OPEN THREAT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 October 1942, Page 3

OPEN THREAT

NOW MADE BY LAVAL ENSLAVEMENT OF FRENCH WORKERS. IN OBEDIENCE TO GERMAN ORDERS. (By Telegraph—Press Association— Copyright) LONDON, October 21. Every factory in France will be levied to provide workers for Germany. Laval revealed this in his latest appeal to French workers to volunteer for work in German war factories.

Laval said he had made an agreement with Germany to provide 100,000 workers in addition to 50,000 who had already “volunteered.” If these 100,000 workers were obtained, the wives of French prisoners in Germany would be alowed to join their husbands and work beside them. The French authorities have threatened to shoot workmen from the Paris Gnome-Rhone aeroplane engine works who have been selected for transfer to Germany if they try to escape, reports the correspondent of the “Daily Mail ’ on the French frontier. The Marseilles police have _ taken special precautions against growing unrest. The Lyons strikers have returned to work, but it is understood that they will strike again if Laval persists in conscripting labour for Germany. The Berlin radio says that a general strike at Lyons was nipped in the bud. In Vichy, Marshal Petain interviewed the Mayor of Lyons. The French Generals Frere and Picquendar have been dismissed because they opposed Laval’s desire that the. French Army should be ready to resist an Anglo-American landing in France or French Africa, says the British United Press correspondent on the French frontier. WITHOUT PARALLEL IN HISTORY OF NATIONS. BRITISH COMMENT ON LAVAL TACTICS. (Special P.A. Correspondent.) LONDON,. October 21. Comment in London on Laval’s latest speech is scathing. “Whining” and “crawling” are typical adjectives. The “Evening Standard,” commenting on the statement that French wives who are willing to go to Germany may work near their imprisoned menfolk, says: “The incident is without parallel in the history of great nations. It belongs to the record of the dope pedlar and the promoter of the white slave traffic.”

Pointing out that Germany’s principal import at present is not food or arms, but human beings, the “Financial News” asks, “Can Germany solve the problem of making slave labour pay? No other nation in history has ever been able to solve it, but no other slave-owning State has combined so high a degree of ruthlessness with extreme efficiency.

“The results of this gigantic experiment will determine to a large degree the result of the race which is now going on between the Allies and the Axis for the production of machines to secure a lead in arms output. Thus it will have a vitally important influence on the war.”

The paper adds that the fact that the demands on Vichy and Denmark have received much publicity while little or nothing has been heard of similar demands on other Continental countries does not mean that none have been made.