Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1933, Volume II, “The Consul General at Berlin (Messersmith) to the Acting Secretary of State, No. 1428”
“The work of the Society has been at an utter standstill in all the states of Germany except Prussia; but on June 24 a decree was issued by the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and signed by Dr. Grauert, the Under Secretary of State in that Ministry. . . . In the decree of June 24 forbidding the activities of the Society throughout Germany, it was also provided that the property be confiscated.”
A despatch from the American Consul General in Berlin reporting on the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. It records that Rutherford had been in Europe for a number of months, came to Germany “a number of weeks ago” and had a long interview at the Consulate General with Consul Geist, and that it was pointed out to him that the Consulate General “would be unable to make any representations to the German Government regarding the ban that had been put upon their activities and that it could use its good offices only to protect the physical property of the organization excluding pamphlets, booklets and brochures which the police had condemned as being anti-revolutionary and communistic in tendency”.
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Provenance and verification note for Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1933, Volume II, The Consul General at Berlin (Messersmith) to the Acting Secretary of State, No. 1428
Confidence note. Opened on the United States Department of State Office of the Historian site on 19 September 2026 and read in full. Both sentences quoted stand on p. 408 of the printed edition, whose page breaks are marked in the text; the despatch as a whole runs pp. 407-410. The ellipsis stands for three sentences about the copy of the decree enclosed with the despatch, about the legal complexities it raised, and about the powers conferred by the Reich President’s decree of 28 February 1933.
Notes. This confirms from a contemporaneous, non-Witness record that the Prussian ban was decreed on 24 June 1933, the day before the Berlin convention.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-de33-frus-messersmith-1428