REVOLTING METHODS

Waikato Independent, Volume XL, Issue 3677, 7 March 1940, Page 3

REVOLTING METHODS

GESTAPO IN POLAND

EVEN GERMAN OFFICERS DISGUSTED

Fully authenticated accounts of the appalling conditions inflicted on German-occupied Poland by its present military masters are reaching (London. .Some of these were mentioned in a recent conversation between Count Raczynski, Polish Ambassador in London, and Viscount Halifax, the Foreign Secretary. Independent reports show that there is a determined campaign by Germany to break the Polish spirit by mass executions and enforced mass migrations of Poles, mainly to the remote areas of Russia. Around Lublin a Jewish reserve has been created, into which Jews are being imported' from the Western Polish region, from the old Reich, Austria and Bohemia. Into their places are being moved Germans from the Baltic, Tyrol and other outlying German settlements. Conditions in the Lublin reserve are described by eye-witnesses as abominable.

Meanwhile, the German victors of Poland are engaged in extermination of the land-owning classes on a scale at least as thorough as that adopted in the worst of the early days of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Only the poorer type of landless Polish peasant will be allowed to remain on his land, there to work under con-

ditions .of-slavery for his new masters. ■' ■ Children as Hostages Jesuits are being arrested wholesale. For the present/the Germans are even more harsh in.'their treatment of the clergy than:the Russians are. ■' ■■': ■ .»■■*£''* *''■?'-. lAII these activities, carried out under the direction of the German Gestapo . Chief, Himmler, are characterised by a ruthlessness which, one is informed, have disgusted even Prussian officei's, who classed these actions as typical of the Bolsheviks at their worst. Whole families have been exterminated in villages and towns where local Germans are reported to have been maltreated. Regular German troops are openly criticising the Gestapo for its campaign of executions. In many cases the children of Poles have been carried off into Germany a's hostages for the good behaviour of their parents.