ONE IN TEN SHOT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21574, 9 February 1940, Page 7

ONE IN TEN SHOT

Executions in Polish

Village

Savage Nazi Vengeance

United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright

(Received February 8, 6.30 p.m.) PARIS, February 7.

The Polish Government reveals that because two Poles killed two German soldiers who were attempting to arrest them, one citizen in every 10 in a Polish village near Warsaw was executed. Entire families were dragged from their houses and lined up in groups. Ten were machine-gunned. M. Stronski (a Minister in the Polish Government in France) declared that only immediate action would prevent German barbarism wiping out the remnant of the Polish nation. He adds that millions of people whose forefathers had been on their native land for 1000 years had been brutally transplanted at half an hour's notice. Poland’s lightning defeat had admittedly been due to the Government’s mistakes. These had been numerous, but Poland had been free only 20 years after 150 years of slavery. “Have not the great nations, free since the beginning of their existence, made mistakes regarding Germany in the past 20 years?” asked M. Stronski. Expulsion Of Jews Reports continue to come in of the persecution and suppression of religious freedom in Poland. An Amsterdam message states that the expulsion of Jews from Poland has already begun, and that all Jewish synagogues and places of worship are being destroyed.

POLISH NATIONAL RESTORATION

Important Allied War Aim

British Official Wireless RUGBY, February 7. The Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs (Mr R. A. Butler), replying in the House of Commons to a questioner who asked if, without prejudice to the ultimate peace settlement, he would state now that those parts of Poland ethnographically Polish from which the Poles were being cruelly removed, would be as effectively repopulated by Poles who wished to return to their homes when the war was won. said: "It has already been stated by Britain that one of the objects for which we are fighting is to vindicate the rights of the Polish people to an independent national existence and to right the* wrongs which have been done them. I cannot make a more explicit statement at the moment.”'

The questioner then asked: “Will Mr Butler see that the statement gets the utmost publicity in Germany in view of the fact that it is reported in the press that 100,000 families are about to be imported into Poland from Germany?”

Mr Butler replied In the affirmative.