RACE STRENGTH

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21924, 19 January 1946, Page 5

RACE STRENGTH

NAZI EDUCATION FORCED LABOUR PLAN EVIDENCE AT TRIAL LONDON, Jan. 13. At the Nuremberg war criminal, trials, the chief French prosecutor, M. Dementhon, said that with the advent of power the national Nazi education system moulded a new generation to show no trace of the traditional moral teachings, which were replaced by a cult of race strength. “The Nazis’ conception of total war had as its basis a forced labour system. There can be rfo doubt that this institution was linked with the German plan of extermination through the labour of the populations adjoining Germany, who were regarded by her as dangerous and inferior.

“Sauckel, chief of the labour recruitment from occupied territories,” said M. Dementhon, “acknowledged that Germany employed 5.000,000 foreign workers, of whom only 200,000 were volunteers.

“Even more serious than the forced labour of civil populations was the incorporation of workers from occupied countries in the labour service of the Reich. By 1942, 3,300,000 workers from occupied countries were working for Germany in their own country. Seven hundred and fifteen thousand French men and women were deported to Germany. “The Nazis, simultaneously with exploitation to the fullest extent of prisoners of war as well as workers from the occupied countries, systematically seized by every possible means the wealth of those countries.”

M. Dementhon quoted figures showing that the seizures of goods and wealth from occupied countries exposed the people of those countries to slow starvation, and broke down their people’s physical stamina, with alarming deficiency in the growth of childen.

German Terrorist Methods

The prosecutor described in detail German terrorist methods of combatting the resistance movement and the destruction of villages as reprisals. The Nazis had a systematic policy of corruption and perversion in the occupied countries. There remained not a single man whose essential rights they did not change or abolish and whose condition as a human being they did not violate in some way. M. Dementhon made accusations of arbitrary imprisonment, ill-treatment, deportation, and murder against the Germans in the occupied countries.

The use of torture in interrogations was almost the general rule. The tortures usually applied were beating, whipping, chaining for several days, immersion in ice-cold water, drowning in bath-tubs, charging bath water with electricity, electrification of the most sensitive parts of the body, and the tearing out of finger-nails, but the crime which doubtless would remain the most memorable among those committed by the Germans against the civilians of occupied countries was deportation and internment in the concentration camps of Germany. M. Auguste Champetier Deribes, an ex-Minister, has been nominated to succeed M. Dementhon ns chief French prosecutor. M. Dementhon asked to be relieved of the leadership after his election as chairman of the constitutional commission of the National Assembly.