VILE ATROCITIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 March 1942, Page 3

VILE ATROCITIES

COMMITTED BY NAZIS IN NORWAY MEN & WOMEN TORTURED. HORRORS REPORTED IN SWEDISH PAPER. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, March 17. Confirmation of the German atrocities in Norway is contained in a copy of a Swedish newspaper which has reached London. The newspaper published two pages of accounts by eyewitnesses of horrors perpetrated by the Gestapo in Norwegian prisons. All indicate the most brutal treatment of the prisoners whose answers when they are under examination do not satisfy their persecutors. Prisoners were beaten till they became unconscious.

Even women were not spared. One woman tells how she was put in a dark Supboard where she was only just able to stand. The place grew hotter and hotter, and she lost consciousness, and when she recovered she was ordered to undress. She refused, and the Germans then pulled her clothes off her. and she was beaten across the back and kicked on the legs till she again lost consciousness. The woman was later released, and she fled from Norway.

Another prisoner tells how he saw a man brutally pushed into a room where there were six members of the Gestapo. When he answered a question they said he lied, and he was then forced to sit on a stool and was beaten till he fainted and fell on the floor, where one of the Gestapo jumped on his stomach and another beat the soles of his feet. They then put iron needles in a fire till they were white hot and forced them under the man’s nails. Another witness saw a prisoner after a beating led to a bath, where his 1 clothes had to be ripped off because they stuck to his flesh. A prisoner said that the hair of women in the next cell turned white after one month of imprisonment, and that some prisoners attempted to commit suicide.

These are only a few of the incidents which are narrated in the Swedish paper.