“Herr Scuttler!”

Manawatu Times, Volume 64, Issue 302, 22 December 1939, Page 7

“Herr Scuttler!”

HITLER’S FEARS OF LOSING WAR NEW YORK, Dec. 30. The United States cruiser Tuscaloosa arrived to-day with 579 survivors of the 32,000-ton /German liner Columbus, which was scuttled by her crew some 400 miles north of Bermuda when a British warship appeared. Tho survivors were taken to Ellis Island, where the immigration authorities ruled that they were distressed seamen entitled to enter the United States legally without visas, but that they must re-ship to a foreign country within 60 days. The liner Columbus is tho eighteenth Nazi merchant ship scuttled since tho outbreak of the war. When hostilities commenced, she took refuge at Vera Cruz, Mexico. She is said to have been laden with 30,000 barrels of oil and with food for Germany. In the neutral as well as in the British press, the practice of scuttling is inevitably interpreted as indicating the German Government’s despair of winning the war. The Daily Herald, in a leading article headed “Herr Scuttler,” asks why the Columbus sent herself to the bottom. “There was no need for it,” says the paper. “She was in no danger of capture. She need never have left Vera Crub. She could have run into any United States harbour and stayed thero for the duration of the war and gone homo after the war—if Germany had won. “This hari-kiri policy can mean just one thing: that the Germa# High Command fear they are going to lose the war and that, at the end, their ships will become Allied property.” GERMANS NOT TOLD OF LOSS OF COLUMBUS BERLIN, Dec. 20. Neither the press nor the radio has yet announced the scuttling of the Columbus.