NAZI EXCUSES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 6 November 1941, Page 5

NAZI EXCUSES

FOR FOOD SHORTAGE IN EUROPE LITTLE TO BE EXPECTED FROM UKRAINE. CONDITIONS UNDER GERMAN NEW ORDER. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, November 4. The Germans now admit that the famous granary, the Ukraine, cannot fulfil the popular expectation of a new, assured supply of food. The organ of the “Reich Food Estate” takes care to explain that “the German food supply must be assured primarily by our own production,” and it offers as an excuse for the failure to deliver the goods the argument that the Ukrainian food exports have declined from 10,000,000 to 2,000,000 tons a year in the last 15 years because of the Bolshevik administration.

In fact, the decline in the grain surplus for export has been caused by the enormous growth of the Russian population in the last few decades.

In Germany itself the fuel shortage is causing a reversion to obsolete methods of cultivation. A west Ger man newspaper complains that “work is being irresponsibly executed . with tractors where horses or oxen would suffice” and urging the farmers not to use tractors except when the work is beyond the capacity of animals.

To the fuel difficulties are added the agricultural sabotage in occupied Europe. A German newspaper in Czechoslovakia reports that a high official of the Protectorate’s Ministry of Agriculture has been shot for having intentionally neglected his farm, where the milk production decreased to 16 litres a day from 20 cows and where an order to grow sugar beet had been disregarded. This official had even instituted disciplinary procedure against an officer of the Ministry of Agriculture who discovered his mismanagement. Swedish workers also are unwilling to work for Germany, states a Swedish newsaper discussing the German attempts to recruit them. It points out that of 2,500,000 foreign workers in Germany all but a few are prisoners of war.

Other countries are unable to escape the consequences of Germany’s “new order,” as appears from an official German account of the recent ItaloGerman economic “negotiations” in Rome. Though Italy is exporting to Germany large quantities of foodstuffs such as rice, fruit and olives, the German statement refers to “goods which are to be shipped to Italy to alleviate the present food situation’ without specifying what these goods will be. The hungry senior Axis partner has taken steps to obtain solid food in exchange for promises to feed the still hungrier junior partner. This perhaps explains Mussolini's words on the occasion of the interment of the remains of Goffredo Manueli, a poet and follower of Garibaldi; “Nobody should draw arbitrary conclusions from our silences, which are often protracted and sometimes necessary. We do not forget.”