FRANCE PAYS... But the Prisoners never Return

Camp News, Volume 4, Issue 159, 29 January 1943, Page 3

FRANCE PAYS... But the Prisoners never Return

By

in the ‘Daily Mirror.”

Acting under instructions from his Nazi masters, Laval recently tried to entice French workers into German factories by telling them that for, every thousand Frenchmen who went to work in - Germany, a thousand French prisoners-of-war would be released. ? Reports are that the scheme is. a failure. Lack of response does not mean that the French have lost interest in the million-and-a-quarter Frenchmen who have now spent more than two years in German camps. It means simply that they do not any longer believe that the Nazis will repatriate the prisoners, whatever the price paid. For two years they have paid and paid for those prisoners. The prisoners have remained in Germany. The French are just beginning to appreciate that they have been victims of inhuman blackmail on a gigantic scale. Few of the Nazi atrocities have been more cunning, deliberate and cruel than that of keeping in Germany more than 1,250,000 Frenchmen between the ages of 18 and 40. Languishing behind barbed wire or wearing themselves out by forced labour on a starvation diet, these men have been the victims of a diabolical German plot. When Petain signed the armistice he believed the prisoners would be . freed in a matter of months. The Germans gave no written promises, but their leaders intimated that this was their intention. Belief that it would result in the prisoners returning, led many French people to approve the armistice—it was the price to be paid for the flower of France’s manhood. Through two dreary years the pris-

oners have been held out to Vichy as an inducement for concession after concession. Meanwhile Hitler smiled, for he had worked it out long ago. France was never again to be a danger to German ambitions. The way to ensure that was to reduce the population to the point where France could never raise a large army. Execution or castration of a million or two men Hitler reluctantly rejected for policy reasons. But denying them the possibility of parenthood by keeping them behind barbed wire well, who could protest? Meanwhile the prisoners could be forced to work. They would take the place of 1,250,000 Germans at the front. Germany has no intention of releasing prisoners. The blow is so horrible that the French find difficulty in accepting it as final. Especially as Vichy continues to use the prisoners to blackmail the French into good behaviour. z ■ V- / A trickle of prisoners has returned to France during the last year, the majority because the Germans do not want sick and crippled men who cannot work. But these trainloads of returning prisoners have not been greeted in joy, but in sorrow. “Twelve to fifteen per cent, of men ' w ■ returned are tubercular,” reported one relief society. - Other prisoners have been returned because they were key men in French —particularly aircraft factories—now working for Germany. There remain in Germany 1,266,671 Frenchmen (German figures) working twelve hours a day for the German war machine and still good for the blackmail of hope deferred.