REFUGEES' PLIGHT

Evening Star, Issue 25619, 20 October 1945, Page 7

REFUGEES' PLIGHT

DISEASE TAKING TOLL | BIG MOVEMENT OF CHILDREN PLANNED | (Rec. 12.30 p.m.) BERLIN, Oct. 19. Two hundred of about 300,000 refugees who arrived in Berlin from Eastern Germany in the past month were found dead in the railway trucks in which they travelled. A British Military Government medical officer revealed that most of them died of typhoid or starvation. The health of refugees trying to -get from Eastern Germany into the British zone is very bad. From to-day the passing on of refugees from Berlin to the British zone in Western Germany will cease, because for the next few weeks all transport will be allotted .to " Operation Stork,'' under which 50,000 children will be moved from the capital to the western zone, where there will be more chance of feeding,them during the winter. This will mean that refugees still arriving in Berlin from the east, at the rate of 10,000 a day, will pile up here, though there is no housing or food for them. The epidemic of typhoid continues to rage in Berlin with a mortality rate of about 25 per cent. The venereal disease rate is extremely high, and in some areas 75 per cent, of the women have been found to be infected.