NAZI REGIME

Southland Times, Issue 22113, 6 September 1933, Page 7

NAZI REGIME

LESSON FROM RALLY EFFICIENCY OF STORM BATTALIONS TRAGEDY OF CAMPS (United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright.) London, September 4. The lesson from the Nuremberg rally, says the Berlin correspondent of The Times, is that the training and organizing of storm battalions will be. pursued unremittingly. Their discipline and equipment have markedly improved since the Nazis attained power and their potential military value progressively increases. The congress demonstrated that the anti-Jewish policy will not be modified, but the worst of the campaign is apparently over with the elimination of Jewish doctors, lawyers and other professional men, whose lot is tragic. Jewish shopkeepers who are managing to carry on may survive the OppreSSiOn. . , TT The anti-Semitic speeches of Herr Hitler and Dr Goebels at Nuremberg were followed by an unofficial boycott of Jewish shops, and the pickets roughly handled would-be customers. The authorities did not interfere. “If only the German people could see what I saw in that camp they surely would not suffer it to continue another week,” writes Mr Arnold Forster, technical adviser to. the National Peace Council, in describing his visit to a X'.varian concentration camp. “I have haewn to believe that fourteen were killed in the camp in horrible ways and many maltreated. It is like the Middle Ages. I was not allowed to see the prison quarters. Men and boys are imprisoned without trial or sentence. I cannot describe the expression of hopelessness on the faces of that tragic company. The electrified barbed wire around the camp is a wire around all Germany now.”

How the Nazis “convert” the inmates of internment camps is described by a London correspondent who recently visited Germany and inspected a camp in which 2500 men are kept in a disused factory that is surrounded by barbed and electrified wire. The Governor explained that the length of incarceration depended on a prisoner’s change of heart. When the correspondent suggested that conversion under pressure would be useless, the governor replied that a prisoner was not released until after three months’ probation during which Nazis spies reported on his informal and intimate conversations while his weekly letters home were censored and his relatives watched, as a “converted” prisoner could not be returned to an anti-nazi environment. The Governor said that 40 per cent, of the prisoners were at present in the process of conversion. Twenty per cent, were still uncertain and 20 per cent, wore not sufficiently intelligent to hold political views. Although many were of humble origin, the prisoners of all ages complained of the totally inadequate food, which comprised mostly potatoes and coarse bread. They added that parcels which their friends sent were robbed of delicacies, and that they were forced to work when unfit. Several showed badly marked backs as the result of floggings.