BERLIN BEWILDERED

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 73, 23 February 1945, Page 5

BERLIN BEWILDERED

CITY OF BARRICADES DESERTERS ~ON INCREASE (N.Z. Press Association. —Copyright.) (Rec. 9.30 a.m.) LONDON, Feb. 22. Creeping paralysis is slowly spreading among Berlin’s five and a half million barricaded, bewildered, bomb-dulled inhabitants, says the Berlin correspondent of the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet, who has just arrived in Stockholm after two and a half

years’ residence there. Ho adds that more and more German army deserters arc slipping into Berlin as the front moves closer, and the Nazi authorities have issued a warning to the population threatening the severest punishment for all deserters. In the suburbs and city itself there arc thousands of barricades and mines and ruins are transformed into fortresses. High military staffs hastily left Berlin last week. It is uncertain whether the Government will remain but this is improbable. “As I drove to the Baltic coast,” he said, “the roads were crowded with endless caravans of refugee wagons ■from Pomerania and West Prussia all moving to the west. Every house in every village and town seemed . to be packed with refugees. Berlin’s population, despite the bombing, is bigger than ever. There are tens of were evacuated earlier and masses of thousands of women and children who refugees and hundreds of thousands of foreigners. - .. “The Volkssturm has been totally mobilised for building obstructions. Engineers are building complicated fortifications. The civil machinery is still functioning tolerably though limping badly here and there.’ “Women in fur coats are helping to build barricades in Berlin, said a German News Agency commentator. “They are standing in a human chain with working-class women to pass bricks and chunks of masonry from bombed buildings from hand to hand to form barricades,”