Herbert W Armstrong

   Now maybe some of you will feel like lamenting this afternoon when we really begin to go over some of the things that God has said this nation is going to have to suffer before it's going to learn its lesson. God forbid that it might be any one of us, but perhaps it will be. Because we know that God says there are going to be those who will be within his own true church who are going to let down. We're going to finally become lukewarm and who will let the goal sink from sight and will just fall into the easy habit that it is to drift downstream like any old dead fish.

   You know, you've heard it said, I think, that it takes a pretty lively fish to swim upstream, but any old dead fish can drift with the current. It's pretty easy to go along with the way of society, but then again, it's a little difficult to go against society, especially all of your friends and relatives and neighbors and the churches, the religious people, all of your buddies, everyone in this world. It's quite difficult to begin living a life that is going directly contrary to everything they believe in and stand for. It isn't easy.

   Well, God says that punishments are coming on this country such as we have never dreamed of. These things have happened in the past. They happen in our lifetime. They are happening now in Indochina, on the Malayan Peninsula, in North Africa, over between the Israelis and the Arabs, in Russia, in Siberia, especially in China. They're happening now. Some of the atrocities that are being wreaked on human beings — human beings who love life as much as you do, who like to draw breath, who enjoy the pleasures of life as much as they can and who would like to go on living as much as any one of you. And I want to make you realize some of these things today.

   Now let's turn over to Jeremiah, the Lamentations of Jeremiah. That is right after that book of Jeremiah, Chapter One. This entire book is about spiritual Jerusalem in a sense, but as the type, and he mentions repeatedly through here Judah and Israel, a picture of God's own nation that he originally chose and decided that they were to become a kingdom of peace for him, that he was going to give them his name. He would be their God; they would be his people. They were given the most righteous laws that any nation has ever been given, a law so righteous that when Moses came down off the mount, his face shone so that he had to cover it with a veil. They couldn't even look on his face. That law was so perfect.

   Now then, Jeremiah's prophecy. He's been going through chapter after chapter after chapter of what is going to happen to Israel, of the punishments that are going to happen to Israel. Chapter 30, verse 14 (Jeremiah 30:14), for instance: "Your lovers have forgotten you." Making alliances with heathen, pagan, Gentile nations — your lovers have forgotten you, to be carried to Babylon. Back in Chapter 27, in the first few chapters, Chapter 10 especially, Chapter 11: "The house of Israel and Judah have broken my covenant. Don't pray for this people. I won't hear you in the time of their trouble," he said in Chapter 11.

   He said in Chapter 4 and verse 30 (Jeremiah 4:30): "Even though you rent your face with painting, deck yourself with your material wealth and your jewels and look beautiful as a kingdom, in vain will you make yourself fair. Your lovers will despise you. They will seek your life" — your lovers. Now speaking nationally, our allies will despise us and seek our life.

   After the close of this book, here is the book that Jeremiah wrote about the lamentations of just exactly what is going to take place. Now, let's begin in verse one, and I'll elucidate as we go along and read some excerpts from a very interesting book I have here, and I'll give you the name of it in case any of you want to procure it for yourselves.

   "How does the city sit solitary that was full of people?" A picture of desolation here where formerly there were multitudes of people living. "How has she become as a widow? She that was great among the nations and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary?" That means annexed as a tributary to other nations. She that was great. In fact, we have now reached the place where we are the greatest nation on the face of this earth, the greatest nation that has ever existed, far greater in power and strength and wealth than the Roman Empire at its zenith, far greater than the Babylonian Empire, the Hittite Empire, the Holy Roman Empire with all of its different resurrections, far greater than any kingdom that has ever existed on the face of this earth.

   "She weeps sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks. Among all her lovers she has none to comfort her. All her friends" — the ones she calls her friends — "have dealt treacherously with her. They are become her enemies." Her friends have dealt treacherously. They are become her enemies.

   "Judah has gone into captivity because of affliction." Now the word "because of" is a little ambiguous. It means "into furthermore affliction," and into actually great servitude. "She dwells among the heathen. She finds no rest. All her persecutors overtook her between the straits. The ways of Zion do mourn because none come to the solemn feast. All her gates are desolate. Her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness. Her adversaries are the chief. Her enemies prosper, for the Eternal has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions. Her children are gone into captivity before the enemy."

   "And from the daughter of Zion, all her beauty is departed." It might remind you of Isaiah 3:12 and 16 and through that the next few verses in Isaiah the third chapter. The daughter of Zion is haughty — our modern Israelite people pictured, as a shadow, and particularly of course it's speaking to the modern Israelite women.

   "Her princes are become like harts that find no pasture. They are gone without strength before the pursuer. Jerusalem remembered in the days of her affliction and of her miseries all her pleasant things that she had in the days of old, when her people fell into the hands of the enemy and none did help her. The adversary saw her and did mock at her Sabbaths. Jerusalem has grievously sinned. Therefore she is removed. All that honored her despise her because they have seen her nakedness. Yes, she sighs and turns backward. Her filthiness is in her skirts. She remembered not her last end. Therefore, she came down wonderfully" — or tremendously. "She had no comforter. O Eternal, behold my affliction," she cries out, "for the enemy has magnified himself."

   She has not remembered her last end, God said. I want to pause here just for a moment now. There is only one possible reason for ever recording an event that happened yesterday. There is only one central reason for ever having such a thing as a history book. The only reason for recording history is for the lesson it can give for the future. That's all. If it doesn't have a lesson contained for you to fashion and shape your life by and for nations to plot their foreign policies by, then there's no reason to have history books. Let's forget about what happened in the past. Let's just go on chance and guesswork. But yet this nation has never learned its lesson from history. We have never learned our lesson yet, and we're not going to until about 17 to 25 years hence, until we finally learn our lesson.

   History repeats itself. Yes, it surely does. The Treaty of Versailles came along after World War I, and a group of men solemnly faced each other over the conference tables over in Europe, and they decided they were going to forever end the menace of Germany. Germany would never rise again, and they bound themselves to that agreement. They carved Germany all in pieces. German Southwest Africa — the capital is Windhoek, and Walvis Bay where fishermen down there on the western coast of Africa — that was stripped from Germany. German Eastern Africa, now called Tanganyika, a colony of Britain where they're having Mau Mau trouble, was stripped from Germany. The Marshalls, the Solomons, the Gilberts, Guam — in fact, nearly all of the South Pacific islands were taken away from Germany. They all belonged to her, you know, at that time, every one of them. They were taken away from Germany and they were made Japanese mandates, some of them American, some of them British, distributed among their conquerors.

   Germany was carved into pieces nationally. And they left the Danzig Corridor so that the warm Baltic seaport of Danzig that formerly belonged to the Kaiser was now only accessible by a narrow railway spur through which Hitler was allowed access later on. And Poland got quite a section of what used to be Germany, and Poland was established as a nation. The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed. And so new nations and new political borders were formed, and we decided Germany was never to rise again.

