RUSSIAN INDEPENDENCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25797, 19 March 1945, Page 5

RUSSIAN INDEPENDENCE

STRICTLY MILITARY BASIS (Rec. 7 p.m.) LONDON, Mar. 16. The Red Army, with about 30,000 square miles of Germany under its control, has not found it necessary to place its confidence in any German group or individual, and the Russian Government is on a strictly military basis, says the Moscow correspondent of The Times. A deep impression was made by the discovery that the average German was living at a comparatively high level of comfort as a result of the employment of foreign slave labour and the looting of Europe. German leaders were found well stocked with food and wine, much of which was foreign, and most houses contain something from lands which the Wehrmacht had temporarily conquered. Heavy labour was left almost exclusively to foreigners. In Silesia it was low-grade Germans, besides Poles and Czechs, who worked the mines. It was their toil which brought Polish and Silesian coal production to 100,000,000 tons annually during the war. Under the supervision of the Polish Provisional Government many of these people are recovering true nationality. The liberation of hundreds of thousands of foreign workers who were the foundation of German comfort, at one stroke reduced Germans to the level of labourers, and as such they are working their passage home under the Red Army's vigilant eye.