even on the cursed ground outside the paradise of Eden. “Meanwhile he became father to sons and daughters. So all the days of Adam that he lived amounted to nine hundred and thirty years and he died.” (Gen. 5:4, 5, NW) On the very day that Adam sinned and God condemned him and drove him outside Eden’s paradise, Adam was dead from God’s viewpoint and so was dead in sin. He became a father of disobedience and produced sons of disobedience. For this reason the apostle Paul told the Christians: “You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you at one time walked according to the system of things of this world, according to the ruler of the authority of the air, the spirit that now operates in the sons of disobedience.” (Eph. 2:1, 2, 5, NW) From that standpoint, too, Eve as well as Adam was “dead though she [was] living.” (1 Tim. 5:6, NW) Now being dead in sin was not the full measure of death for Adam and Eve, but when they ceased to breathe and when the spirit or life-causing active force returned to God who gave it to them, then the first two human souls, Adam and Eve, died. Adam lived seventy years less than a thousand years. So, if we take the apostle Peter’s time measurement, “One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet. 3:8), then Adam as well as Eve positively died “in the day” that he ate from the forbidden tree. He died in the first thousand-year day of humankind’s existence.

(To be continued in our next issue)

The Nazis Bluffed, but Not the Witnesses

The Theory and Practice of Hell is a book giving an analytical report of Nazi concentration camps. It was a best seller for years in Germany, and in April, 1955, an English edition was published. Of particular interest to readers of The Watchtower is what it has to say in the chapter “The Categories of Prisoners” about Jehovah’s witnesses, among which is the following:

“On September 6, 1938, the SS [Nazi elite guards] offered the witnesses [at Buchenwald] the chance to abjure their principles in writing, especially their refusal to swear oaths and render military service, and thus purchase their liberty. Only a very few failed to withstand this temptation. The others were henceforth subjected to savage pressure in order to break their spirit. On Easter Sunday of 1939 the Roll Call Officer of Buchenwald made another effort to persuade the Witnesses to acknowledge ‘State and Fuehrer.’ The success was nil. On Whitsunday all the Jehovah’s Witnesses again had to fall in on the roll-call area. A speech was delivered to them, and a fearful period of fatigue drill followed. For an hour and a quarter the wretched men had to roll about, hop, crawl and run while the boots of the Block Leaders helped them along.

“When the war broke out the Witnesses at Sachsenhausen concentration camp were invited to volunteer for military service. Each refusal was followed by the shooting of ten men from their ranks. After forty victims had been killed, the SS desisted. In Buchenwald this appeal to the Witnesses was made on September 6, 1939. First Officer-in-Charge Rödl told them: ‘You know that war has broken out and that the German nation is in danger. New laws are coming into force. If anyone of you refuses to fight against France or England, all of you must die!’ Two SS companies with full equipment were drawn up by the gate house. Not a single Jehovah’s witness answered the officer’s appeal. There was a brief silence and then came the order: ‘Hands up! Empty your pockets!’ The SS men began to assault them, robbing them of their last penny—a reprisal that seemed rather grotesque in view of what might have been expected. True, the witnesses were assigned to the quarry and during this entire time were barred from hospital treatment.

“One cannot escape the impression that, psychologically speaking, the SS were never quite equal to the challenge offered them by Jehovah’s Witnesses.”