Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 1940. NAZI TERRORISM.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 123, 23 April 1940, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 1940. NAZI TERRORISM.

Shocking crimes committed by the Nazis in Poland have led to a protest to world conscience by the Governments of Britain, Erance, and Poland. Prom reports in their possession, it is stated, the German Government is bent on destroying not only the lives and property, but also the cultural and religious existence of the defenceless Polish population at present under its control. There is abundant evidence to support this charge to the hilt. To-day the people of Poland, whose territory has been incorporated in the Reich in violation of accepted international law, are being pursued by a ruthless oppression hardly believable in this century. When two common criminals for whom the Polish police as well as German soldiers were searching killed two Germans who tried to arrest them, a battalion of German troops was marched to the town with orders to kill one in every ten of its inhabitants. Innocent men, women, and children were the Nazis’ victims of this ghastly outrage. At other places ten Poles were shot in revenge for the death of a Nazi policeman; five young women were executed as a reprisal; a woman of fiftyfour was condemned to death for having taken part in the Upper Silesia rising after the last war; in Poznan more than 5000 persons are declared to have been executed either individually or in mass since the- Nazis reoccupied this former German part of Poland ; at Kalisz a Catholic priest and five landowners were shot on the pretext of being in possession of weapons; at Gdynia professors, lawyers, priests, and industrialists have been shot in batches, while thousands of other unfortunate Poles, including Jews, within the territory have been deported during the past winter under conditions which violate every decent instinct 'of humanity. It is Hitler’s intention to destroy the Polish nation. It is well-known that the invasion of last September was carefully arranged in advance, Germans living in Poland having their allotted parts as spies, saboteurs, and snipers. Most of them were Polish subjects and when found were summarily, executed. The Nazis have been taking a terrible toll for this perfectly just act of selfdefence. As part of his policy Hitler is exterminating the Poles’ leaders, intellectual, religious, and industrial. No national monument, either, must remain to let any Nazi know that it stands as a glowing tribute to a brave people’s struggle for freedom, or a reminder of their former glory. The statue of Kosciusko 'at Lodz and other monuments have not been allowed to survive this awful vengeance against a hapless people. Such are some of the crimes, but only a very small proportion, which have moved the I Allied Governments to protest to

the world’s conscience. They supply the answer why Britain is fighting this war, an answer that is still further emphasised when the brutal outrages on the sea are taken into account, of ships torpedoed without warning and their crews left to the mercy of sea and storms, often dying after suffering the most horrible privations, or else escaping death only after ghastly torture. Such is the Germany of to-day in .which family life, according to the Hitler doctrine, has little value except to provide cannon fodder for the State. Commenting on this a writer says: The State is God. Whatever it orders must be unquestionably perpetrated, even if, according to Christian standards, it is a crime. Yet in spite of the frightful ordeal through which it is passing, the spirit of Poland, cultured and Christian, lives on; and it will be indestructible so long as Poles are found like the young man who, doomed to die, looked straight into the rifle muzzles of the firing squad and cried, “Poland is still not lost.’’