GERMAN BESTIALITIES

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 31, 5 January 1945, Page 5

GERMAN BESTIALITIES

BRITISH REPORT ON TORTURES RUGBY. Jau. 4. Perhaps the most revealing and complete document yet issued dealing with German atrocities during the occupation of Belgium is published by the 21st Army Group in a paper summarising 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 train-loads of prisoners on their way from Brussels and Antwerp had not been left behind because of the speed of the Allied advance and sabotage of the railway system. The report says the idea of torture and mutilation is so abhorrent to the British mind that it is not easy to believe that such practices can be carried out in the 20th century by Europeans. 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. Most of the report deals with the situation at the 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 prisoners were not normally interrogated till they had been in 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 he was taken to a 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 trails, laid across a table and thrashed, hauled up to the ceiling by a pulley and thrashed while in midair, 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 a torture chamber. Women were not excused these tortures, and "Madame X," whose name has to be kept secret, gives details of treatment she received in a torture chamber. Another witness who worked in a 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 hanged were made to construct their own gallows. The report deals in less detail with what happened at a torture chamber in Brussels. Victims were taken there from all parts of Belgium. There are two 'cemeteries, where some 300 victims were buried. The names of collaborators responsible for the apprehension of prisoners are given in an appendix to the report. The report is being forward to the Allied War Crimes Commission.—Official Wireless.