AXIS CRUELTY

Grey River Argus, 2 December 1943, Page 3

AXIS CRUELTY

Camp Atrocities IN BELGIAN NAZI CAMP. PROFESSOR'S REVELATIONS'. (Rec. 11.5) LONDON, Nov. 80. M. P. L. Levy, a Brussels professor and the former head of the Belgian Radio News Service, who has reached London from Belgium after long captivity followed oy a life of hiding, described the Breendonckare concentration camp, near Antwery, as being more horrible than Daschau or Buchenwald, before this war, as attested by prisoners who were in both the Belgian and German camps. M. Levy says that he often, before the war, refused to believe statements about the German concentration camps, but what he had experienced had surpassed anything he had previously heard and he now feels he has had a frightful nightmare and wonders how his mind could imagine such horrors. Professor Levy; said that: The prison was small, permitting ‘‘individual treatment” for prisoners, who were crowded in -long disused casemates, which were streaming with damp. There were dungeons underneath for prisoners undergoing special punishment in isolation. Some prisoners in the dungeons for months were brought out for ten minutes daily, when their heads were hooded. •'Punishments included the stopping of food, standing in heat or freezing cold, beating with whips, cudgels and fists and standing against a wall with a forty pound sack of bricks on the back, also tortures. There was a well in which prisoners were placed. It was fitted with a pump. Prisoners were forced to pump continually to avoid drowning. Prisoners would go on pumping until exhausted. When they were nearly drowned, they were quickly dragged out, and revived, and v/ere then thrown back into the well. The normal work was hard demoralising manual labour, with broken picks and shovels and trucks in dangerous disrepair. An organisation forced the prisoners to fight for the best tools and fomented discord. Professor Levy said that a few of the inmates succeeded in reaching Allied territory. He was the first. He was followed by. a friend, who was a Jesuit priest. The little priest was now in the United States. They had resolved to let the civilised world know what was going on m that Gestapo Hell.

WOMEN SUFFER TORTURE RUGBY, Nov. 30. According to reports of deliberate cruelties which have been collected bv representatives of Allied Governments in London, and issued by the International Information Committee in a pamphlet entitled “Women Under Axis Rule,” women have been reduced to the level of slaves m eleven countries occupied by the Germans and Japanese. The material for the publication has been carefully selected from a mass of evidence based on eye-witness accounts, official pronouncements from enemycontrolled. broadcasts', and similar sources. It proves beyond all doubt that the brutality is not just the temporary excess of an invading army, but a deliberate policy under the more settled conditions of long-term occupation. The Gestapo never- hesitates to use its expert tortures in an effort io make women incriminate their menfolk. Girls in Yugoslavia . have been flogged to death or otherwise tortured to force them to reveal the secrets of guerrillas. Many Norwegian women have died in concentration camps, where even four-year-old children are among the prisoners, because they have refused to give information. Trifling offences are made an excuse for imprisonment, deportation, or forced labour. Hundreds of women in occupied countries have been shot for “sabotage” and thousands more are dying daily in concentration camps. In Poland young girls are regularly abducted and sent to brothels for soldiers. These abductions are not isolated incidents, but are clearly the systematic policy of the German authorities. When the Germans do not need women for slave labour, they watch them die. Women in Greece, after trudging miles with starving children, pleaded with the Germans for food. They were told: “Even if half of you die, there will still be too many left.” Neither torture nor mentay agony can conquei- the magnificent spirit of resistance shown by these women. Even the wholesale murders that followed the shooting of Heydrich did not daunt the Czechs. Girls in Russia resist heroically in spite of sadistic persecution. Women teachers in Norway went into a concentration camp rather than leach their pupils the Nazi curriculum. .