   Vast reparations were demanded, up into the millions and hundreds of millions of dollars on Germany for what had happened. Someone got married, sounds like. Those reparations were finally lowered, finally lowered some more, and then finally totally forgotten. And no one got suspicious along about 1937 when they saw German buses and trucks rumbling down the streets in Munich and Kaiserslautern and over in Bamberg, Berlin, Wuppertal, and all the other cities that had high chassis on them, four-wheel drive, sturdy bodies with high fenders and wheels. No one got suspicious.

   The IG Farben cartel managed to get hold of the steel, the coal, the chemical industries, and it was all under one supreme head. No one was suspicious of Alfred Krupp and his dynasty, of the billions of dollars' worth of steel that was now coming out of Argentina, of the millions of dollars' worth of German capital that was stashed away in Swiss banks, in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, of all the millions of dollars that was stashed away over in Spain. No one got too suspicious when Hitler decided to try out the Stuka, his new dive bomber, and all of the new German machine guns and their tanks during the Spanish Revolution of the Civil War when Alfonso was deposed in Spain.

   So the world went on complacent. As Mr. Apartian will tell you, our French teacher at Ambassador College: "We French people heard the Germans were coming. We had our Maginot Line. We didn't believe it. We played," he said. "We sang, we danced, we drank our wine, we had a good time. We had our Maginot Line, didn't we?" He has told me of how the soldiers in the Maginot Line, which I saw last summer in the pillboxes, had their women out there, and they would dance among the pillboxes and take the harlots to bed with them, and they would drink their wine and get drunk and have riotous living. But you know, Hitler didn't go through the Maginot Line, did he? I mean, he came around to the north of it through Belgium. They never suspected that might be possible. And so Hitler didn't even bother with it. He just bypassed it, and France fell. And the butchery began.

   And so Germany was soaked in blood because we had decided that world government was the only answer to our problem. We were going to gather together in a League of Nations. We were going to ensure that Germany would never again rise like she did under the Kaiser. But here all of a sudden it had happened.

   President Roosevelt tumbled out of bed one night in 1939, all about October. Got a long-distance overseas telephone call from the Ambassador over in Berlin that says the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty has been signed. And his heart went up in his throat and his words were, "God help us." Those were his words: "God help us," when he received the news. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty was a non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany which said, "We have an agreement with you Russians. We won't fire on you. You don't fire on us. We're going to turn our attention to the West." Twelve days later, bombs fell on Warsaw, and Poland fell. Czechoslovakia was occupied. And Germany began to soak Europe in blood. World War II had begun.

   Finally, the United States was inducted in World War II when Pearl Harbor occurred in 1941. We fought through the entire war. Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost. Billions and billions of dollars were spent. And our men sat out and got the jungle rot at the Tenaru River and Guadalcanal and wondered what it was all about and finally decided they were fighting the war to end all wars, and we were real patriotic about it. We had bond drives, we wrote songs about how Uncle Sam was going to spank the Jap. Yes, we did. We fought a tremendous war, didn't we? This was the war to end all wars.

   I want you to realize we were never again going to have to compete with these people. The Japanese people were to be crushed totally. Germans were to be exterminated and brought to their knees so they would never again rise. Never. We demanded total unconditional surrender, and so we got it.

   A few years later, Germany began to rise. We decided we were going to denazify the Germans. We had them fill out some Fragebogen. A man later wrote a book about that — our questionnaires about the ex-Nazis. Before the end of World War II, billions of dollars were taken into Argentina. An article just recently came out in the Police Gazette about that. Millions of dollars began to filter once more into Swiss banks, IG Farben industries, Krupp industries in India, in Spain, down here in South America, all parts of South America for that matter, Mexico, and even over here in America. Many American industries which are directly owned by those German concerns were going full blast once more.

   All the high-powered Nazi men escaped. A few of them, of course, survived, but the ones for the rebuilding of the Nazi empire were taken safely out of the country, including Adolf Hitler, which is amply demonstrated, and the State Department has files to prove it, although the populace doesn't in general believe it.

   After World War I, a woman named Mildred Schütz wrote a book, and she called it "The Germans Will Try It Again." And she quoted every single thing that had happened, including personal interviews that she herself had had with Hitler, with Goebbels, with Göring, in which they said, "We are going to unite Europe."

   Now the German dream, beginning so back with the Kaiser when he was a boy and even before that time when the Iron Chancellor first united Germany from all of its disputing little countries into one whole and it became an empire under the Prussians, has been to unite Europe, has it not? That is what the Kaiser tried. That is what Hitler tried. And that's what we have paid for with our taxes. That's what we bought and gave to Germany when we set up the present German government, when we started pouring our billions into Germany, into France, into Belgium, into Luxembourg, into Yugoslavia, and into all those German countries.

   It is going to happen here. We say it can't happen here. People don't believe it. All right, God has set a watchman. God has his church, God has one voice. And now two, I'm just being used with my father in that regard, but I'm speaking now of the work, the voice of the watchman, to proclaim a message that this world does not believe. Germany is going to attack the United States. Germany is going to conquer the United States of America. We're going into a captivity such as no nation has ever suffered.

   Now, point number one in the scheme of things is this: Any commentator, any news analyst, anyone who knows the first thing about any world relations or geopolitics knows the United States is hated, despised, cursed in every single foreign country, including our most close friends, the British. Yes, the British have reason to curse us. Especially are we hated south of our own borders. Especially are we hated in the Orient. Especially are we hated in Europe. Where else is there? Well, the South Pacific islands. Oh, we're hated there too. Indonesia — we're hated there too. We are hated here and we're hated there. We have no friends, and yet we're hiring friends, aren't we? We're trying to buy them.

   Did you see the morning papers? As of yesterday, 500,000 barrels of oil are being shipped to Europe daily from the United States at the express command of President Eisenhower to help alleviate the oil shortage in Europe. But Europe is going to unite. And this very thing that is happening now is one of the major things that is going to bring the uniting about because they're going to have to get together to ensure that their oil supply, their lifeline, is never more endangered by the whims of one petty dictator in Egypt.

   They're going to unite, and the Arab League nations are finally going to go fascist with the rest of them. I think you may have heard some of the news broadcasts that some of the officers who were killed and captured had copies of Mein Kampf — Egyptians, I mean, now Egyptian officers — and Nazi literature on them. So we're Nazi sympathizers, and who were shot through with Nazism and fascism, fascist ideas in Italy, in Egypt.

