NAZI REGIME

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 May 1942, Page 3

NAZI REGIME

EXECUTIONS & IMPRISONMENT IN FRANCE. TERRIBLE TALE TOLD. A terrible tale of executions, imprisonment, pillage and humiliating vexations throughout German-occupied France is told in a confidential report made to the Vichy Government, a copy of which has reached London. In a single fortnight, 15 death penalties and 13 sentences to long terms of imprisonment were, recorded in this document. The death sentences were for alleged espionage or for harbouring French prisoners of war and helping them to reach the unoccupied part of France. One woman, a mother of two young children, was condemned to death for having sheltered two prisoners. Her sentence was later commuted to 11 years’ imprisonment. Four schoolboys at Calais were sentenced to terms of imprisonment varying between two months and twelve months for having listened to 8.8. C. broadcasts. For hissing a German news reel in a cinema at Nogent-le-Rotrou (Eure-et-Loire) other youths were sentenced to six months and two years hard labour. The. Prefect of Calvados reported that 400 people were shut up in the prison at Caen, Normandy, in deplorable sanitary conditions. This town was fined a million francs after the cutting of a cable and sabotage of a German soldier’s motor cycle. Among numerous cases of pillage, German soldiers burned part of the furniture at the chateau of Tourelles at Ivry-Petit-Port, near Paris. Nazis installed a pigstye next to a girls’ school and opposite a hospital at AthisMons. At Maisons Lafitte, the Germans seized the covered market for a garage for tanks, obliging the townspeople to ,hold the market elsewhere in the open. German soldiers at Villeneuse-la-Comtesse (Charente-Inferieure) beat a cafe proprietor so severely that he had to be taken to hospital. Neighbours who tried to intervene were held back by other German soldiers, who threatened them with revolvers, beat them and locked them up. German sailors under the influence of drink broke into a school at Bonpland, near La Rochelle, and beat several persons.