ONLY TWO SIDES (Part 2)
By Norman H. Crowhurst

Every fundamentalist group emphasizes that there are only two sides, that of God and that of the Devil. So choose your side! How many really understand how to identify the sides? All I can say is that full appreciation of its significance came to me only after many years, laden with experience. So I will try to pass some of it on to you.

The beginning of this phase of my learning occurred in the mid thirties. Jehovah’s Witnesses were swinging along pretty well, but a group of young people with whom I associated felt much the same as I did about the whole thing. We believed in God. We could not accept all those new doctrines the Watchtower was churning out. So why did we stay so long? A lot of people ask that. This story may bring an answer to that question.

Some of these young people decided to vacation in Switzerland in 1936. During the vacation we would spend the evenings with the local Swiss at the hotel, who were very hospitable. At that time, Watchtower publications had quite a bit to say about Hitler and the atrocities perpetrated in the concentration camps. The rest of the world refused to believe the atrocities existed.

We were not far over the border from Germany. So we asked these Swiss if they knew anything. They told us about friends they knew in Germany, about people who disappeared in the middle of the night and were never heard from again. But of what happened to these people they knew nothing, although there were rumors.

The father of a girl in our party was Austrian by birth, naturalized British. On our way home, we stayed at this girl’s home over the weekend. Her father asked us about Switzerland, where he had often visited during his youth. What was still the same, what had changed? We told him about the conversation concerning Hitler, and he became silent, which was not like him. An effervescent Austrian by nature, he always had something happy to say. Silence was not his nature.

Next morning, very solemnly, he asked us if we would take him for a ride, he would show us where. I looked at Anna, but her frown stopped me asking where he was going to take us. We rode to a point between Sandwich and Deal on the Channel coast, and he told us to turn into a lane clearly marked “Private, No Thoroughfare.”

We passed sign after sign, Dead End, No Admittance, Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted, enough to deter anyone from going further. But he insisted we keep going. Eventually, we reached a sentry at the gate of a camp. John Retter got out of the car and spoke to the sentry in German. After a few moments, we were waved in.

It appears that John was camp interpreter for this place, that housed about 3,000 persons who had escaped from German concentration camps. John was sworn to secrecy about his work. But what he had seen was too awful to keep to himself. So he did not tell us about it. He showed us. With him as interpreter, we interviewed several of the poor people there and learned what was going on. It was unbelievable. It would be impossible to exaggerate the atrocities. We would rather forget. But it was real enough.

Jehovah’s Witnesses had been circulating a petition for signatures, demanding that the British government make representations to the German government to cease such atrocities. Our group of young people had little to do with that up till then. We thought the stories about Hitler fighting God’s kingdom under Christ, by putting Christians in concentration camps, was a bit far-fetched.

But this first-hand evidence changed our thoughts: Jehovah’s Witnesses were right and all the rest of the world was wrong. After that, we joined in circulating the petition with a will. What then shocked us was the way people would denounce us as communists, or as parroting communist propaganda, because “everyone knows how much good Hitler is doing for Germany.”

The petition went to the British government. Their official reply was that the government had no knowledge, either of any camps or of any atrocities. But we knew better!

The next years were heartbreaking years in some ways and yet they were years of success in bringing many to believe. Some of these joined Jehovah’s Witnesses, some did not. But they believed, which was what mattered to us.

In 1939 attitudes changed. Now all the world wanted to stop Hitler and Mussolini, it seemed. And the Watchtower attitude changed, too. Their “preaching” was from door to door. If all the young men went into forces, they would have no preachers left to sell books. So they decided we should be conscientious objectors.

Personally, I felt there was a score to settle, after what I had seen, but I wanted to do God’s will. When my age group was due to register, I went to the office and took the form the clerk gave me to register for the armed services. However, after my name and address, the next space was for ‘occupation’. Following that was one for ‘employer’.

Two years earlier I had been an electronic engineer, but now I was a minister of a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I could enter ‘electronic engineer’, but then I could not name an employer and I was certainly not unemployed. So I asked the clerk.

I did not say I was a minister for Jehovah’s Witnesses, because that was not how I viewed myself. My Master is Jesus Christ. So I told him I was a Christian minister. He would not accept this, without knowing of what denomination I was a minister. Eventually I had to admit that it was of a congregation of people known as Jehovah’s Witnesses.

He said that my correct procedure was to register as a conscientious objector. I told him that I did not conscientiously object to that war. He said that was the only way to get my case ‘clarified’, but that is another story.

During the war, I actually witnessed shiploads of scrap iron being shipped from British ports to Germany. Then there was a coal strike toward the end of the war. From some strikers I met from South Wales I learned the reason for that strike that was never published in the newspapers.

The miners had learned from the stevedores who loaded the coal on ships, that its destination was Barcelona, Spain. In turn, the sailors on the ships had learned from Spanish stevedores that the trains onto which they loaded the coal were headed for — you guessed it — Germany!

So the strikers were really patriots, yet the newspapers blasted them for trying to sabotage the war effort. The only part of the war effort they wanted to sabotage was the enemy’s side!

These things, at the time, seemed to confirm Watchtower teaching, that the whole world is in a conspiracy against God’s people. While pretending to fight tyranny, our government was secretly helping our enemies. This was Bible prophecy fulfilled, as the Witnesses said.

That side of things seemed plain. But another side did not. If they were God’s exclusive people, as they claimed, why would the Watchtower Society restore to subterfuge, to keep young men out of the forces? And why would they even get the government’s cooperation in this, as they had in my case?

After the war, I found myself one of the key men in the British organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses. At all their big conventions I would have a prominent place organizing things. I resumed my activity as an electronic engineer and as an educator and, when the Watchtower urged people to come to Yankee Stadium in 1950, my wife and I were on the boat.

That was when Nathan Knorr released the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures (New Testament). In his speech, he gave a great buildup for “restoring the name Jehovah to its rightful place in the New Testament.” In talking about that, he mentioned the pronunciation of the name. It was during this speech that the only wind to even breathe in New York City all that week blew down into the Stadium.

On the grass, in front of the platform, was spelled out the words JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES

The wind — quite a stiff gust — blew over the E, 0 and A, at the very moment Knorr was explaining that all we know of the Divine name is the tetragrammaton, the Hebrew equivalent of JHVH. What was left standing at that moment were the letters J H V H’S WITNESSES

That seemed a high moment for the crowd gathered in that Stadium. The gasp was audible. God was speaking to us, it seemed. But Knorr continued, apparently oblivious. From that day to this, that incident has never been mentioned in Watchtower literature. What did it mean? Why the silence?

In 1953, following some business contacts we made in 1950, my wife and I emigrated to the United States. But that brings a whole new story. — Rt. 3, Box 324-R, Dallas, Or. 97338