Problem Of Foodless Nations Of Europe

Northern Advocate, 17 March 1944, Page 3

Problem Of Foodless Nations Of Europe

C8.0.W.) RUGBY, March 16. In a debate in the House of Lords on under-nutrition in Occupied Countries of Europe, the Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr Temple) stated that it was estimated that well over 11,000,000 young children were suffering from malnutrition. “It is the future of the population of the Continent that is involved,” he said. Dr. Temple was moving to ask the Government if it had any information concerning the supply of food for people in enemy-occu-pied countries, particularly Greece and Belgium. The actual death roll was becoming very high, he said, and the incidence of disease showed how much resistance was being weakened. **" ’ There was a prospect in future of a German nation with citizens well nourished. strong and vigorous surrounded by neighbours whose physical vigour and possibly nervous stability and even moral constancy had been undermined by malnutrition. Dr Temple dealt with the plight of the populations of Greece, Belgium and Poland, so far as nutrition was concerned, and stated that numbers of young children were in want of swift help. There were in France 1,900,000, Holland 300.000, Poland 3,500,000, Czechoslovakia 2,100,000. Dr Temple suggested that the Government should make the most generous possible response to a resolution which had been passed in the United States asking' the United States Government to work out. in conjunction with Britain, Sweden and Switzerland, a system of moving food supplies to Belgium, Norway, Poland, Greece, the Netherlands and Yugoslavia. Wild Statements Made Lord Horder, supporting the motion, said that wild statements had been made about famine and hunger, but medical men were more concerned with prolonged under-nourishment which was much more serious because it led to diseases of low resistance, chiefly tuberculosis, and a state of affairs for which they could not find a remedy in that generation or even the next. Lord Horder understood that Germany had not prevented food sent to Greece reaching the people for whom it was intended. Why not try elsewhere? Replying, the Minister for Economic Warfare (Earl Selborne) said that the Government had no wish that its blockade policy should be judged by any other standard than Christian principles, “but when you are attempting to apply Christian principles in wartime, you are really faced with a continuous choice of evils.”

In applying the blockade the Government endeavoured to mitigate the impact on our unfortunate Allies in Occupied Countries by every way it could. Germany now had all occupied Europe rationed and organised in her own interests and she was able to send food from one country, to another, though both might be short of‘food, and keep the level of supply at just what neight she Avishes in any country. The Germans calculated that they Avould lose more than they would gain by trying to preserve the economy and life in Greece since the country was a large importer of foodstuffs and had very little to contribute to the German Avar machine, so they simply let Greece starve, with the cold, calculated brutality characteristic of them. It was not we who treated Greece indifferently, it was the Germans. “Let Us Beware” Lord Selborne, referring to pleas to ship food to German-occupied countries, said that Allied sailors and ships of countries other than those mentioned were risking their lives every day to bring food to Britain. “What justification should we have Tn asking them to risk their lives to bring food, to the exclusion of their country, to other countries which are in no greater straits? Let us beware,” he concluded, “that in trying to save the health of young, people in Occupied Territory, we do not prolong by a single day the appalling degradations and horrors to which they are subject. Let us also beware, lest by. in prolonging the war, we sacrifice the lives of thousands of young men who, from all Allied countries, are marching to liberate Europe.”