Further Startling Evidence in Treason Trial

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 23, 28 January 1937, Page 7

Further Startling Evidence in Treason Trial

GERMAN PREVAILED UPON TO WRECK PLANT. United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright. MOSCOW, January 26. At the fourth day of the Russian treason trial, M. Stroiloff, a former Kusbass mining chief, gave evidence that he was tangled up with German intelligence officers while visiting Berlin. They gave him the choice of a German or Soviet prison and in view of this he agreed to agitate for a German machine in the industry to help impede production of coal. Documentary evidence was produced to support Stroiloff's story. The first foreign witness/ a German engineer named Stein, testified that he was prevailed upon as a patriotic German to participate in wrecking a plant to necessitate the purchases from Germany. A German Fascist engineer, Herr Slesser, reprimanded him for not doing some sabotage. THE LATEST ARREST. CAMPAIGN FOR DEATH PENALTY. LONDON, Jan. 26. The latest “old Bolshevik” to bo roped in by the Ogpu is Beloborodoff, who, while President of the Ekatrinburg Soviet, ordered the execution of the Tsar and his family in 1918. His arrest is a sequel to the detention of Prince Budum Mdivani. Beloborodoff is charged with being a member of the Trotsky centre in Siberia. Evidence given at the trial to-day concerning alleged German sabotage activities is regarded as having an important bearing on the cases of thirtyfive Germans now awaiting trial at Moscow, Leningrad, and in Siberia. Some are charged with being agents of the Gestapo, some with sabotage, and some of espionage. The Riga correspondent of The Times reports that in response to an agitators’ campaign hundreds of thousands of resolutions have been passed at factories and villages demanding the death penalty for the seventeen prisoners, and all who have leanings to Trotskyism. The authorities are conducting an impassioned campaign which extends even to tho schools, where the crimes of the prisoners are enumerated in picturesque language and the progress of the trial is reported. In consequence the children have passed hundreds of resolutions couched in the same bloodthirsty language as those of their elders urging tho Judge “to shoot these bandits, de stroy these hounds of Germany, and put an end to Trotsky and all Trotskyists.”