MODERN HUNS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIX, Issue 22, 26 January 1940, Page 8

MODERN HUNS

DARK AGE IN POLAND

DESTRUCTION AND INFAMY

VATICAN REPORTS

(British Official Wireless.)

(Reecived January 26, 1.45 p.m.)

RUGBY,.January 25.

According to further disclosures from Vatican sources the martyrdom of Poland is described as constituting the worst religious persecution in a thousand years of history. These disclosures supplement Monday's Vatican broadcast in which it was said the Pope was profoundly pained at reports from Warsaw, Cracow, . Pomerania, Poznan, and Silesia which gave an "almost .daily tale of destruction and infamy, horror, and inexcusable excesses committed upon helpless and homeless people."

The broadcast" noted that the persecution was far from being confined to districts under Russian occupation. Even more violent and persistent wasthe assault upon elementary justice | and decency in that part of prostrate Poland which has fallen to German administration. The richest part of western Poland is being unceremoniously stolen from the Poles and ceded to Germans, while the real proprietors are packed off in evil-smelling trains to the war-torn regions of Warsaw which the Hoiy Father, only last week, described as a "desert where once a smiling harvest waved." STARK HUNGER. Stark hunger stared 70 per cent, of the population in the face and reserves of foodstuffs and implements had been shipped to Germany. Jews and Poles were being herded into ghettos. The crowning iniquity "lies in the cynical suppression of all but \ the merest suggestion of religious worship in the lives of one.of the. most pious and devotional peoples of Europe." In addition to flagrant acts, of cruelty which occurred in depopulating once prosperous towns, reports of outrages directed against the practice of religion continue to reach the Vatican. Priests and nuns are subjected to \he gravest insults and in one diocese ten priests were shot by Nazis and one killed byblows from rifle butts. In the diocese of Pomerania only 30 out of 700 priests are allowed to mm- j ister to the faithful and one estimate states that only 25 per cent, of the priests remain in Poland. The others have been sent either to Germany or to concentration camps and no news has been heard of them. UNIVERSITIES SUFFER., The Nazi campaign of destruction of learning in Poland is the subject of a leading article in the "Manchester Guardian." It says: "The University of Cracow was famous enough in the fifteenth century to intervene in great debates of the Council of Constance. No fewer than 165 of its professors and lecturers were sent in November to concentration .camps ~ in Germany and several of them, are nowdead. Other universities in Warsaw, Lublin, and Poznan have suffered the same fate. Libraries and museums are stripped of their treasures as ruthlessly as Napoleon stripped the picture galleries of Europe.,, Priceless documents have been destroyed. Thus in Poland Germans are repeatingl all the barbarities they have practised against literature, learning, and art in Czechoslovakia. The most ominous fact about this relapse into barbarism is that no German university lifts a finger against it."