RELATIVES OF BENES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 April 1943, Page 3

RELATIVES OF BENES

SENT TO CONCENTRATION CAMPS.

NAZI ATTEMPT TO SILENCE \ CZECH PRESIDENT.

(By Telegraph—Press .Association—Copyright) LONDON, April 27. The Prague radio announced on behalf of the Chief of the Gestapo that an additional number of relatives of the Czech President, Dr. Benes, have been sent to a concentration camp as a result of “Benes’s inciting speech at the weekend and in accordance with the warning given on February 13.” The Berlin radio on February 13 had stated that a number of Czech intellectuals had been sent to concentration camps in reprisal for a broadcast by Dr. Benes from Britain, and the radio then threatened other arrests if Dr. Bernes broadcast. The Germans last December announced that all of Dr Benes’s relatives had been placed in concentration camps in Germany. A British Official Wireless report of the latest announcement from Prague says that the radio stated that “a large number of persons who are friends of Benes have been arrested.” President Benes’s speech last February, like most of his war time statements, was a call to the Czechoslovaks to resist the enemy in every feasible manner and an assurance of the coming Allied invasion. In his broadcast last weekend he forecast decisive military events very soon.