   All right. In the near future we are going to suddenly see that this drought that came on us clear back beginning in 1951 — just the real big beginning, it began sooner than that — but the drought that is on us right now is going to get worse and worse and worse. We're going to see some scriptures right here where the other nations don't believe it either. Germany doesn't right now believe she's going to conquer us. Neither does Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, or any of the other countries — Spain, Italy — that might be united in with this when they come out from behind the Iron Curtain within a few more years. They don't believe it either, but when they see what is going to happen over here, they're going to be amazed, astounded. And they're going to seize on that opportunity.

   When these things happen, I want you to realize that because of the hatred that has been borne the United States citizens all over the face of this earth, there is going to be no pity. There is going to be no mercy. There is going to be no place to run, no place to hide. Sounds preposterous, doesn't it? To make broad sweeping statements like this, and yet I'm not saying maybe, am I? I don't have to say maybe because I know. And I think you know what is going to happen and going to come on this world, especially this country. First of all, then the other countries are going to be punished too.

   I want you to notice some things here. Let's drop down a little bit further to verse 11 (Lamentations 1:11): "All her people sigh, they seek bread, they have given their pleasant things for meat to relieve the soul. See, O Eternal, and consider, for I am become vile. Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by?" You people who see my plight, you people down in Central and South America, you people the world over — is it nothing to you that pass by? "Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the Eternal has afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger. From above has he sent fire into my bones, and it prevailed against me. He has spread a net for my feet and has turned me back."

   "He has made my strength to fall." We've got to be weakened first before they can conquer us. That's true. If normal situations went on, if the United States continued to have good weather, if we continue to have national prosperity and abundance, if we weren't the sickest nation on the face of the earth, living through disease so that more than 50,000 men dropped dead in the United States in 1953 from heart disease alone — not to mention cancer, multiple sclerosis, and muscular dystrophy, all of the other diseases — that was heart disease alone. If those things didn't happen and didn't continue to go on, Germany couldn't conquer us in centuries. In thousands of years they couldn't do it. They don't have the land to do it. They don't have the natural resources to do it. But Europe combined means over 300 and possibly up to 350 million population of a country that is far richer than we are when you take it all put together, the whole thing. And that's a different matter again, especially when you consider what is happening here.

   "He has made my strength to fall. The Eternal has delivered me into their hands." Oh, then it's God who is going to do it. God has delivered us into their hands, "from whom I am not able to rise up. The Lord has trodden underfoot all my mighty men in the midst of me. He has called an assembly against me to crush my young men. The Lord has trodden the virgin, the daughter of Judah, as in a winepress. For these things I weep, mine eye, mine eye runs down with water because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me. My children are desolate because the enemy prevailed."

   "Zion spreads forth her hands, and there is none to comfort her." She just says, "Help me, oh God." "The Eternal has commanded concerning Jacob" — this is Israel, of course — "that his adversaries should be round about him. Jerusalem is as a menstruous woman among them" — the pride of the empire.

   "The Eternal is righteous, for I have rebelled against his commandment. Hear, I pray you, all people." Let all of the nations of the world take this for an example and a witness. "Hear, I pray you, all people, and behold my sorrow. My virgins and my young men are gone into captivity. I called for my lovers, but they deceived me." Who are our lovers today? The Arab League, the Baghdad Pact, NATO, SEATO — all of our lovers, our allies that we have hired with our billions and our millions, our rubber and our tin, our tanks and our trucks, and all of our Marshall Plan and our foreign aid policy.

   "My priests and my elders gave up the ghost in the city." They died. My priests, my religious leaders died in the city "while they sought their meat to relieve their souls." And so the priests and the rabbis are going to have to go scrounging through the alleys and the streets themselves, looking in garbage pans with the rest of the people to try to find something to eat and will be shot down for doing so.

   "Behold, O Eternal, for I am in distress. My bowels are troubled. My heart is turned within me, for I have grievously rebelled. Abroad, the sword bereaves" — so it shows it beginning to approach on the country now. "Abroad, the sword bereaves." The colonies begin to be stripped away from the British Empire. Wars begin to flare up. People are rioting, United States consulates being burned to the ground. Our Ambassadors, their families, and all of our service men and all Americans being slaughtered overseas. "At home there is death" — yes, disease epidemics, famine, drought, sickness and death at home.

   "They have heard" — these foreign nations have heard — "that I sigh." They have heard of my national weakness. "There is none to comfort me. All mine enemies have heard of my trouble. They're glad that you have done it." Yes, they're glad. "You will bring the day that you have called, and they shall be like unto me." Yes, they'll be punished too, finally, but notice that they are glad that you have done this.

   There is going to be singing and rejoicing and dancing in the streets of Berlin. They're going to have parades. They're going to shout to each other in the streets down here in Buenos Aires. They're going to rejoice and cry for joy and shout and clap their hands and dance in all the Central and South American capitals and in all Europe and all the world over. They're not going to say, "Oh, those poor Americans." They're going to say, "Those dirty, stinking, filthy capitalists. I hope they kill every one of them." Yes, that's what they're going to say. "Those stinking filthy rich Americans. Gringos ricos." I think Mr. Yáñez knows the meaning of that word. It's a disrespectful term for the rich in America, which all of the South American people feel toward us, because they feel that every man, woman and child up here is rich, you know, and wealthy. They're going to sing and dance in the streets when it happens.

   Now we weren't so much in the same plight as some of these other nations who didn't believe it, but Israel was there. Some of the Israelite people were there, among them Norway, Denmark, the lowlands, the Netherlands, the British. They had to suffer in the last World War.

   I want to read you just a few excerpts as we go along through this from this book. This is a book that was written by Sayers and Kahn back in 1945. It was published right at the close of the II World War. It says "The Plot Against the Peace" is the name of it. "The Plot Against the Peace" by Sayers, S-A-Y-E-R-S, and Kahn, K-A-H-N, published by Dial Press, D-I-A-L, in New York. I suppose it is not extant now on the bookshelves, the bookstands, but I suppose by writing to the Dial Press, you might be able to get a copy. This is a warning to the nation. It says "The Plot Against the Peace, a Warning to the Nation." It's a simple introduction.

   Just a few excerpts from the very first page: "The German General Staff has always regarded military defeat as merely a temporary phase of war." Is that a truism? Yes, it is. Every German document, every German soldier, every German army officer admits that that is true. They put that in their own writings. "The war goes on." To the German people, brethren, I want you to realize they never have stopped fighting. They didn't stop fighting when they signed a surrender paper over at Nuremberg in 1945. The Germans just began then. The Germans are fighting today. They've been fighting all these years. They are still warring against the United States. But right now it is war underground. Right now it's not shooting yet. It's a financial war.

   Western Germany, just to give you a few facts to throw it in to illustrate the point, outproduces the United States by nine nations in between in shipping at this moment. Western Germany is far richer than the entire Sterling area. That includes Great Britain, all of its dominions, all of its crown colonies, and all members of the Commonwealth. That includes every red-colored and pink-colored area on your entire map that belongs to the British Commonwealth of Nations. The little nation of Western Germany has more gold reserves, more cash, funds, and assets than all of that vast area put together. That's a fact.

