GERMAN MENTALITY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25802, 24 March 1945, Page 7

GERMAN MENTALITY

ATTITUDE TO ATROCITIES “MERELY OBEYING ORDERS” (N.Z.P.A. Special Correspondent) (Rec. 11.10 p.m.) LONDON, Mar. 23. What type of men are the Germans who slaughtered innocent men and women in German prison camps? This thought has often been in mind when accounts of their brutality are read. Judging by a report from the Daily Mail’s war correspondent, they regard themselves as being innocent, merely obeying orders. When the correspondent retused to shake hands with an SS trooper aged 22, who had been a guard at the notorious Lublin massacre camp, the German inquired: “But why? What have I done? I did not ask to be an SS guard. I only obeyed orders.’’ The correspondent continued: “It meant nothing to him that 11,000 innocent men, women, and children had been slaughtered and burned in Lublin. He told me the story of what he had seen done in Lublin as dispassionately as you or I might describe a sports meeting which we found somewhat dull.

“He said: ‘ In all I saw about 16,000 Polish Jews arrive in the Lublin camp. They were driven in groups of 500 to 1000—whole families at a time —wheeling all their possessions with them. They were ordered to undress in the barracks and told to emerge without their clothing as they were to be “ deloused.” As they came out from the barracks they were ordered at the point of a gun to march to trenches which had been dug by Russian prisoners. Men, women, and children all walked to the trenches together and knelt down. As soon as 200 or 300 had reached the trenches machine-guns were turned on them. We could kill several thousand that way every day if necessary. Russian prisoners filled in the earth over them.’” The correspondent asked whether no German soldiers ever protested against being made a party to such foul deeds. The reply was: “We were not a party to them; we were soldiers obeying orders. Polish residents in Lublin and the surrounding districts protested, but no one listened to them.” When correspondents told this guard that the Germans eventually killed the Russian grave-diggers so that they would never be able to tell the world of the horrors they had seen in Lublin he said: “You must not believe such stories. We Germans would not kill Polish prisoners of war. That would be illegal and inhuman.’’ That the wholesale slaughter of millions of Jews was equally atrocious, inhuman, and illegal had never occurred to him.