WAVE OF EXECUTIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 February 1942, Page 4

WAVE OF EXECUTIONS

IN GERMAN OCCUPIED COUNTRIES UNREST IN MANY AREAS. SECRET SOCIETIES SPRINGING UP. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 12.30 p.m.) RUGBY, February 19. A new wave of executions throughout occupied Europe is suggested by reports reaching London. In France a further 45 hostages are reported to have been shot on the Rouen racecourse, by orders from General Stuelpnagel, as reprisals for attacks on Germans. An additional three Frenchment recently have been executed for being “De Gaullists” and two for espionage and illegal possession of arms. One of the five young Frenchmen, who recently escaped in a niotor-boat from France, said it is not generally known outside France that an average of two executions daily has been taking place in occupied France since the armistice. Notices are made public every twenty-four hours. General Frank, Hitler’s governor in occupied Poland, is stated to have issued a circular containing the names of 20,000 Poles wanted for subversive activities. The circular, containing photographs, is now in the hands of the Gestapo. Acts of sabotage at the Skoda works are said to be increasing and seventeen persons recently were killed and a large number arrested by the Gestapo, following upon a strike there. At Kaunas 42 “Communists” are reported, by the Stavangar radio, to have been shot at dawn for “murder, arson and associating with abetting Jews.” In Holland, according to a Dutchman who escaped recently, secret societies of child saboteurs are springing up, whose avowed purpose is to make the lives of the German occupation troops untenable. The placing of sugar and sand in petrol tanks, the slashing of tyres, the cutting of signal wires on the railways and the setting of innumerable booby traps are among the routine duties the children undertake.