NAZI METHODS

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20639, 20 August 1941, Page 6

NAZI METHODS

CHECK DESERTION FAMILIES HELD DNIEPER MENACE DAM MAY BF BLOWN (Elec. Tel. Copyright—United Press Assn.) (Reed. Aug. 20. 1.50 p.m.) | LONDON, Aug. 19. J The German military leaders are taking drastic measures to check the growing desertions on the eastern front, says a Stockholm report. Deserters’ relatives in Berlin Cologne, Hamburg and Danzig have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment up to five years. Relatives have also been sent to concentration camps on charges of having encouraged soldiers to desert. The Russians may flood a vast area of the south-western Ukraine by blasting the great Dnieperstroy dam on the Dnieper River if the battle goes against them, says the Daily Telegraph’s Stockholm correspondent. The destruction of the dam would send the pent-up waters of the Dnieper swirling through the plains west of the Dnieper bend, creating a vast unnavigable flood. The Russians claim that the Dnieperstroy dam is the greatest hydroelectric undertaking in the world. The dam, which has a capacity of 291.800.000 gallons, services power stations supplying the industrial area of Dnepropetrovsk. Budenny Would Not Hesitate It is believed that Marshal Budenny would not hesitate if it became necessary to destroy at one blow the whole Dnepropetovsk industrial district and sweep away his enemies by blasting the dam. The Stockholm correspondent of the Russian Tass Agency reports differences between the Nazi Foreign Minister, Herr von Ribbentrop, and the chief of the secret police, Herr Himmler, and the Propaganda Minister, Dr. Goebbels, in reference to the policy in Hungary, Sweden, Denmark and Slovakia. Herr Himmler is stated to have demanded the dismissal of the old diplomats who, it is noticed, are being replaced by prominent Storm Troopers. Although the German people believed that the capture of the Ukraine would solve their food problem for the coming winter, the Berlin radio said to-day that the Russian wheat crop was not as big as they had been led to believe. The Moscow radio, however, stated that the grain harvest totalled 131,000,000 tons, far in excess ox the bumper crop of 1937.