   The Germans are physically stronger, tougher, healthier than any other nation on the face of the earth. They're better fed. They're harder working. They're more determined than any other nation in Europe. Western Germany at this moment is the strongest nation, taking into consideration its size, on the face of this earth. On the face of this earth, including the United States of America, and I'm saying taking into consideration its size on the average.

   "The war goes on. Battle strategy becomes underground conspiracy. Artillery is replaced by propaganda." Everything made in Germany is better. If it's stamped "Made in Germany," buy it, it's good. Is that what you've heard? Propaganda. "Wartime espionage becomes post-war political intrigue, terror, assassination, and secret preparation for new military attack." Isn't this what they have done twice before? Isn't it what we know they are doing now, what the State Department knows they're doing, but we call it a calculated risk?

   If you only knew, there are drawers after drawers and files after files in the Pentagon and in Washington DC that are jammed full of captured Nazi documents, of geopolitical circular letters from Madrid, of all kinds of evidence from Spain, from Argentina, down here from Colombia, from Germany itself, from nations in Europe, from the world over, about Germany's intended try once more for world dominion when the time is right. Why are our people so stupidly unaware of it? Why are they so stupidly ignorant that they can't see that it might just be possible for a country like the United States to have more than one enemy at a time?

   Back in 1940 and 1941 — and I read the article just the other day — my father, Mr. Armstrong, wrote some articles about Russia. And so we were preparing to give Russia Lend-Lease and send all fleets of ships breaking the ice up to Murmansk around the northern part of Norway, Sweden, and to give tanks, ships, planes, and guns to the Russians. He said communism is the enemy of democracy, the sworn enemy of democracy and of fascism too for that matter, and communism is also going to try to conquer the world. But the only difference is that at the present time, the communists who are the enemy of the United States are fighting against another enemy of the United States. It would be to the United States' advantage to let one or the other kill the one off. It would have been to the United States' advantage actually as a physical correlation to let the Germans kill the Russians. Or in the light of today's world news, do you disagree?

   Now we're tremulous in fear for Russia. We're building frantically a bulwark against Russia over in Germany, aren't we? Old Kaiserslautern, for instance, there are pictures, and I think Mr. Manteufel showed me this morning. We were looking at it. Thousands upon thousands of General Sherman tanks and trucks. Those trucks cost a lot of money, you know. You couldn't buy a truck like that very cheaply — $15,000 I suppose for a good stake truck. The tanks cost a lot of money. One B-50 aircraft costs $7 million. We have them over there by the hundreds. They're just sitting there encased in cocoons wrapped in canvas and plastic, waiting. For what? The possibility of a Russian attack? No, that's what we think they're waiting for. But they're waiting for the Germans to take them and use them against us.

   Doesn't remind you, does it, of the trucks that went rumbling past your front door in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, and 1941 until suddenly it stopped — the flow of scrap iron to Japan. I used to see them go by up in Eugene, Oregon, going to Portland to load on the ships to take it to Japan. We didn't have any use for the rusting metal. The Japs did. Stupid, aren't we? Oh, we're stupid today too.

   Now I want you to listen to something if it doesn't shock you too much. These things are going to happen in the streets of Los Angeles, if Los Angeles is not obliterated. In the smaller cities and towns, when Nazi paratroopers and when South Americans and Mexicans invade the border. Because you know, when this country goes down, it's going to be pillaged. It's going to be looted, it's going to be robbed, it's going to be raped. It won't be an orderly occupation by foreign soldiers from Europe alone. It will be ravaged by a shrieking mob of millions of Central and South Americans who are going to come over into this country with the most fiendish hatred that you have ever imagined. And the sight is going to be pitiful. God says that the blood is going to run so deep in the streets that it will be deep enough in some cases to swim in, especially in Jerusalem later on. It did once before in 70 A.D. It came up to the horses' bridles. It's going to again.

   "Robbery and massacre of defenseless prisoners was systematically encouraged." This is a documented book full of letters, memoranda, diaries from German officers and troops who were in Poland, Czechoslovakia, who were over in Romania, and who were in the western sector of Russia. They were encouraged, systematically encouraged in the Nazi Wehrmacht, or the army — war machine is what it means.

   On December 31, 1944 — it wasn't too long ago. This is only 12, 13, so forth years ago now. In the lifetime of all of us while we were living, cooking our daily meals and having a good time over here, people were dying in Europe. On December 30, 1944, Allied Supreme Headquarters confirming front reports of a mass German slaughter of American prisoners issued an official statement declaring that 115 helpless captured American soldiers had been murdered in cold blood near Malmedy on December 17th, shortly after the opening of the German counter-offensive that was called the Battle of the Bulge. You may remember that in 1944.

   The statement from Allied headquarters said that the captured Americans were lined up in ranks six deep in a field and after being looted of all possessions by German soldiers were mowed down by machine gun fire from German tanks. As the Americans fell dead or wounded, German infantrymen on top of the tanks fired their small arms into the helpless mass. American correspondents traveling with the Allied armies in France and Belgium discovered more and more proof of Nazi atrocities. They found whole villages gutted by the retreating German armies and heard one story after another from the local inhabitants of German pillage and slaughter.

   Let's get down to particular details. From a Nazi soldier who was educated in the Hitler Jugend school in Germany and then sent to the Eastern Front, from a diary entitled "My Experiences in Russia." Here are some excerpts from him, a top corporal in the German army:

   "Arrived in Minsk" — and I'm quoting — "The mission of our battalion is to guard prisoners of war and shoot all Jews in the city. During the night we dispatched 500 Jews alone. July 7th: We marched on. Our objective was Krupki. With that as our base, our mission was to clear Korolenshchina, Glubokoye, Verkhi, Kurenets, and the adjoining villages. We divided into companies, surrounded the villages, and set them on fire. October 5th: In the evening, the lieutenant called for 15 men with strong nerves. I volunteered." These are Germans, you know. "Each one of us was asked whether he could stand the sight of blood. We all laughed. We were ordered to take along 300 rounds of ammunition each and line up in front of company headquarters in our helmets the next morning at 5 o'clock. We waited for the morning with impatience. The lieutenant explained our mission. There were about 1,000 Jews in Krupki, and we were to shoot them that day. All the Jews, men, women, and children reported at an assembly spot. Lists were read and the whole column set out for a nearby marsh. The firing squad, of which I was a member, marched in front. An escorting squad marched on both sides, keeping watch. It was raining. The Jews had been told they were going to be sent to work in Germany, but many guessed what their fate was going to be, particularly when we crossed the railway embankment and entered the marsh. Panic ensued and the guards had their hands full, keeping the Jews herded. When we got to the marsh, all the Jews were ordered to sit down facing the side from which they had just come. About 50 meters away was a deep ditch filled with water. The first 10 Jews were stood up at the ditch and ordered to take off their clothes, the men remained in their trousers only and the women and children in their skirts. Then they were ordered to step into the ditch. We stood above on the ledge. The lieutenant and one sergeant were with us. A volley was fired and 10 Jews gave up their ghosts. This went on until all were done for. The children clung to their mothers, the girls to their sweethearts. It was a sight!" — exclamation point. "A few days later, about the same number of Jews were shot at Kopylovichi. I was in it too. There was no marsh there, only a sand pit into which we piled the Jews."

