Return to Reich

Franklin Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 41, 15 April 1940, Page 7

Return to Reich

POPULATION EXCHANGE MANY HOMELESS ALIENS A vast redistribution of German population is now in full swing. Already tens of thousands of Ger-. ( mans have been moved to newlyconquered territories, or from neighbouring countries, such as Italy, Hungary and Rumania, and plans are now being made to transfer a total exceeding 2,000,000. The aim is to expel l'rom the conquered territories all alien peoples, and to replace them with Germans from the Reich, who are, in turn, replaced in the Reich' by people of German descent from outside the Reich The German Foreign Ministry announces that plans are being prepared to bring—in 750,000 Germans from Transylvania (Rumania), (500.000 from Yugoslavia, and 480,000 from Hungary. - Already all Germans have left Latvia, 15,000 have been transplanted from Estonia, and the migration of 150,000 from the Polish Ukraine is progressing. The Tirolese from Italy must be added; and Germans from the Ukraine are now pouring across the former Polish frontier to Germany in cattle trucks and motor lorries. A senior German official, in an article in the Nazi Landpost, says that the transfer of these vast populations was long being prepared, but could not be realised hitherto for iack of territory. The Gazette de Lausanne” gives a harrowing description of the “purification of Polish territory. Poles who return to their homes to fetch some treasured possessions after they have been ordered to migrate to other areas, it says, are invariably executed if caught. The official German News Agency announces some of these executions, with the object of deterring- other Poles, and explains that the victims were executed for “pillaging houses inhabited by Germans and terrorising the occupants.”