DEVASTATED CITIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25849, 21 May 1945, Page 6

DEVASTATED CITIES

RECONSTRUCTION BY GERMANS

PAYMENT FOR AGGRESSION RUGBY, May 18.

The distributing and demobilisation of nearly 750,000 German army, navy, and air force personnel began in Northern Germany to-day, writes a correspondent. At dawn great masses of men began to stream southwards from the Flensburg area and sectors north of Hamburg and west of Lubeck to giant prisoner-of-war cages prepared by the British in the North Sea Peninsula Oederstedt, Wesselburn, and Marne areas. Soon the prisoners will be going back to Belgium, Holland, and France to start, according to their pre-service tareds, to rebuild the cities they laid waste. When this work is finished they will begin reconstruction work essential to the Allied Military Government in Germany. The men of the surrendered German armed forces will have to pay in full for the aggressions and destruction by the Third Reioh.

The rations for the average German are equivalent to half a tin of bully beef and half a packet of biscuits. The only drink is water. The vast concentration camp to which the men are bound contains.no huts and few tents, and all fit men must sleep in the open. A further 5000, including some S.S. men, will leave Hamburg to-morrow and another 7000 on Sunday. Five thousand German soldiers were assembled at Hamburg early to-day and marched with full kits to the railway station. They were forbidden to talk or sing, and as the silent column erached the station groups of German civilian police ensured that there was no contact between the soldiers and civilian travellers. The Germans were then loaded into cattle trucks, and went off in trains bristling with British armed guards. Desperadoes from the S.S. formations are being sent to the new Devil’s Island established at Nordstrand Island.