   Another quote: "Children were used by Nazis as living targets. A. de Bassi, an elderly French woman who witnessed instances of this unspeakable barbarism in Lvov, told Soviet authorities, the Soviet-Polish Atrocities Commission: 'The little children were martyrs. They were given away to the Hitler Jugend which used them as live targets for shooting practice. Let them run about while they shot at them.' Describing conditions at the Nazi camp in Klooga, Estonia, the escaped prisoner Jeremiah Ratner told Soviet Extraordinary State Committee in February 1944, quote, 'Two babies were born in the Klooga camp. Both were thrown into the boiler room furnace and burned alive. I personally saw how they burned children. In May 1944, a third baby was born in the camp from the cohabitation of these women with German officers and troops, and Unterscharführer Bahr strangled it at once.'"

   No one can tell where the individual atrocities ended and the organized mass atrocities of the German army began. Here are excerpts from the diary of Otto Berger, a staff lance corporal of the 2nd Security Battalion in Soviet Russia:

   "Serebryanka has completely demolished a small village. 250 Jews were shot. We have eaten well. The prisoners of war dug their own graves. We lined them up and shot them down row after row. Shot a Communist today. We drove him to the forest with a whip and made him dig his own grave. In the evening, we shot two men. They dug their grave, kissed each other, and lay down. They were father and son. Our field police shot 50 Ukrainians. Sharkovshchina is a pretty little town. 50 prisoners were brought here and given to us for use for target practice. The prisoners of war eat rotten potatoes. They have no strength at all. Dead bodies lie in three or four layers. All the Jews were shot on New Year's Eve in Smolensk. We were at Vitebsk. There are two Russian girls here, 17 and 18, very pretty. We shall have to rape them. We were at Novorozov."

   Another excerpt: "Shot 156 guerrillas today. I wonder where the boundary of power of the German state will be. The new order, where will be the new political border?" he wonders.

   All right, I want to turn over to another section. The secret history of Nazism and so on, and it mentions a diary from a German officer. I won't bother to read that part. Here's a section from the policy of genocide and how they were going to exterminate the entire Jewish race if they possibly could.

   Let's see, it began here: "About 80,000 German or Russian war prisoners were executed and buried near the village of Glinki in 34 grave pits. In the Blagovshchina Forest near Minsk, the Nazis buried 150,000 people, enough to populate a good-sized city. 10,000 in a ditch near Drozdy, 254 children in a ditch near Kirovograd. When the bodies were exhumed from these mass graves, Soviet medical experts established that many of the victims had been buried alive. Large numbers of the bodies were dreadfully mutilated and bore evidence of fearful tortures inflicted by the Nazis. Frequently, the bodies of fathers and mothers were found with their dead children and infants still clutched in their arms."

   Here's a footnote: "The famous Soviet novelist and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg wrote: 'The word ravine used to be a good word. It spoke of grass, rivulets, sand, and the big-eyed daisies where children used to pull apart murmuring, "He loves me, he loves me not." But the word ravine has become a terrible word. One feels that in any moment the dead will come stalking out of a ravine, and not only out of the ravine in Tripoli, for there is a ravine in Kiev too. Every Ukrainian town has its ravine, and everywhere it's the same story: patches of underlinen, rigid corpses, children's toys sprinkled with blood.'"

   Scenes of unspeakable horror took place during the mass executions of Soviet men, women, and children. Here's one of them described by Alexander Baryshnikov to the Soviet authorities. He saw the following in June 1943:

   "At the end of June last year, I myself saw as many as 300 girls and women brought to the woods in 10 or 12 motor trucks. These poor people ran hither and thither weeping, tearing their hair and clothes, many of them dropping in a swoon. But the German fascists paid no attention to this. They punched them and beat them with their rifle butts and clubs to make them get up. If they did not get up, the butchers tore their clothes off and threw them into the pit. Several girls and children tried to run away but were killed. After a round was fired from automatic rifles, I saw several women stagger and throw their arms helplessly and uttering heartrending shrieks, run toward the Germans standing about begging them, 'Don't kill me.' The Germans shot them down with pistols. Mothers, driven out of their minds by fear and grief, ran shrieking about the glade, pressing their babies to their breasts, seeking safety. The Gestapo men tore the children out of their mothers' arms and swinging them by their arms or legs, threw them alive into the pit. As the mothers ran after them, they were shot down."

   "Wholesale execution," said Corporal Reinhard Retzlaff of the German secret field police, "by hanging and shooting appeared to the German command to be too bothersome and slow a means of fulfilling the task set by the punitive organizations, and it was therefore deemed necessary to devise simpler means of exterminating the population, and it must be said that these means were found." Which was by gas and mass live burials.

   Retzlaff went on to relate how in '42 he had seen a large gray strange-looking automobile standing near the entrance of one of the Gestapo prisons in Kharkov and surrounded by a group of German policemen. His curiosity aroused, he asked a police official he knew named Kaminsky what sort of an automobile it was. He told him that it was a gas van, that it was used for putting people to death. Later, he said, "I had numerous opportunities of seeing this automobile at work, and on several occasions I took a direct part in loading it with prisoners confined in the Kharkov prison. On these occasions, I was able to convince myself that the gas van fully answered its purpose. This was to speed up the process of exterminating the Soviet citizens."

   Large covered automobiles, the interior lined with zinc-plated sheet iron. In the rear they had double doors that could be sealed. The floor had a grating beneath which there was a pipe connecting it with the exhaust pipe of the engine. When the motors were running, the waste gas from the diesel engine poured through a grating on the floor, and they were asphyxiated from carbon monoxide fumes. Thousands of them died in these Nazi death vans.

   The factories of death, the German prison camps where United States citizens are going to be confined. Mass executions at Majdanek began in the winter of 1941 and lasted all through the war until 1945. At first shooting was the usual method of execution. Out of a party of 2,000 Soviet war prisoners brought to the camp, only 80 remained alive after a few days. The remainder had been shot. Early in 1942, 6,000 men, women and children were shot within the course of two days. On another occasion in a single day, 88 truckloads of civilian prisoners were driven to the Krepiec Forest, which stood near the camp. They were shot and their bodies thrown into huge pits.

