SMUGGLERS WHO FIGHT.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21112, 20 February 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

SMUGGLERS WHO FIGHT.

RUNNING THE GAUNTLET. * X GERMAN GUARDS DEFIED. SHOOTING RIGHT AND LEFT. A contraband trade in the historic crossroads city of Aix-la-Chapelle, Germany, through which so many escaping British prisoners passed incognito on their way from German prison camps during the war, lately developed into guerilla warfare. Bands of smugglers, sometimes a hundred strong, fight their way into Germany with caravans of cheap wines, iiquers, cigarettes, sugar, coffee, cigarette papers, and various de luxe articles that can be bought in Belgium and Holland for a-half or a-third of the German price. Aix is only a few hundred yards from both the Belgian and Dutch frontiers, which makes it a strategic headquarters for the contraband runners, and the whole German Rhino country is being flooded with a deluge of these goods, ruining merchants and affecting state revenue. The German customs and frontier guards at the passage points near Aix were so overwhelmed by these stronglyarmed expeditions during a few nights at the end of December, that they appealed to Berlin for several companies of soldiers with fighting equipment. Disdaining their former tactics of creeping through the forests, or slipping through fields, the smugglers, who are

mostly German army veterans, driven to a state of desperation by lack of work and hunger, blaze their way through the frontier cordon, shooting right and left with rifles and machine-guns when guards try to bar the route. And the booty is worth fighting for! Sometimes ten or twenty big lorries piled to the roof with merchandise run the gauntlet of bullets. One of tlie smugglers' favourite roads is that between the Belgian village of Lichterbresch and the German frontier post of Roetges. The smugglers drive down this road, which is the main route between Aix-la-Chapelle and Malmedy, like the wind. By a trick of frontiermaking, the road itself is German, but the territory on both sides is Belgian, so if they don't, want to fight they can escape the German guards by simply jumping into the ditches on either side.

A favourite dovice, when pursued by the German guards along this road, is to pour forty or fifty gallons of petrol on to the road and set it on fire. The guards, dashing up on their motor-cycles, (ind themselves blocked by a sheet of flame that may burn for five minutes. In some cases guards on cycles have sped through fifty feet of solid flame to keep up the chase. Several times in December smugglers sent empty lorries down a road, putting the German guards on this false scent, and then shot the loaded ones along a parallel route. Tlie smugglers communicate with their agents in Holland and Belgium by means of dogs. Messages, written in code, are placed in a small container fastened to the collar, and the dog takes it straight to his master on the other side.