MURDER AND RETRIBUTION.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 November 1941, Page 4

MURDER AND RETRIBUTION.

that is best in France, bond and free, has expressed itself in the silent demonstration of protest made on Friday last against the murder by the Nazis of innocent French hostages. Tn the impressive proportions it assumed, the protest and the pledge of retribution it embodies are directed not only against Hitler and his accomplices but against the Vichy camarilla of which Marshal Petain is the titular and’recognised leader. The record of these men was already black. They have incurred an almost incredible infamy by endeavouring to induce Frenchmen. to cringe to and co-operate with the ferocious barbarians by whom their countrymen are being slaughtered. While it has rightly been singled out, as a deed of deliberate and cold-blooded atrocity, the murder of French hostages is only a detail in the dark and terrible record of millions of human beings tortured and done to death by the Nazis in the lands they have occupied. Retribution, in the extent to which it is possible, can be brought within sight only by the defeat and destruction of Nazism, but there is practical sense in a proposal made, in a broadcast address, by the well-known British journalist, Mr 11. Wickham Steed. Commenting on the fact that both President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill had spoken of an inevitable coming retribution for the crimes that have been and are being committed by the Nazis, Mr Steed said he would like to see it announced by the United States and Britain that the authors of these deliberate atrocities, from Hitler downward, would be held personally responsible and would not be allowed to escape a. just penalty. This action, which no doubt would be seconded and supported by all the Allied nations, is well worth taking if only for the reason, as Mr Steed suggested, that it might save some lives. It has to be considered also, however, that the specific denunciation and outlawry of those responsible for atrocities might contribute ultimately, in a very material degree, to the disintegration of the Nazi gang.