Germany's Black Holocaust: 1890-1945 by Firpo Carr

Author:Firpo Carr [Carr, Firpo]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2015-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Witness Omission?

Although the literature of the Watch Tower Society speaks extensively about the inhuman treatment followers unjustly suffered at the hands of Nazi persecutors, we found no mention of Blacks being targeted by the Nazis in Witness publications.[††††††††††††††]

The Witnesses are not alone though. They quote certain Holocaust experts who, as well meaning as they are, also neglect to speak of the staggering Black pain, suffering, and death during the Holocaust.[173]

One of these well-known experts is Dr. Christine King of England, whom the author has been privileged to meet.

Dr. King, in her excellent book, The Nazi State and the New Religions: Five Case Studies in Non-Conformity (1982), discusses the history of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Nazi Germany. She gives the Witnesses well-deserved praise for standing up to Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement.

Her name is well established in Witness publications.[‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡] But since her work highlights religious as opposed to ethnic interaction with Nazism, she does not focus on the plight of Blacks—as far as I can tell—especially those who may have been Witnesses.

Jewish institutions that memorialize the plight of Jews in the Holocaust also have not given a full disclosure of the Black experience in Nazi Germany. This is notable in that other unfortunate groups have received such attention in various ways.

Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel, The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., as well as the Museum of Tolerance and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, California—all of which the author has visited—do not focus on the fact that the Nazis especially singled out Blacks for extermination.

Is receiving recognition as having been victims of the Nazi Holocaust important to the Witnesses? Indeed it is. The most recent manifestation of this understandable desire is seen in the 2003 Yearbook of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Please note what is stated in the impressive work with regard to due recognition under the heading, “In Remembrance of Their Steadfastness.”

For more than 30 years, the Buchenwald Memorial, at the former Nazi concentration camp, made no mention of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Witnesses simply did not fit into the concept that the East German authorities had of victims and opposers of the Nazi regime. Even today many people in Germany find it hard to acknowledge the Witnesses’ unique record of steadfastness. Therefore, May 9, 2002, was a particularly meaningful day. A plaque commemorating the Witnesses who suffered in Buchenwald was unveiled by Mr. R. Lüttgenau, the deputy director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation. … The plaque gives prisoners who wore the purple triangle their due place among the victims of the Nazi regime.[174]

This act is to be applauded. Although it cannot undo the horrors that Witnesses and others faced during the Nazi Holocaust, the plaque does indeed give Witness prisoners “their due place among the victims of the Nazi regime.”

Like the Witness organization that realizes that recognition does have its place in this entire unfortunate scenario, the townspeople of Wereth, Belgium have also come to the realization that recognition for Black victims is also important.

For

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