PEACE FEELER?

Grey River Argus, 17 March 1945, Page 5

PEACE FEELER?

SURRENDER QUESTION. peace demonstrations IN BREMEN! (Rec. 11.20) NEW YORK, March 16 A New .York "Times’s” correspondent in Stockholm stated: According to a reliable eye witness, numerous strikes, peace demonstrations and bloody clashes with U.S. troops occurred in Bremen this week. Strikes started in a camouflaged munition factory in a forest outside the city, and spread to Bremen’s shipyards and other war industries. Crowds marched the streets demonstrating noisily for an early end to the war, shouting “Down with Hitler! Down with the Nazis!” S.S. troops were unable to break up all the demonstrations. Both sides used firearms. It is reported that a food shortage inspired the riots. LONDON, March 15. A Stockholm newspaper "Svenskadag Bladet” stated: Britain and United States have rejected a peace offer from Hitler. One of Hitler’s most trusted officials contacted with British and American representatives in Stockholm to make the offer the Germans moved after a conference at Berghof, where Ribbentrop spent an entire night persuading Hitler peace was essential. The Germans offered to evacuate all occupied territories, but asked that the Nazi regime should remain after peace, because only Hitler and Himmler had sufficient authority to reconcile the German people to the sudden idea of asking for peace. The German spokesman threatened that Germans, if the offer was rejected, .would cease to resist in the East and allow the Russians to overrun Germany, leading to “the complete Bolshevisation, which would hurt British and American interests.” The story is not supported in any quarter in London. Nothing is known of any offer in British official circles. The British Legation,, spokesman at Stockholm made the following statement: “An approach was attempted a' few days ago through a third party to a junior member of the Legation staff. The third party, however, was immediately told the Legation was not in the least interested in any such approach.” It is reported that an emissary of Von Rundstedf crossed the Rhine last week under a white flag to test out General Eisenhower’s sentiment on a German surrender in the west. It was stated at Washington that Allied military officials will accept the unconditional surrender of German units of any size, including whole army groups, but will not make any deal for an armistice or a truce. This attitude was again stated to-daj l - in response to rumours that von Rundstedt had unavailingly sought armisterms from General Eisenhower. DOUBTS ABOUT PEACE FEELER (Rec. 10.50) LONDON, March 16 A Reuter correspondent at Stockholm said: It is reliably reported that a German peace offer was made by a protege of the Foreign Minister, von Ribbentrop, named Nesse, who was the attache of the German Embassy in London until shortly before the outbreak of the war. Fie is at present an offical of the German ■Foreign Office and of the Propaganda Minister. He was sent specially to Stockholm by von Ribbentrop. Allied representatives in Stockholm, however, feel that his real object was not’ to seek peace, but merely to try and stir up suspicion among the western nations and Russia.

PEACE FEELER DENIED. (Rec. 10.10). LONDON, March 16. The Berlin radio has broadcast from the German Overseas News Agency a statement denying , the rumours about peace feelings from Stockholm. These rumours have been received with amazement in Berlin because no one in the world could credit them, even for a minute. Everyone should now be convinced that the leadership of the Army and the people in Germany would never think of capitulation. PRESS CORRESPONDENT'S IMPRESSIONS IN THE WEST LONDON, March 14. Mr. S. L. Solin, a correspondent of the “News Chronicle”, states: The most striking thing about Cologne is how completely human beings have adapted themselves to the horrors of war—a's if they always existed and will never end. In Cologne, war at its worst has become the normal way of life, and peace is a strange and unusual phenomenon that sends cellar dwellers blinking into the open to see what has gone wrong. When, the sun has grown cold and the last cities on the dying earth are crumbling to ruins, I suppose that the surviving remnants of human life will live, as they live to-day, in the bowels, of Cologne, breakdown in administration is 100 per' cent, and the city lived its miserable existence without administration for a long time. Its biggest industry for months past ha's been looting by drably-dressed civilians who dart out of holes that seemed to be carved in rubble heaps, but are, in fact, cellar entrances covered with wreckage. Their cellar homes are not without comfort, and many ar e snug and warm. Squirrel-like, these people learnt to store away everything that could possibly have a future utility, and then, when neighbours died or disappeared, their remaining stocks were rifled hungarily by survivors. Cologne has an importance for Allied peoples because in it are concentrated problems to be found throughout Germany —ruin, chaotic cities, thousands of helpless and suffering foreign slaves enfeebled by years of bondage, disease that can menace Europe if not checked, and vjtiated, demoralised Germans reduced to a primative existence that may turn wide stretches of Europe into festering slums. There is no easy answer for this colossal problem, Allied peace-time generalship will somehow have to find it.

Correspondents stated large reserve of food have been discovered in every German town of any size which has been entered by Allied troops. Villages and country districts are, if anything, more rather than less prosperous. Bread, meat, coffee, potatoes, spaghetti and onions are available. It is tardy but, nevertheless, justice that the these food stores are being used for feeding the freed “slave” labour of all nationalities which has been found in Germany. Christopher Buckley, in the “Daily Mail” says Europe has never experienced anything resembling the forced migration of peoples which has been imposed by the German Reich in the past five years. None of the great depopulations in the Near East or medieval or Biblical times is comparable in scale. _ There are, at this moment, wandering over Western Germany tens of thousands of hapless displaced persons whose lives were violently interrupted months or years ago b5 r , the Nazi demand for labour. Since then they have lived the life of slaves to the German war machine. They tell m e there are 17,000,000 of them—an appalling reflection.” Buckley says that in one camp he saw 3000 of them. They included Russians, Poles, French, Dutch, Serbians and Armenians. They were being housed in a transit camp as a preliminary to repatriation. They do not include foreign political prisoners, who were herded out into the roads and driven along on foot in the direction of Dusseldorf when the Americans advanced.