DUTCH HOSTAGES SHOT

Southland Times, Issue 24824, 17 August 1942, Page 5

DUTCH HOSTAGES SHOT

(Rec. 9 p.m.) LONDON, August 15. Hilversum radio announced that five Dutch hostages had been shot for sabotage because the perpetrators of a high explosive attempt at Rotterdam were too cowardly to give themselves up. Dr P. S'. Gerbrandy, the Netherlands Prime Minister, speaking in London on Saturday, said that five hostages had been arrested in the Netherlands because the perpetrators of a sabotage attempt on a German train had not come forward. He said: “Sabotage is one of the real proofs that Hitler, even if he should win the war, would not be able to establish a real rule. It is exactly the consciousness of this which makes this despicable tyrant seize on the means of murdering innocent hostages. But the moment will come when the Netherlands Government, on its own territory, will have the power of trying those who committed war crimes.” Czarniakov, Mayor of the notorious Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw, committed suicide with poison which he always carried, ready to die if the Germans ever demanded the impossible from him. The Germans ordered him to prepare a list of 100,000 names of people for deportation from the Ghetto to a destination in the East Czarniakov knew the deportees would probably be massacred. There have been mass executions of Jews deported from other Polish towns. Near Zwlodzimerz, in Eastern Poland, is a common grave nearly a mile long containing the bodies of many thousands of massacred Jews.