and beatings in 1972. 7,000 Mozambiquean members of the denomination were arrested in 1975 to be sent to communist re-education camps. During Knorr's presidency, membership of Jehovah's Witnesses grew from 108,000 to more than two million. Predictions for 1975 From 1966, Witness publications heightened anticipation of Christ's thousand-year millennial reign beginning in late 1975. Repeating the 1925 cycle of excitement, anticipation and then disappointment, Witness publications and convention talks intensified focus on 1975 as the "appropriate" time for God to act, with statements that "the immediate future is certain to be filled with climactic events ... within a few years at most the final parts of the Bible prophecy relative to these 'last days' will undergo fulfillment". The September 15, 1971 issue of The Watchtower warned that "all worldly careers are soon to come to an end", and advised youths that they should not "get interested in ‘higher education’ for a future that will never eventuate." A chart in a 1971 Awake! indicated the "thrilling hope" of a "grand Sabbath of rest and relief" in the mid-1970s at the close of 6000 years of human history. Some Witnesses sold businesses and homes, gave up jobs, deferred medical procedures and set aside plans to start a family in anticipation of Armageddon's arrival. The May 1974 issue of the Watch Tower Society's newsletter, Our Kingdom Ministry, commended Witnesses who had sold homes and property to devote themselves to preaching in the "short time" remaining. Watch Tower literature did not state dogmatically that 1975 would definitely mark the end, and the buildup was tempered with cautions that there was no certainty that Armageddon would arrive in 1975, but magazines warned that "time is running out rapidly" and that "only a few years, at most" remained before Armageddon. Circuit assemblies in 1970 held a public talk entitled "Who will conquer the world in the 1970s?". In a speech in Australia in 1975, the society's vice-president Frederick Franz went so far as to name a precise date—September 5, 1975—as the "end of the present wicked system". Witnesses were urged that they should not be "toying with the words of Jesus that 'concerning that day and hour nobody knows' ... to the contrary, one should be keenly aware that the end of this system of things is rapidly coming to its violent end." The number of baptisms soared from about 59,000 in 1966, to more than