   The greatest of the mass executions occurred on November 3, 1943. On that single day, 18,400 prisoners from all over Europe were shot on the prison grounds and their bodies buried in tremendous ditches. You mentioned how they had to install loudspeakers and played music to drown out the shrieks of the people. All during the day, SS troopers from what a German said to them, brought out the people stripped naked in groups of 50 to 100 to the pits, laid them on the bottom of the pits face downwards, and shot them from Tommy guns. Another group of live people was then laid upon their dead bodies and shot in the same manner, and so on until the pits were filled. Then the bodies were covered with a thin layer of earth and two or three days later removed and buried in the crematorium or on the bonfires. Then a poison cell, gas cells, annihilation of 18,000 here, 20,000 there, 30,000 here. I won't read any more of that section. There's an entire chapter on it.

   One or two more excerpts. Here's one. God prophesied, brethren, that this is going to happen to the United States. It has happened in the past. He prophesied that this is the exact manner in which babies are to be killed in this country.

   A former prisoner named Aronov told the Polish-Soviet Atrocities Commission: "They took a baby from its mother's breast and killed it before her eyes by smashing it against the barracks wall."

   "I myself," said Edward Baron, another witness, "saw how babies were taken from their mothers and killed before their eyes. They would take a baby by one foot and step on the other and so tear the baby apart."

   Brutality? Yes, it's terrible. If you have children, you know how you feel when you hear of things like this. I have three, and I know how it makes me feel. But it is going to happen here. It is going to happen here. That is as sure a fact as the fact that you're sitting here. Anyone who doesn't believe it, all I have to say is wait and see. And God grant that when it does happen, if any of you are there, you'll remember the things you heard and remain steadfast even through torture if you have to, knowing that there's only one possible way you can be saved and get protection finally.

   All right. Let's go now to Chapter 2:

   "How has the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel and remembered not his footstool in the day of his anger? The Lord has swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob and has not pitied."

   Can you imagine what it is going to be like for people who are so concerned with little physical, unimportant, unnecessary, minute points today and who are not concerned about getting close to God and obeying God? Can you imagine the thought in their mind as they stand in the forest glade with Nazi machine gunners facing them and what they would give if just one soldier would smile at them and say, "Not you, we'll spare you. We won't shoot you today. We'll let you go free." How much wealth would they fork over? How many Cadillacs would they give? Do you think they would give something more dear? Yes, I dare say they would say, "Please amputate both my legs, but don't kill me. Take my arm if you will, but don't kill me." But they won't be given the chance because there will be no mercy.

   God is going to forsake this nation totally. They'll cry out to God. They'll say, "God save us." And God will not hear. He will close his ears to it. That's what he says. Yes, they'll scream and beg for mercy, but there will be none. No mercy shown.

   "He has brought them down to the ground and has polluted the kingdom and the princes thereof. He has cut off in his fierce anger all the horn of Israel. He has drawn back his right hand from before the enemy." Only God has withheld them, "and he burned against Jacob like a flaming fire which devours round about."

   Notice verse 5: "The Lord was as an enemy. He has swallowed up Israel. He has swallowed up all her palaces. He has destroyed his strongholds" — San Diego was one of his strongholds. We have a lot of navy and military bases around here — "and has increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation."

   Notice verse 9: "Her gates are sunk into the ground. He has destroyed and broken her bars. Her king and her princes are among the Gentiles" — scattered among the nations — "where the law is not. Her prophets also find no vision from the Eternal. The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground and keep silence."

   The elderly people who feel they should be given deference will be shown no mercy. They're not physically strong enough to work, so you know what the Nazis did? They killed them first. The young women were fit for the labor camps and the German soldiers, so they would preserve them alive if they felt it was necessary, only for a period of time. The young men could work in slave and prison camps, the ones they needed; the others they shot. The elderly people were a burden on the new state, the new order, and so they were shot. The little children, they were a nuisance. They always cried and got in the way. They were frightened when they saw their parents being beaten. The German officers didn't like to hear them cry, so they were shot.

   "The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground and keep silence. They have cast up dust upon their heads. They have girded themselves with sackcloth. The virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground. Mine eyes do fail with tears. My bowels are troubled. My liver is poured upon the earth for the destruction of the daughter of my people, because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city." Little babies sitting out in the midst of the devastation, fainting from hunger and thirst and dying.

   "They say to their mothers, 'Where is corn and wine?'" — where's food? — "when they swooned as the wounded in the streets of the city, when their soul was poured out into their mother's bosom." Bleeding to death right in their mother's arms.

   "What thing shall I take to witness for thee? What thing shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? What shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? For thy breach is great like the sea." You've broken away from me so far. It's as wide as the ocean, he says. "Who can heal thee? Your prophets" — not mine, but yours, yours of this nation, your ministers, your preachers, your churches — "have seen vain and foolish things for you. And they have not discovered thine iniquity."

   What did Allen Manteufel just tell you? Isaiah 58:1, God says, "Cry aloud and spare not and show my people their sins," but they have heaped to themselves teachers having itching ears. They say, "Don't prophesy the truth. Speak smooth things and deceits. Tell us there is going to be no war with Germany. Tell us we're going to have utopia in 1976. Tell us we're just now entering the jet and the atomic age when we're going to have push-button living. Tell us everything is going to be all right. Don't tell us the truth."

   "They have not discovered your iniquity to turn away thy captivity, but have seen for you false burdens" — the burden of the prophet, the message that he has given, in other words, they have seen false messages — "and causes of banishment."

   "All that pass by" — notice this, all the foreign nations who see this occur to us before 1980. And I say not maybe but positively, definitely, as God lives, before 1980. And the Bible says the same thing. "All that pass by clap their hands at you. They rejoice. They hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem saying, 'Is this the city that men call the perfection of beauty? Is this that great land, the United States of America? Is this that great country that we feared all these years? Is this the way their citizens look, being dragged by the heels, head down, a beaten mass through our capital cities?'"

   We're a healthy nation, aren't we? You want a cross-section? Go to the Greyhound bus depot and look at 50 people who walk by. That's a cross-section of the entire nation. Are we deceiving ourselves? Do we think we're healthy? Do we think we're a nation of 6-foot-6 men with brawny arms and strong backs, armed to the teeth and ready to go out and conquer, to carry the white man's burden, stomping through any country on the face of the earth? Is our Marines, our gallant Marine Corps, are they going to save us? Take a look at them. A bunch of shaved-head juvenile delinquents, to put it plainly, on the majority, on the whole.

   We don't know which end is up. We know less about geography, world conditions, politics and world relations and the Bible and anything in general for that matter than an nincompoop. I was in the Navy for four years. Mr. Hill has been in the Navy most of his life. He can tell you the same thing. I wouldn't have given you that for the entire might of the 7th Fleet out there in Korea during the Korean War. If the Russians had chosen to blast those two carriers to the bottom of the sea, they could have done it with one plane. One aircraft. We floated out there like a bunch of fools while a Russian submarine surfaced in the middle of the convoy and sat there for an entire night, and we didn't do a thing.

