Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1941. TERRORISM AND REVOLT.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 September 1941, Page 4

Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 1941. TERRORISM AND REVOLT.

NOTHING in the records of this war is more appalling than the bestial ferocity with which the Nazi dictatorship is attempting to intimidate and reduce to submission the peoples of the countries it has occupied and plundered. Wholesale murders of innocent people—so-called hostages and others —are merely an item in the carnival of savage crime in which the Nazis are engaging in the occupied countries from day to day. It was reported recently that three French hostages had been, shot by the Nazis as a reprisal for the attempt made by Paul Collette to assassinate the infamous traitors Laval and I)eat. Now the Paris radio has announced that the Germans have shot another ten hostages, whose ages ranged from 19 to 62. as a reprisal for “acts of aggression.” A similar carnival of criminal terrorism continues in Norway, where trade union leaders have of late been singled out as victims, in Poland, Czechoslovakia. Yugoslavia and other occupied countries. A former President of the United States, Mr Herbert Hoover, has predicted that Hitler will collapse in his own overreaching and will be crushed by the vicious forces within his own regime. The hate of Hitler in the conquered countries. Mr Hoover added, would prove more terrible than the blizzard ■was to Napoleon. No doubt Mr Hoover is here on safe ground. Like any other gang of criminals, the Nazis may be expected, when they fall on evil days and perceive the inevitable approach of retribution, to contribute by internal treachery and strife to their own downfall. Undoubtedly, too, scores of millions of oppressed people in Europe are living for the day when they will be able, to turn on their Nazi taskmasters and torturers. There is evidence from many quarters that the spirit of revolt is spreading and rising in spite of all that Nazi savagery can do Io suppress it. The day of full reckoning can only come when the Nazi military machine and the vile system in whose service it operates have alike been destroyed. Well as that is established, however, it is a question whether the Allied free nations might not even now do something more than they have yet done to encourage the oppressed and outraged victims of the Nazis. This might be done by an explicit intimation that Hitler and his accomplices will be held personally and fully responsible for the murders and numberless other crimes that are being committed by their orders. Besides being in conformity with elementary .justice, a formal declaration that no peace settlement will be concluded •which does not provide for the arrest and execution of these monsters of iniquity would count for something—perhaps for a great deal—as a stroke of war. It would tend to drive a wedge between these criminal terrorists and those of their own people whom they have bludgeoned into subservience. Action on these lines would have nothing in common with the “hang the Kaiser” cry which was raised in the last war and ultimately was allowed to die away. In spite of all his posturing, William IT was in the main a puppet and figurehead. No such plea can be made for Hitler, an evil creature who schemed his own way into power and has never possessed any title to authority that would bear examination by civilised standards. Hitler and his associates are definitely a criminal gang. It is entirely just that they should be individually branded and outlawed accordingly.