Nazis De-Christianising Poland Willi Perverse Sadism

Northern Advocate, 30 January 1940, Page 5

Nazis De-Christianising Poland Willi Perverse Sadism

(Received 1 p.m.) RUGBY. January 29

Prominence is given in the Press to extracts from a report now published on German persecutions in Poland, which has been presented to the Pope by the Primate of Poland, and upon which the recent Vatican broadcasts were apparently based. Eye-witness accounts of Nazi savagery towards the Polish priests included in this report were given in a further Vatican broadcast on Saturday, the transmission of which was jammed by a German station.

Incidents which occurred in the diocese of Gniesna are cited. Priests in Concentration Camps.

There 10 priests had been shot by the Nazis, and one had been killed with rifle butts.

Thousands of priests, it is stated, in a general revie wof the situation, have been sent to concentration camps, and many deported to Germany. Their fate is unknown.

The report forecasts that the persecution will .soon have achieved its object, and by the middle of the twentieth century it will be a fact that, owing to the frenzied and unchecked actions of Hitlerism and impiety, a region with 2,000.000 Roman Catholics and with a flourishing religious life, will become deChristianised. Mein Kampf Model. With regard to the elimination of the Polish element in the diocese of Poznan and Gniesnau, which, it is remarked. follows the Mein Kampf model of extermination, it is stated to be continuous, without interruption, and furthermore is taking forms of perverse sadism. Almost all the Polish nobility, especially the landed nobility, and tens of thousands of both rural and urban families, and almost all the educated class, have been exiled. These people have been robbed of all their real and personal property, and are allowed to take only 10 marks with them. The “Daily Telegraph,” commenting on the Nazi attempt to jam the Vatican broadcast revealing these facts, says they have no doubt been effectual so far as Germany is concerned. Goebbels’ Way. “The German people—a large proportion of whom are fervent Catholics - —have not been allowed to know anything of what their co-religionists in Poland are suffering for their faith at the hands of the Nazi Government,” the paper says. Evidence that cannot be refuted is suppressed. That is the Goebbels way. “Though the German people may thus be kept in the dark, the world cannot be so deceived, and it will draw its own conclusions from the Nazi Government’s fear lest it should be known how evil are its deeds.”