NAZI TERRORISM

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22064, 21 September 1933, Page 9

NAZI TERRORISM

STATEMENTS BY VICTIMS

EXTRAORDINARY REVELATIONS,

LONDON, September 5.

Extraordinary revelations are contained in a book on the Nazi regime, entitled “The Hitler Terror,” which hr s been published by an international committee under the presidency of Professor Albert Einstein, the famous German Jewish scientist, who was obliged to leave Germany because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

Documentary statements are included by victims of the Nazi terror. These reveal how the burning of the Reichstag building (attributed by the Nazis to .Communists, but believed abroad to have been connived at by the Nazis as an election manoeuvre) was arranged as a signal for organised terrorism. It is stated that before the building was fired 30 Nazi barracks in Berlin were prepared as torture chambers, and stocked with steel rods, whips, chains, cords and castor oil.

The pogrom against the Left began while broadcasting stations throughout Germany were announcing that the Reichstag building was afire. Details of the first three months of atrocities are given, with particulars of 250 out of the 500 murders, most of which were accompanied by revolting brutalities. The book contains summaries of 533 declarations by victims of torture, including workers who were beaten to force them to reveal names of their associates. Sometimes the victims were told that they would be shot, and were forced to stand against a wall while Nazi bullets spattered about thenu Thousands of victims, to their credit, refused to give new victims to the torturers.

Repulsive scenes were enacted in dimly lit cellars where men were flung on to flogging benches and beaten with steel rods and rubber truncheons and subjected to indescribably loathsome insults and indecencies. The bloodstained victims of earlier outrages were forced to look on.

Prisoners were packed into cells so closely that they were unable to sleep at night. From nearby cells came the cries of the tortured and the singing and laughter of their Nazi tormentors.

The News-Chronicle (Liberal), in a leading article, says: “There is no recent parallel to the Einstein Committee’s indictment of the Hitler Government. “A careful study of the evidence forcibly suggests that the guilt for the Reichstag fire, with or without Herr Hitler’s complicity, lies at the door of General von Gocring, Premier of Prussia, who is a morphinist, and was formerly an inmate of a lunatic asylum. _ “ Discounting traces of political bias, the book remains a factual record of inhuman savagery, giving a picture of Hitler’s Germany such as shocks the conscience of the civilised world. “Europe cannot dismiss the terror as Germany’s domestic affair. “Hitlerite Germany has become an international nuisance, menancing the tranquility of Europe.”