CHURCHES DEFY HITLER

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 5, Issue 40, 15 April 1942, Page 2

CHURCHES DEFY HITLER

Not a week passes without a challenging broadcast, in several languages, being heard all over Europe from the new anti-Hitler radio station calling itself "Christian Radio." In its first transmission it appealed to all Christians to "follow the leadership of the priests and co-operate by giving information likely to contribute to the overthrow of the AntiChrist, litiler."

It is crystallised in the brave words of the Serb Orthodox Patriarch when he said: "If we are meant to live let us live in unity and freedom, and if we are to, die, let us die for honour and freedom as so many of our predecessors died."

It is men like Ley who torture priests and believers in Poland so that the American Bishop Hurley wrote: "Poland is a charnel house surrounded by a wall cf censorship." According to the most resent estimates of the Vatican 300 priests have been shot in Poland after being beaten and tormented, and more than 2700 imprisoned in the German occupied zone alone. Of the latter, 1000 have died in prison, while more than 1400 are still in concentration camps, or the stone quarries of Austria. They are to be seen ragged and broken, harnessed like beasts to carts loaded with road material beside wlii-ch S.S. men walk with, whips.

The ferocious enmity directed against the Church is part of the calculated plan for 'crushing the Polish people. The Church is deemed "the bastion against the. Germans" (Gauleiter Weiss); "every ehurch, every cross, every Madonna picture ise onsidered a stronghold for pious people" (Ostdeutsclier Bcobachter. October 2, 1941).

In the words of Cardinal Hlond: "Never yet in the course of its thousands of years' existence has the Catholic Church, in Poland suffered such persecutions and torments as at present under German occupation"