MANY TRAITORS

Evening Star, Issue 23376, 20 September 1939, Page 10

MANY TRAITORS

NAZI OFFICIALS INTENSIFY HUNT If one believes official German sources, the 'Reich is' overrun with spies, traitors, and saboteurs, states a writer in Paris Midi. Propaganda Minister, Dr Goebbels, has launched a campaign to get Germans to share his convictions and his fears. The campaign shows considerable ingenuity in the way of catching the imagination of the man in the street. First, large white posters bearing the single word “ Spying ” suddenly made their appearance on the walls of Berlin and other German cities. Later still, larger illustrated posters followed. They showed a German soldier standing before an aeroplane and some war material with his finger on his lips. The caption had only three words—“ Spies, traitors, saboteurs.” Newspapers and magazines help to make the public “ spy-conscious ” by publishing short stories and serials dealing witli espionage.

The German radio also assists the campaign. The Berlin broadcasting station recently included in its programme a short play entitled ‘ War in the Shadows.’ The danger of honest but incautious citizens of the Reich falling under the influence of unscrupulous foreigners was clearly brought out.

The cinema, in its turn, has set to work. A whole series of short films has been turned out to emphasise the menace of stpying. These are being shown throughout Germany. In one of those films entitled ‘ Who Was It? ’ a group of men is seen sitting in a beer garden drinking. The conversation turns to the fortifications, and each man tries, _ through vanity, and without ascertaining whether he is overheard, to impress his companions that he knows more about fortifications than the others. All this is. of course, the cause of joy to a sinister-looking “foreign agent” sitting at the next table, who overhears everything. The greatest impression on the public mind has been made, however, by the blood-red posters which announce the execution of “traitors.” The frequency with which executions succeed _each other has increased recently. Xot a week passes without a number of executions taking place. The people executed, whose names and ages arc given on the posters, are mostly young men from the frontier regions, particularly the Rhineland and Silesia,