   The equipment was shabby, outdated. It didn't work. The repair men were constantly working on the 40-millimeter guns. They never worked and functioned. The gunners rarely could hit the broadside of a barn. The only way they could hit a thing was when the plane that was towing the sleeve happened to be going at an extreme slow rate of speed. But you know we're not shooting at old outdated Grumman Avengers anymore, but at MiG jets. They go a little faster nowadays, in fact, up to 1,000 miles an hour. Not down at 98 miles an hour with flaps down and going slow enough so our gunners can shoot.

   Who are we trusting in anyhow? I was on that ship. I know that that is the most stupidly run organization of non-militaristic policies, of disobedience to superior officers, of neglect and goldbricking and getting off of the duty any possible time they can, going on sick call at the slightest excuse, of getting out of every duty they possibly can, of any army on the face of this earth. The Egyptians could whip them, matched man for man. But our resources and our ingenuity and God's miracles have stood us in good stead up until 1951. And that's when, as Mr. Hoeh explained in his article about Leviticus 26, that things began to turn. That was the turning point.

   Look at Korea. What happened there? Just look, this great tremendous country with all of its strength. Look how big we are on the map and then look at how small Korea is. We evacuated the Chosin Reservoir. We were pushed clear back down. All we had was Pusan, clear down on the end of the tip of Korea, just a little foothold. That's all. Until finally we mustered enough strength to start pushing them back, and we had to pour thousands upon thousands of men and supplies in there and trucks and tanks. So we finally managed to push them back toward the 38th degree parallel. And that's where it remains today.

   We demanded that they do thus and such. They have broken every single provision of that armistice or treaty. There remains not one single minute point that has not been totally broken. We have not so much as passed them a stinging note on the subject. Oh, we're a great nation. We're really a great strong, fearful nation. But we're hated, we're despised, we're spit at.

   A greasy little corporal, when you land at an airport over in the Middle East, as Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong did last summer, you go through the borders in Europe or down in Central or South America? We'll take your passport and say, "Americans. You wait here." And then the Germans go through. And next, the Italians, and next the Middle Eastern people, finally the British, and last of all after the British come the Americans. In the order of preference, you see. That's the way it always works. Mr. Hoeh and I repeatedly were the last. We would be the first out of the plane, the first into the office, the first to sit down, and the last to go through customs. All through Central America, every single city we went into and in Colombia, in South America. If you don't believe it, go there. People who have been there believe it and they know.

   These things are not many years hence. That's what I want you to get today. Just as a matter of rehearsal and perhaps I could entitle it, quote, "Lest We Forget," unquote. Lest we forget. You know, maybe you could say this: lest we forget that it hurts to die. It doesn't feel good to get chopped into pieces. It's unpleasant to have your children bashed against the curbing in front of your own eyes. And God says these things are going to happen to this country, and he has given God's church, his people, a way to escape, and there is only one way to escape.

   The Canadian Rockies are not far enough away. You can't run far enough. Punta Arenas, the southernmost city on the face of the earth, down at the utmost tip of Chile on Tierra del Fuego, is not far enough to run. Because they would get you there too. And if the army doesn't get you, God says the plague will get you, and if the plague doesn't, the drought will. And if the drought doesn't, the famine will. And there is going to be no escape. Every last man, woman, and child is going to have to suffer unless they're under God's protection.

   "All your enemies have opened their mouth against you. They hiss and gnash the teeth." Notice that. All these foreign nations hiss at our state when we're going to be brought totally to our knees, and they gnash their teeth and they say, "We have swallowed her up. Look how great we are. Certainly this is the day that we looked for. This is the day we have been living for. This is what we have yearned for all of our lives. We wouldn't have believed it was possible. Look at what a tremendous thing has happened. The United States lies a smoking heap of ruin. New York vaporized, Chicago gone. Los Angeles is not. San Diego, a pit of smoking ruin. Nothing left of the major cities. The Eastern cities and the industry smashed. The citizens in total are out."

   Unprepared, totally unprepared, unhealthy, frightened nearly to death, out of their wits to where they will be trampling each other in the streets. We have a civil defense measure up in Los Angeles, a wonderful plan made by our learned city officials who have a mass exodus plan. So that everyone, the minute we get the warning of an A-bomb on its way — we're given approximately 45 minutes from the time the bomber reaches the tip of Alaska. Between the time it reaches Alaska and the time the bomb falls on Los Angeles is 35 minutes. We're all going to jump in our cars in orderly fashion, go out from the city. That's what they said in the Los Angeles Times and gave you diagrams where to enter the freeway.

   Stupid people, stupid ignorant people. Try to drive through Los Angeles at a speed more than 10 miles an hour at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and you'll kill yourself. You can't do it. That's just normal work traffic going home after a day's labor. Stupid people. It is, it makes my blood boil. It really does. Now maybe that's fanatic religious doctrine. And maybe it's common sense. And maybe it's God's truth.

   All right, let's go on. "We have found, this is the day we looked for. We have found, we have seen it." Oh how happy they're going to be. They will actually see us go down, how they're going to dance and sing and rejoice. "The Eternal has done that which he had devised. He hath fulfilled his word that he had commanded in the days of old." Yes, from way back during the time of King Hezekiah, God proposed this. Jeremiah's prophecy about Israel's captivity was written before — or I should say after — 120-some years after Israel even went into captivity. And yet he's prophesying about a captivity for Israel, a captivity that has not occurred as yet.

   "He hath thrown down and hath not pitied." You ask why would God allow a foreign nation to come in and actually rip up the bellies of pregnant women and saw their babies in half that are yet unborn, which also has been done and eyewitness accounts which tell of it. You ask why would God permit that? Remember the second commandment: "For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments."

   But we don't hate God, they say. All we do is say we repudiate his law. We will not keep his Sabbath. We don't believe his ministers. We say the sword will not come nigh our dwellings. This country will never fall. The United States will go on to be the greatest nation on the face of the earth in every way — technologically, financially, economically, physically. By 1975 we're all going to be physically much more healthy. We won't even have to heat our food. It will come in preheated little cans or pills or bottles. It's what they say, by 1975. By 1975, American people will be blessed. They will feel blessed if they can scrape the smallest bit of a rotten potato peel out of the bottom of a filthy garbage can. Believe it or not.

   Now notice this. "He has caused your enemy to rejoice over you. He has set up the horn of your adversaries. Their heart cried unto the Lord, O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night. Give yourself no rest. Let not the apple of your eye cease. Arise, cry out in the night. In the beginning of the watches, pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children that faint for hunger in the top of every street."

