Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1942. NAZI CRIME AND PRETENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 October 1942, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age MONDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1942. NAZI CRIME AND PRETENCE

JT has now been disclosed that the small British party of ten officers and men who recently made a. gallant and daring landing on the Channel island of Sark did tie the hands of some Germans whom they took prisoner. This, however, in no way alters the criminality of Germany’s action is manacling prisoners of war taken at Dieppe or the entirely bogus character of the outcry raised by the Nazi propaganda machine. So far as Britain is concerned, the only thing initially to be regretted is that the War Office, in a statement apparently based on inaccurate or incomplete information, denied that the hands of any German prisoners had been tied. There is, however, nothing inhuman or in any way outrageous about tying the hands of prisoners in a time of emergency, particularly when the prisoners are held by a very small force, like that which made the raid on Sark. That the Nazis, with their vile record of murder and torture and of every kind of bestial cruelty committed against men, women and children, in occupied countries, and even in their own country, should profess to be horrified at the common sense precaution adopted by the British raiding party at Sark is a crowning and culminating absurdity. In their handling of this matter Hitler and his accomplices have simply demonstrated once again that there is no depth of lying hypocrisy to which they will not descend.

The immediate purpose of the Nazi gangsters in the present instance no doubt is to distract attention if possible from the latest atrocity of which they have been guilty-—one of which explicit evidence was obtained in the raid on Sark —the illegal and infamous removal of British subjects from the Channel Islands to Nazi Europe, there to be employed in forced labour. Obviously the intention is to raise a bogus side issue in the hope of diverting attention from this indefensible crime.

That intention, it may be hoped, will be defeated, but it has to be admitted that in the contest of retaliatory action which has now opened, and which may yet be carried through further stages, Britain is under a handicap which cannot be removed until the war has ended in Allied victory. A lawabiding nation cannot compete, in so-called reprisals, with a gang of atrocity-mongers like the Nazis, because it refuses to sink to the depths of criminal depravity which to the Nazis are a normal and accustomed field of action.

An encl can be macle of Nazi atrocities and criminality of every kind only by winning the war and bringing the authors of these crimes to trial and punishment. There are definite limits to the action Britain or her Allies can take by way of reprisal against Nazi crimes. What the Allies can do and have clone, however, is to resolve inflexibly that when they have achieved victory just punishment shall be meted out to the men responsible for a long and mounting list of abominable crimes —a list to which there are now added the enslavement of British subjects torn from their homes in the’Channel Islands and the manacling of prisoners of war.