NAZI ATROCITIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25735, 5 January 1945, Page 3

NAZI ATROCITIES

TORTURE OF BELGIANS BRITISH OFFICERS’ REPORT (Rec. 8 p.m.) RUGBY, Jan. 3. Perhaps the most revealing and complete document yet issued dealing with German atrocities during the occupation of Belgium, writes a correspondent, is published by the 21st Army Group in a paper summarising the evidence collected by a small number of British officers during a three weeks’ investigation. Many of the stories contained in the report would never have been obtained if two trainloads of prisoners on the way from Brussels and Antwerp had not been left behind owing to the speed of the Allied advance and sabotage of the railway system. The atrocities were committed against Belgian civilians by four groups of individuals; first, German security police, of which the Gestapo forms a part; .secondly, the Flemish and Walloon S.S.; thirdly, secret field police; fourthly, German Army guards at concentration camps. Most of the report deals with the situation at Breendonck concentration camp, near Malines, on the BrusselsAntwerp road, where over 300 people were shot and some 15 hanged, according to a prisoner whose testimony is included in the report, which covers the period between. 1941 and 1944. The report says the prisoners were not normally interrogated until they had been in camp a month or two. on the principle that their powers of resistance would have declined during that period. If a prisoner would not talk and the Germans particularly wanted certain information from him, he was taken to a torture chamber.

There he was generally stripped naked, handcuffed, and subjected to one of the following tortures: —He was either hit across the body or the face with a truncheon or cat-o'-nine-tails, laid across a table and thrashed, hauled up to the ceiling by a pulley and thrashed while in mid-air, released from the ceiling so that he crashed on the sharp edges of wooden blocks, burned on the body with cigar ends, his body crushed in a press or burned with an instrument connected to an electric plug in the torture chamber. Women were not excused these tortures, and Madame X, who name has to be kept secret, gives details of the treatment she received in the torture chamber. Another witness, who worked in a dispensary, gives details of how Belgian women were stripped and beaten. Executions by shooting were carried out at a range of 15 yards, and prisoners who were hanged were made to construct their own gallows. The report deals in less detail with what happened at a torture chamber in Brussels. Victims were taken there from all parts of Belgium. There are two cemeteries, where some 300 victims were buried. The names of collaborators responsible for the apprehension of the prisoners are given in an appendix to the report, which is being forwarded to the Allied War .Crimes Commission.