ORDERS TO ITALIANS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 70, 20 September 1943, Page 5

ORDERS TO ITALIANS

HITLER'S ASSUMED POWERS

LONDON, September 18,

The German military authorities have ordered the Italians in the Province of Como, in northern Italy, to surrender all army weapons, clothing, and equipment within 24 hours, under penalty of death, says the Berne correspondent of the Associated Press of Great Britain. /

Reuters Lugano correspondent says diplomatic circles state that Hitler has assumed the same powers in Italy as in Germany, according to orders which he has persqnally issued on the policy the German occupying troops should follow.

The orders include: (1) -The Italian people should be regarded as traitors to the Axis, which means that they are renegades and outcasts over whom individual German soldiers have power of life and death as well as authority to requisition their private property for their own use.

(2) The. scorched earth policy will be applied by official requisitioning, whereby the German army will augment its supplies and force the Italians to concentrate their energies on keeping body and soul together.

(3) Able-bodied Italians, first men and then women, will be depo|ted as labour slaves. German troops' have already received the instructions, which explains the open pillaging that eyewitnesses are still reporting from the provinces under German control.