ClaimAuthority and accountabilityverified1930sContext

Autoridad y rendición de cuentas · Claim record

La organización ha publicado dos cifras sobre los ejemplares de la Declaración, y no están formuladas sobre la misma base. El Anuario de 1934 dice que la Declaración “was printed and mailed to every high officer of the government from the president down to the members of the council” y que “2,500,000 copies were freely distributed”. El Anuario de 1974 dice que los delegados “took 2,100,000 copies of the ‘declaration’ home with them” desde la asamblea, y ¡Despertad! de 1998 dice que “following the convention, the Witnesses distributed 2.1 million copies”.

Claim ID claim-authority-de33-print-run-disputedConcerns 1933Contexto

La afirmación y sus pruebas

Contexto · 1933 Verificado

La organización ha publicado dos cifras sobre los ejemplares de la Declaración, y no están formuladas sobre la misma base. El Anuario de 1934 dice que la Declaración “was printed and mailed to every high officer of the government from the president down to the members of the council” y que “2,500,000 copies were freely distributed”. El Anuario de 1974 dice que los delegados “took 2,100,000 copies of the ‘declaration’ home with them” desde la asamblea, y ¡Despertad! de 1998 dice que “following the convention, the Witnesses distributed 2.1 million copies”. Source: Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, 1934Source: Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, 1974Source: Awake!, 8 de julio de 1998

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Publicación primaria de los testigos de Jehová Verificado

Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, “Germany”

1934 · p.146 · Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society

“The Declaration adopted at that convention was printed and mailed to every high officer of the government from the president down to the members of the council. 2,500,000 copies were freely distributed.”

Printed under the subheading “Conventions” in the Germany report. The same page adds that “The Declaration itself has been a tremendous witness to the people of Germany”.

Nota de procedencia y verificación for Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, Germany

Nota de confianza. Read on the page image of p. 146 (leaf 142) on 19 September 2026, whose own running head reads “146 Year Book”, and confirmed word for word.

Procedencia del escaneo. 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).

Notes. The 1974 Year Book and the 8 July 1998 Awake! both give the figure as 2,100,000.

Consultado. 19 de septiembre de 2026 · Identificador de la fuente. src-de33-yb34-copies-distributed

Publicación primaria de los testigos de Jehová Verificado

Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, “Part 1—Germany”

1974 · p.111 · Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society

“The copy sent to Hitler was accompanied by a letter that, in part, read: “The Brooklyn presidency of the Watch Tower Society is and always has been exceedingly friendly to Germany. In 1918 the president of the Society and seven members of the Board of Directors in America were sentenced to 80 years' imprisonment for the reason that the president refused to let two magazines in America, which he edited, be used in war propaganda against Germany.””

Immediately after recording that the delegates took 2,100,000 copies of the Declaration home with them for distribution. The 1974 Year Book quotes only this part of the letter and does not say who wrote or signed it.

Nota de procedencia y verificación for Year Book of Jehovah's Witnesses, Part 1—Germany

Nota de confianza. Opened on the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and the wording confirmed; the page was taken from the pageNum marker preceding the passage.

Notes. This is the organisation's own confirmation that a letter accompanied the copy of the Declaration sent to Hitler. No full text of that letter was located in any source that could be opened for this research.

Consultado. 19 de septiembre de 2026 · Identificador de la fuente. src-de33-yb74-hitler-letter

Publicación primaria de los testigos de Jehová Verificado

Awake!, “Jehovah's Witnesses—Courageous in the Face of Nazi Peril”

8 de julio de 1998 · p.14 · Awake! correspondent in Germany · Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society

“According to the account in the 1974 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses, some German Witnesses were disappointed that the language of the “Declaration” was not more explicit in tone. Had the branch office manager, Paul Balzereit, weakened the text of the document? No, for a comparison of the German and the English texts shows that this is not the case.”

Part of a section answering specific criticisms. The article also states that photographs of the convention “clearly show that they displayed no swastikas in the hall” while conceding that “it is possible, however, that there were flags on the building’s exterior”; that the convention began not with the national anthem but with “Zion’s Glorious Hope”, whose Haydn melody the German government adopted for the national anthem in 1922; and that “a ban on Jehovah’s Witnesses in Germany had been issued on Saturday, June 24, 1933, just the day before the Berlin convention”. The article does not say that the ban of 24 June was a Prussian decree; that comes from the United States diplomatic record.

Nota de procedencia y verificación for Awake!, Jehovah's Witnesses—Courageous in the Face of Nazi Peril

Nota de confianza. Opened on the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026 and read in full; the passage quoted stands on p. 14, the page taken from the pageNum markers. The article runs pp. 10-14, and the organisation’s own index cites this section of it as pp. 12-14.

Corroborado por. src-de33-yb74-convention, src-de33-frus-messersmith-1428

Notes. The article gives the number of copies distributed as 2.1 million, agreeing with the 1974 Year Book and differing from the 2,500,000 printed in the 1934 Year Book.

Consultado. 19 de septiembre de 2026 · Identificador de la fuente. src-de33-g98-rebuttals

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