   "Behold, O Eternal, and consider to whom you have done this. Shall the women eat their fruit and children of a span long? Shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord? The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets. My virgins and my young men are fallen by the sword. And you have slain them in the day of your anger. You have killed and not pitied. You have called as in a solemn day my terrors round about, so that in the day of the Lord's anger none escaped nor remained. Those that I have swaddled and brought up has mine enemy consumed."

   Now notice this. Page 136 of this book. The Germans systematically accumulated the clothing and possessions of the men, women and children who had been killed and stored the articles in enormous warehouses in dozens of various size rooms. They were all tagged and shipped in trucks and cars and railroad cars off to Germany to be sold.

   All right, now let me see. I don't want to read all of this, but just some excerpts to get this point across. When Red Army troops entered the Majdanek camp in 1944, they found 820,000 pairs of different kinds of shoes and footwear in one of the camp's warehouses. The shoes and boots had trademarks of firms from Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Warsaw, Trieste, Prague, Riga, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Kiev, Krakow, Lublin, Lvov, and other cities in Russia and Western Europe.

   Quote: "I have been in a wooden warehouse at the camp," wrote the American correspondent Mr. W.H. Lawrence, "in which I walked across literally tens of thousands of shoes spread across the floor like grain in a half-filled elevator."

   Here is how Simonov described the warehouse: "It is hard to say how many pairs of shoes there are here. There are so many that they overflow through the windows and the doors. In one place their weight has broken the wall and part of the wall is falling out together with a mountain of shoes. There's footwear of all shades and descriptions: torn Russian soldiers' boots, Polish army boots, men's shoes, women's slippers, rubber overshoes, and most terrible of all, tens of thousands of children's shoes, sandals, boots, and shoes worn by children of 10, 8, 6, and even the little booties of one-year-old infants. Tens of thousands. It is hard to imagine a more horrifying spectacle than this mute witness to the death of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children."

   A mother brings a baby into the earth in the pains of childbirth. She puts it to her breast, day after day and night after night. She gets up at 3 o'clock in the morning. She loves it, caresses it, bathes it, takes care of it, works over it, nourishes that child. For days, finally weeks and then months and finally years, she teaches it how to say "dada" and "mommy." She rears it up under the guidance of her hands and makes it a part of her for years until he was a young boy of 6 or 8. For what? To be chopped in two by a bayonet from a foreign soldier? To be slaughtered in some ignominious stinking swamp? Shot down brutally, mercilessly? To be dashed against the barracks wall by a brutal soldier laughing at the blood-curdling screams of the youngster? Why were you born? Were you born to face this kind of an end? Is that what human life is for? Or is there a purpose? And is there a reason why we draw breath?

   Now God has said there is a way to escape. I'm going to close now quickly by going over to Ezekiel and the 33rd chapter.

   Verse 1 (Ezekiel 33:1): "Again the word of the Eternal came unto me, saying, 'Son of man, speak to the children of your people, and say unto them, When I bring the sword upon a land, if the people of the land take a man of their coasts, and set him for their watchman: If when he sees the sword come upon the land, he blow the trumpet, and warn the people; Then whosoever hears the sound of the trumpet, and takes not warning; if the sword come and take him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet, and took not warning; his blood shall be upon him.'"

   Why is God going to allow these people to suffer merciless deaths? They will not listen. They have heard God's prophet. They have heard the message going on now 23 or 4 years. They will not heed, but a little tiny pitiful handful. Does this sound not quite right when you think of the hundreds of thousands and you compare the size of God's church with them? But then when you look in the Bible and investigate how many God said there would be, it looks exactly right. That the many would be going the way of the easy way of the line of least resistance, the way of the world, the way of stupidity. But the few would be seeking the narrow and straight way. "Few there be that find it," Christ said.

   "If they take not warning, their blood will be on their own heads. But he that takes warning shall deliver his soul. But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand."

   You are also a part of the watchman. You are a part of the watchman as much as Mr. Armstrong. His is the voice that is being used. Your faith, your prayers, your life has an awful lot to do with it, a great deal.

   "So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore you shall hear the word at my mouth, and warn them from me. When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die; if you do not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require of your hand. Nevertheless, if you warn the wicked of his way to turn from it; if he do not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity" — nevertheless, you see — "but you have delivered your soul."

   "Therefore, O son of man, speak unto the house of Israel; Thus you speak, saying, If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live? Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord Eternal" — he can swear by nothing higher — "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked." He doesn't derive pleasure from babies having their brains dashed out against the curbstones, "but that the wicked turn from his way and live." That's what he wants these foolish people to do. He doesn't have pleasure in their deaths. He doesn't have pleasure in their sufferings. But he wants them to turn away. He says, "Turn you, turn you from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel? Why will you die?"

   And yet it seems that they want death, doesn't it? It seems that they will not listen. It seems that the louder you shout and the more plain you make it, the more they will rebel and say, "Well, now I heard another minister that said that we're not going to be taken into captivity."

   The test for a prophet is if these things come to pass. For the past 23 years, the prophecies that Mr. Armstrong has been preaching have been happening. I didn't believe it either as a little boy. I grew up fighting it out as hard as I could. And I went astray and rebelled and fought and didn't believe and smirked and sneered and spit like all the rest of the carnal-minded idiots who don't have a bit of sense in this world. But now I can see and I'm thankful I can. Very thankful.

   And now I can look back and I remember that while our bombers were busily pounding Germany to rubble, my father had the audacity to say that Germany was going to rise again. And I didn't believe it, and neither did the United States of America, but it has happened. It has happened. Those figures I gave you appeared in the United States News and World Report. Those figures that I gave you about Western Germany appear in your newspapers, not in the Bible. Not from something that I got out of my own mind. He said that in 1943. He said it in 1934 and again in 1945 and wrote articles to the subject. Amazing, isn't it? But you see it in the Bible. And that's why it is sure, and that's why it is going to happen, and that's why babies are going to die in the streets of the United States of America.

   Not because we want it to, because we want with all our hearts that it should not happen, just as God also wants it. And he said he is not willing that any should perish, but that all should repent. He takes no pleasure in their death. He wants them to turn from their ways, but they won't. And so he's going to have to punish them.

   All right, I'm going to leave off there. If any of you care to obtain this book, if you think you can stomach some of these things — and truly it is difficult to read through some of it — I think you could probably get it by writing to the Dial Press in New York and asking for it by name. It's called "The Plot Against the Peace." If you want to buy it for your own library or for your own use. There are other sections and it's not all just an account of German documents. There are other sections about the plans of the Germans, different Nazi front organizations, different organizations in Central and South America, and Spain and other parts of the world where IG Farben and Krupp industries and steel mills and so on are flourishing right now. And so it would be a valuable asset I think if you do care to look over it and if any of you care to buy it, well please do.

   All right, let's have a closing song now. All rise and let's sing the one at the top of page 36. "Blessed be the tie." We're going to have to get on our way in about 15 minutes now, so I want to go ahead and bring it to a close.