RUTHLESS NAZIS

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21037, 13 February 1940, Page 6

RUTHLESS NAZIS

METHODS OF WARFARE ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY NEW CODE URGED (Official \Vlreles3) (Received Feb. 13, 3.lfi p.m.) RUGBY, Feb. 12 Indications are growing that the need is being increasingly felt in Germany to justify to the German people the indiscriminate sinking of neutral shipping, of which 342,357 tons have now fallen victim to enemy action. While Dr. Goebbels’ organisation claims that Germany is master of the whole of the North Sea and the South Atlantic, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung seeks to justify the Nazi methods of warfare against neutral ships by a frank confession that it is Britain’s control of the seas that justifies defiance of all accepted tenets of international law. The newspaper says: “As the means of modern war enables a State to be master of her territorial waters in nearly the same sense as she can be master of her land territories it is impossible for Germany to accomplish a blockade of anti-trade war near the English coast in accordance with prize laws.” Neutral shipping is compared by the newspaper to a bus running be- • tween the Maginot and Siegfried Lines. Finding that this thought introduces quite a new conception of international law it pleads for the evolution of a new code to replace all existing international law and designed, it would appear, to give legal authority to ruthlessness. Murder—Not War In a recent speech the Prime Min--1 ister declared that Nazi raids on British fishing vessels is not war but murder. “ The justice of this accusation,” says the Yorkshire Post, “ is sharply revealed by the news to-day of contemptible attacks by German planes i on a tiny fishing boat off the Yorkj shire coast. Two fishermen and a boy j were out in the boat when two Nazi i planes swooped down and tried both | to bomb and machine-gun them. All , they did was to crouch and make for I the shore. j “ Once their boat was blown clean i out of the water by the explosion j of a bomb. “ Attacks such as these can have no object but sheer frightfulness. Nazi airmen must get the same sadistic pleasure preying upon helpless fishermen as their Gestapo colleagues in torturing Poles, Czechs and Jews. “ Such a story as brought home by our Yorkshire fishermen is a crushing reply to the excuses offered by the German newspapers that British fishing boats are armed to fight Nazi raiders and that attacks on them are therefore honourable and legitimate. What arms had these two men and a schoolboy—a boathook?”