REGIME OF REGRESSION AND STARVATION

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 84, Issue 178, 31 July 1940, Page 5

REGIME OF REGRESSION AND STARVATION

COUNTRIES OCCUPIED BY GERMANY efforts to break will of POPULATIONS | British Official Wireless. ] RUGBY, July 29. In recent weeks newspapers have printed dispatches concerning conditions in countries under German occupation, but, as The Times says, “News comes in slowly and sparingly from the prisonhouse where peoples enslaved by the Nazi occupation are held under a regime of privation, hard labour and silence. "Every one of these countries is faced with the gaunt spectre of hunger. The food stock has been requisitioned in bulk or purchased for worthless currency by the invading troops. In most of these unhappy lands harvests have been seriously damaged and transport disorganised for some time by military operations. Everywhere a strict rationing system has been imposed, and everywhere exploitation of men and resources is in full swing." In connection with these observations of The Times, it is relevant to note that the serious food situation which threatens particularly Belgium and northern France will" be attributed by the Nazi propagandists to the British contraband control. The speciousness of that claim as far as the countries seized and ravaged by the German armies are concerned is well known, and its inversion of the truth in the particular cases of Denmark and Norway is again exposed to-day in a letter which Professor Koht, the Norwegian Foreign Minister, has addressed to The Times. Professor Koht points out that "the initiative to stopping of overseas commerce to the northern countries was with Germany and not with Britain." The Nazis, in their very first ultimatum to Denmark and Norway, demanded that they should cut oft all kinds of commerce and communication with all countries west of the North Sea. The Times adds: "It is not only with the physical resources of the occupied territories that the Germans are tempering, but also with their moral and spiritual ties.” Occupied countries were deluged with a stream of propaganda from the Press and radio stations which compelled them to follow the behests and model themselves on the methods of the German Propaganda Minister, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. The occupying authorities would like to stop listening to foreign broadcasts. There is very little evidence to suggest that efforts to undermine or break the spirit of independence in the conquered countries is succeeding."