NAZI ATROCITIES

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 21604, 5 January 1945, Page 3

NAZI ATROCITIES

BELGIAN_VICTIMS CAPTIVES TORTURED OVER 300. MURDERS (10 a.m.) RUGBY, Jan. 4. Perhaps /thei most revealing arid complete document yet issued dealing with German atrocities during the occupation of Belgium, writes a correspondent. is published by the 21st Army Group in a paper summarising the evidence collected by a small number of British officers during three weeks’ investigation. Many of the stories contained in the report would never have been obtained if two trainloads of prisoners on the way from Brussels and Antwerp had not been left behind owing to the speed of the Allied advance and the sabotage of the railway system. The atrocities were committed against Belgian civilians by four groups of individuals, first, the German security police of which the Gestapo forms part; secondly, the Flemish and Walloon S.S.; thirdly, the secret field police; and, fourthly, German Army guards at concentration camps. Torture Chamber Horrors Most of the report deals with the situation at Breendonck concentration camp, near Malines, on the Brussels-Antwerp road, where over 300 people were shot and some 15 hanged, according to a prisoner whose testimony is included in the report which covers the period between 1941 and 1944. The report says that the prisoners were not normally interrogated until they had been in the camp a month or two on the principle that their powers of resistance would have declined during that period. If a prisoner would not talk and the Germans particularly wanted certain information from him* lie was taken to the torture chamber. There he was generally stripped naked, handcuffed and subjected to one of the following tortures; He was either hit across the body or face with a truncheon or cat o’ nine tails, laid across a table and thrashed, hauled up to the ceiling by a pulley and thrashed while in mid-air, released from the ceiling so that he crashed on the sharp edges of wooden blocks, burned on the body with cigar ends, his body crushed in a press or burned with an instrument connected to an electric plug in the torture chamber. Stripped and Beaten Women were not excused these tortures and Madame X, whose name has to be kept secret, gives details of the treatment she received in the torture chamber. Another witness, who worked in the dispensary, gives details of how Belgian women were stripped and beaten.

Executions by shooting were carried out at a range of 15 yards and the prisoners who were hanged were made to construct their own gallows. The report deals in less detail with what happened at the torture chamber in Brussels. The victims were taken there from all Darts of Belgium. There are two cemeteries where some 300 victims were buried.

The names of the collaborators responsible for the apprehension of the prisoners are given in the appendix to the report. The report is being forwarded to the Allied War Crimes Commission.