SUFFERINGS OF PRISONERS

Press, Volume LXXXI, Issue 24547, 21 April 1945, Page 7

SUFFERINGS OF PRISONERS

Terrible Stories Told TORTURE AND MURDER (Special Australian Corresp., N.Z.P.A.) (Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON. April 19. Terrible stories of the sufferings inflicted by Germans on men and women in the prison camps continue to be sent from war correspondents. They are illustrated with some of the less gruesome photographs that can be published, and they tell of the inhuman cruelty inflicted by the self-styled ‘'Master Race.” There is no propaganda about these stories. They are cold-blooded facts. Here are some extracts: A “News-Chronicle” correspondent Who spent two days at the Belsen camp said one man was unable to stand up and sprawled on hig belly across a pile of rubbish drinking from a cup given to him by a British soldier. He looked like a yellow stick wrapped in grey r a g. Another jnan, who had been in the camp only one week, said he had had nothing whatever to eat for three or four days, he could not remember which. Oh other days he bad had pearly half a pint of turnip Spup. One day he had a thin slice of bread with a teaspoon of gour milk cheese, “How about those who have been here many months?" ho was asked. The man replied: “Well, look around. Can you see a blade of grass? You won’t find one. They have eaten all the grass.” Two women, says the correspondent, came up to him, sallow and bagged with burning eyes—Hungarian Jewesses looking as old as time, yet probably young in years. They asked for food, but he had none and offered cigarettes. They smiled delightedly and then burst into wild, hysterical, weeping. One seized his hand and kissed it again apd again until, her cracked lips broke and the blood ran. Corpses Moved A British civilian prisoner told the correspondent that when the news that the British were approaching was received he worked for several days with 1000 other men taking corpses from the morgue to the burial ground. There were thousands rotting and some had been there many weeks. "We dragged them. We could not carry them,” said the prisoner. “When the bread lorries arrived a ghostly band Of prisoners flowed after them with strange and terrible cries. “That food will save lives,” says the correspondent, “but many are too far gone and will die in spite of it, and it will never restore the damage of months and even years of torment and privation to 6000 souls. "That is the tally in Belsep at this moment. God knows how many thousands have passed through there in the years the camp has been established—passed through to the inevitable end, a reeking charnel at the end of rows of cages ” Writing of the Bucbenwald camp thp “Daily Mail’’ correspondent says; “The death house is a single storey building, but there is a cellar beneath it. It reeks of disinfectant. There were 48 hooks let into the walls. These were used to hang prisoners. They were hanged in pairs, strapped back to back. “The walls were scored and scratched where they had kicked in their death throes, Some took five minutes to die. After five minutes the bodies were lifted down and the nooses removed, and if the victim was not dead there was a huge wooden .club like an' outsize potato masher which the killers used to smash the man’s head. “An electric motor in the corner was switched on to drown the screams of the men tortured or killed, but its whirrings could not quite obliterate the cries. They were heard outside. In a refrigerator in the cellar bodies were kept when the furnaces could not keep pace with the deaths. Once there were 600 bodies there. Bodies Flayed “One camp commandant ordered doctors to flay the bodies. The skin was tanned and used to hind copies of ‘Mein Kampf.’ If a man were tattooed he. was noted, marked down, and murdered, and the skin bearing the design removed, cured apd fashioned into a lampshade for the commandant’s wife. “Prisoners were often flogged. They were stood, stripped baked, against the walls, their toes and noses touching it. Then they were *put to the question.’ If they refused to answer or gave the wrong answer they were beaten until they were crushed against the wall. A favourite weapon which left no scar was a strip of gristle cut from a bull’s spine." Another “Dolly Mail" correspondent went to the camps where the Germans used prisoners to . make V weapons. Slave workers were recruited from all those members of the European resistance movement regarded as most dangerous who fell into German hands, including German resisters, Communists, and Social Democrats. Disease and Starvation Roman Catholics were herded in groups of 30,000 and each group staffed a prison factory. The conditions in these factories can be summed up in the words torture and starvation. The workers died at the rate of thousands a month. At Nordhaqsen there was a series of long sheds with vpopden racks reaching to the ceiling, On the racks were laid hundreds upon hundreds of men shrunken with starvation waiting to die —living flesh, not men. Most of them were nakef}. Some had typhus and others dysentery, and stm ethers had Suing wounds from 8.3. torture, nes showed through the skin. 9 now under Allied care are ? *Gemian» living near these centres said they had no idea such things were being done, hut Nordbausen civilians out for a walk with their girls used to go near the extermination centre, point out prisoners, and crack jokes at them, “A British-born countess, who was a political prisoner working in the Schneider basooka factory, told aaAmerk

can that the 8 8. burned to death 209 slave labourers the day before the capture of Leipzig,” says Reuter’S correspondent. ~‘The Germans put the victims, who were Russian, Polish, and French political prisoners, in barbed wire enclosed huts, placed cans or petrol around the camp, and set fire to it.” The correspondent visited the camp site and saw the charred bones di the victims, .