NAZI ATROCITIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 October 1941, Page 6

NAZI ATROCITIES

IN OCCUPIED EUROPE AT THEIR WORST AGAINST SLOVENES. REVELATION OF GHASTLY DETAILS. (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright) (Received This Day, 12.45 p.m.) LONDON, September 30. The persecution and agony of the subjected people of Europe, where Hitler’s executioners are doing their utmost to exterminate all individuals, even nations, whom they cannot Germanise, is revealed in the ghastliest detail in the latest messages reaching London. Thousands of arrests are being made in Czechoslovakia, where the break-up of the puppet Government and the complete dismemberment of the Protectorate is foreseen, but for sheer brutalisation nothing beats the unrelenting and merciless persecution of the Slovene population of Yugoslavia. Dr Krek, the Deputy-Premier, disclosed the terrible plight of the Slovenesya nation of a million and a half, which is part of the Yugoslav Kingdom. Hitler, knowing he could not Germanise the Slovenes, decided to exterminate them. Gauleiters decreed that all churches should be closed and the Gestapo arrested the clergy. Aged priests were forced to stand in supplication before pictures of Hitler while members of the Gestapo spat in their faces and beat them with their fists. The Gestapo organised shooting exercises “for. fun.” The priests had to face a wall while members of the Gestapo kept shooting over their heads. All religious ceremonies are forbidden, including baptisms and weddings. Intellectuals are robbed of their belongings and sent to concentration camps. Their women and children are packed into cattle trucks and transported to Serbia. The Germans have arranged for the deportation 283,000 Slovenes and by the end of July had sent away 60,000. The people are allowed to take only clothes under the value of £l. The Gestapo travelled from village to village, selecting men and boys for forced labour in Germany, and also girls, aged ft'om fifteen to twenty-five, who will be sent to Germany “for free military use.” Aged people and children are sent south. There is ho food on the trains and - nothing for them at their destinations. The scenes when the Gestapo made “collecting” expeditions were appalling, the wailing of victims at railway stations and the heartbreaking brutality of the parting, especially of young girls, from their homes, were beyond description. They were dragged away like cattle, without a chance of saying farewell to their families. I

Hitler has also destroyed the economic structure of Slovenia, dissolving 1,600 co-operative savings and credit organisations and confiscating their property. The Germans have forbidden, under pain of death, the publication of books, periodicals and newspapers. All the books were taken from public libraries and publicly burned. All Slovene notices and street signs have been obliterated by the Germans, who even defaced Slovene inscriptions, on tombstones and destroyed public' monuments. Thus is Hitler murdering a highly civilised nation in the midst of Europe in the twentieth century.