GESTAPO CRIMES IN BELGIUM

Press, Volume LXXX, Issue 24389, 16 October 1944, Page 3

GESTAPO CRIMES IN BELGIUM

■ 4> ■ TORTURE CHAMBER IN OLD FORT (8.0. W.) RUGBY. Oct it. No grimmer stories of Gestapo methods have come to light than those told by men of the 15th Scottish Infantry Division who are engaged in the assault on Germany from the northwest. During their rapid advance across Belgium, these troops spent a couple of days and nights in the neighbourhood of Breendonck, between Brussels and Antwerp, where the Germans had turned, an old fort into a torture Chamber. From the outside it looked like a conventional prison camp, but inside the ' resemblance ceased The punishment cells had stone floors and measured barely six feet by four. Prisoners here had their _ wrists shackled to the wall by a chain only a foot long. Food was placed in a tin bowl on a low trap-door, and by straining forward to the fullest extent of their chains the prisoners were just able to reach the bowls and lap up the food like animals. The Scottish troops were shown rooms where the Gestapo had carried out its brutalities, among them a lethal chamber where the bodies of those who had been beaten, shot, and tortured were thrown naked cn the floor and gassed, whether a spark of life remained in them or not. The torture chamber now stands empty except for a wooden table and a small stove with a hooked branding iron beside it Through two hooks high in the ceiling the Gestapo hung a rope by which victims were .hoisted up and down. Across the floor was a tunnel leading to a drain, down which the blood oi tortured men flowed. Wall-plugs showed where electric light wires:had been extended to subject prisoners to shocks. - • .■ The execution ground was behind the port, and bullet-holes in a wall showed where prisoners had been shot. Forty soldiers were used to shoot 10 prisoners, at a time. The bodies were afterwards dragged to wooden sheds, then stripped and placed. in flimsy wooden coffins. One shed was stacked , bigh with pathetic relics of the Gestapo’s crimes against _ Belgian soldiers and civilians. These included respirators, clothing of all kinds, and emptyjewel cases flung away by the Germans after they had helped themselves. In an open courtyard -alongside the commandant’s living • quarters prisoners were publicly bludgeoned to death.