Starvation Diet for Prisoners

Manawatu Times, Volume 66, Issue 208, 2 September 1941, Page 4

Starvation Diet for Prisoners

FRENCH SOLDIERS SUFFER UNDER NAZI CAPTORS LONDON, Aug. 3L The dreadful treatment the Germans meted out to French prisoners was today described to the Cairo correspondent of the Times by a young Frenchman who, after ten months of captivity, escaped through Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Turkey, Syria and Palestine to | Egypt. When he arrived in Syria, the I Vichy authorities again imprisoned I him, but he was released when the Allies occupied Syria, and now is going to England to join the Free French Air Force. He said that French soldier prisoners, from the moment of their capture, had been systematically starved. French officers and nil ranks of British prisoners were better treated. Only the French soldiers were brutalised, because France had no German prisoners ou whom to inflict reprisals. The men lived for months in holes in the ground exposed to sun and rain. The hygienic conditions were detestable. For weeks, t’heir only food consisted of soup made from rotten potatoes, with seven ounces of poor black bread, and a cup of alleged cof- * fee which was actually *hot water in which a few fragments of ersatz coffee j had been boiled. Except for parcels sent from their families, whole camps must have starved. Brutal young Nazi guards maintained order with the assistance of savage police dogs trained to pull down prisoners at the word of command, which was given at the slightest provocation. The prisoners were paid with “camp notes’’ which were worthless elsewhere and useless in the camp, because the canteens had practically nothing to sell. The R.A.F. raids frightened sjnd irritated the prison guards. 1 The prisoners were often confined to <Vimp for several days after a raid 1 while signs of damage were being hidj den.