DEMAND FOR INQUIRY

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 October 1946, Page 7

DEMAND FOR INQUIRY

COMMUNISTS PARTICULARLY VOCAL “ANTI-CLIMACTIC BURLESQUE” (Rec. 11.35 a.m.) LONDON, October 16. Parisians were stupefied by the news of Goering’s suicide, says Reuter’s Paris correspondent. Marcel Cachin, the veteran Communist leader, said: “This is the limit. It will create intense irritation throughout the world.” Some Parisians are circulating talk that “influential Anglo-Saxon circles enabled Goering to cheat the gallows.” A high official of the French Ministry of Justice said: “One cannot help wondering how Goering could commit suicide under the very eyes of the Allied guards.”

Ce Soir, which is 4 a Communistcontrolled newspaper said: “World opinion will demand to know who allowed Goering to escape the hanging which he a hundred times deserved. It was expected that exemplary justice would be meted out to the guilty persons.”

“Life Begins Anew.” The Berlin radio opened the day’s i broadcast with the hymn “Life Begins anew.” Later it announced that the employees of many Berlin undertakings were holding special meetings i to-day to “give expression to their at- ■ titude on the verdicts and the death sentences.” I Nuremberg people generally were apathetic at the news of the execu- ' tions, but indignant later at the news of Goering’s suicide. The Russian-controlled Berlin radio demanded that’ more trials should follow quickly “to convict the I capitalist industrial war criminals, i A Nuremberg message reports that I some people thought the Allied Control Commission made a mistake by ' reversing the original decision not to • admit the press to the executions and giving the condemned men a chance of getting propaganda to the German people while on the scaffeld. A German, who spent four years in a concentration camp, declared: “The Al- ■ lied press made martyrs of some of i these men. They have sown the seeds i of another war from the scaffold. i The Russian-controlled Czech radio commented: “If the Control Council devoted as much energy to seeing that Goering was not allowed to commit suicide as they did to ‘guarding the eight correspondents , who witnessed the executions, Goer- ’ ing might not have cheated justice.”

British Press Comment. Goering’s last act was political dynamite. There should be a stringent investigation into how suicide, was possible, says the Evening News in an editorial. It adds that the boosting of the security arrangements at. Nuremberg is fresh in everyone’s minds, but it would appear to have been less than efficient. Had Goering’s suicide happened under British or Russian control, it is possible to imagine the volume of protest there would have been. Goering was a clever villain to the end. The Evening Standard in a leader says the first reaction is one of complete astonishment that the chief prisoner of all should have managed to evade the precautions to. bring him safely to judicial execution. An inquiry must be made not only in the interests of his guards but for the important long-term purpose of discovering whether what occurred was the outcome of a plot devised and executed from outside by Nazi sympathisers. “Betrayed His Weakness.” In Washington Mr. Justice Jackson said that Goering’s suicide was “as anticlimactic as a burlesque after a Wagnerian overture” and destroyed his opportunity to become a German martyr hero. “The founder of concentration camps, where death was handed out to millions, could not face the gallows himself. His end betrayed the weakness of his whole life—cunning, crafty, always outwitting somebody, bullying and cowardly. If Goering had been made of the stuff that could walk to the gallows voicing some patriotic sentiment he might well have become a German martyr hero. That was his great remaining ambition. He often told his prison mates that the Germans some day would dig up his bones and put them in a marble mausoleum. He dreamed of himself as a sort of Teutonic Napoleon.”