NAZI PLUNDERERS

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 72, 21 September 1940, Page 12

NAZI PLUNDERERS

ENSLAVED LANDS

HOW THE SYSTEM WORKS

RUMANIA'S PLIGHT

A PROBLEM TO BE FACED

(British Official Wireless.)

(Received September 21. 11 a.m.) RUGBY, September 20. The plundering by the Germans of countries they have enslaved is dis-! cussed in "The Times," which notes that Rumania has celebrated ' her adhesion to the Axis by rationing the bread consumption of her people on the pretext of a. poor harvest, "The real reason," it says, "is that the Nazi war machine requires to be fed more and more at the expense of the countries it has enslaved. From Rumania it expects corn as well as oil and to supply the corn the people of Rumania must go on short commons." Remarking that the procedure varied from country to country, and describing the open despoliation an-, enslavement of Czecho-Slovakia and Poland, "The Times" says in more recently conquered Scandinavia, the Low Countries.. ■ and France, where it was felt necessary for a time to present a less forbidding face, different tactics were necessary. The methods employed were .those of the card sharper rather than the highway robber, but "whatever method is employed, the result is the same. The real wealth of the subjugated peoples finds its way to Germany. What has occurred in all these countries is only a demonstration of the kind of 'new order' that Germany seeks to establish in Europe." "No other people is to have any independent life or will of its own," says "The Times." "All the economic resources of the Continent are to be enlisted to supply the German machine of conquest. "Herr Funk has explained that the standard of living of the conquered peoples must be reduced to maintain the standard of living in Germany. For those' countries which have so far escaped German domination the warning is plain. For us there is an equally plain lesson. Since everything the subjugated peoples produce for themselves or import from abroad is at the disposition of the German masters, the blockade must be drawn tighter and tighter. "The recent extension of the navicert system seems to be working effectively, backted, as it is, by regulations ensuring that facilities at British ports shall be available only to shipowners who conform to the system. These regulations have now been strengthened by the revival of a black list of ships, which will be denied all facilities and refused navicerts. It will be an offence for any person to transact business with any shipowner named on this list. The object of the system is to shut off trade with the outside world from the whole area controlled by Germany and Italy. Other countries from which goods might find a I way without difficulty into this area are being rationed to ensure that they do not receive more supplies than are required for their own needs. This rationing system must inevitably raise problems of real' difficulty, as in the case of oil imports to Spain, concerning which an agreement has just been reached. But these problems have to be faced. We are fighting for our lives and must prevent all possible from falling into the hands of plundering Nazism."