SLAVE LABOUR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26289, 22 October 1946, Page 5

SLAVE LABOUR

NON-EXISTENT IN YUGOSLAVIA PERTINENT COMPARISON MADE (Rec. 10 p.m.) BELGRADE, Oct. 21. The head of the Foreign Press Department, M. Erich Koch, described the United States Note accusing the Yugoslav Government of detaining persons claiming United States citizenship under conditions amounting to slave labour as “ a malicious untruth." M. Kosh said slave labour never existed in Yugoslavia, which cannot be said of the United States. M. Kosh said the Yugoslav Government had previously asked the American Embassy to submit a list of persons whom it considered to be United States citizens. The majority of those whose names had been submitted had left Yugoslavia on October 12 for repatriation. The British United Press states that a Foreign Office spokesman admitted that naturalised Americans were being held in concentration camps prior to repatriation and were during detention working as farm labourers. “It is more humane to give them appropriate work than let them sit in prison,” the spokesman said. The Americans thus held belonged to the “ Volkdeutsche ” group or were among those who during the war allied themselves with the Germans. He added that the Yugoslav Governmenf was prepared to hand over any sucn Volkdeutsche whom the American Embassy recognised as American citizens if the embassy were prepared immediately to send them out of Yugoslavia. The United States Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Mr Richard Patterson, earlier told correspondents that slave labour did exist in Yugoslavia in its vilest form. “We have irrefutable documentary evidence that American citizens are being held in camps without charges being laid,” he said.