still photographs and newsreel films of the killing centers and camps liberated by the Allies in 1944 and 1945 first brought the shocking reality to the broad public, especially in the west.”
Yet, even before the death camps were set up, a voice was proclaiming the dangers of Nazism, through Awake!, the magazine you hold in your hands. It was first known as The Golden Age and was renamed Consolation in 1937. Beginning in 1929, these magazines, published by Jehovah’s Witnesses, boldly warned of the perils of Nazism, living up to the proclamation on the cover, “A Journal of Fact, Hope and Courage.”
“How can one remain silent,” asked Consolation in 1939, “about the horrors of a land where, as in Germany, 40,000 innocent persons are arrested at one time; where 70 of them were executed in a single night in one prison; . . . where all homes, institutes and hospitals for the aged, the poor, and the helpless, and all orphanages for the children, are destroyed?”
How, indeed, could one remain silent? While the world in general was unaware or skeptical of the horrific reports trickling out of Germany and occupied lands, Jehovah’s Witnesses could not keep quiet. They knew firsthand the cruelties of the Nazi regime, and they were not afraid to speak out.
[Picture Credit Line on page 3]
U.S. National Archives photo