HORRORS OF NAZI RULE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII, Issue 6, 8 January 1942, Page 6

HORRORS OF NAZI RULE

The accumulated stories of Nazi terrorism in the occupied countries of Europe during the last two years had already reached a stage beyond anything on record in the long, sad chronicle of "man's inhumanity to man," when the latest disclosures of calculated .frightfulness in Russia administered another shock to the civilised world. There might be a disposition to put it all down to propaganda, were it not for the fact that the bulk of the evidence on their methods comes from the Nazis themselves. The wholesale shooting of hostages is, of course, admitted, anfr is being openly continued as a deliberate policy to hold down subject peoples. But there are, for instance, numerous eye-witness accounts by Nazis themselves in their reports. Here is an example of terrorism in Serbia described by one Walter Gruber, chief of the S.S. (Black Shirt) Propaganda Department in Belgrade: "In some villages the population met us with white flags; in some cases we respected them. In others we found unflattering slogans chalked on the walls, poster? ■insulting the Fuhrer. In those cases we sometimes shot one man out of ten and sometimes burned the villages to the ground." All people suspected of aiding the Serbs or suspected of resistance ' "were shot out of hand." When winter clothing and bedding were requisitioned in Norway for the use of Nazi forces in Russia, Josef Terboven, Nazi Commissioner in Norway, said: "It is a matter of indifference to Germany if some thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands, of Norwegian men, women, and children starve and freeze to death during this war." These examples could be multiplied indefinitely with authenticated testimony from other countries.. Mr. Churchill has declared that "retribution for these crimes must henceforward take its place among the major purposes of the war," but it may well be that retribution can be left to the wronged and tortured people themselves when their time comes, as come it*", will. The Germans then will have to face such a pent-up flood of hatred as no other nation in history has ever raised against itself. For the present these horrors of Nazi rule are a reminder of what would be the fate of the rest of the world, should the Nazi plan of world-domination succeed. Whether the Nazi system will ever achieve the abject submission of the conquered it is aimed at accomplishing is doubtful. A high German officer in Greece is reported to have said: "There is a point beyond which human suffering ceases to pay us." Such is the calculated, cynical brutality of the exponents of the Nazi code of frightfulness. The day of retribution will come, and it is the Nazis then who will have to