OUT OF CAPTIVITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 26 October 1943, Page 4

OUT OF CAPTIVITY

1 REPATRIATED ALLIED SUBJECTS DETAILS OF CONDITIONS IN GERMANY EFFECTS OF AIR OFFENSIVE (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.35 a.m.) RUGBY, October 25. “With your trials behind you, you bring us fresh inspiration and new courage; you inspire us to go forward until the comrades you have left behind are free and happy and the whole world is free,” the Lord Provost of Edinburgh declared when welcoming 3,693 British, Canadian, Australian and American fighting men and civilian internees repatriated from Germany, when they landed at Leith today from the liners Empress of Russia and Drottingholme. Of the men 2,301 were sick, 104 were civilians and the remainder protected personnel. The important effects of the R.A.F. and United States day and night air offensive were stressed by many of the returning men. The bombing, one of them said, was marvellous in its precision. “Living houses at the back of a factory were untouched. There is a French prisoner of war camp 100 yards from a factory,” he added, “and only one Frenchman was injured so far as I know.”

A private in the R.A.M.C. said the prisoners would have starved but for the Red Cross parcels. When they were captured in France they were forced to march to Germany, averaging nearly ten miles a day, although they were badly fed and had to sleep in the fields. Another private said British prisoners had been brought from Italy to Germany since the Italian armistice, after having signed documents which were believed to have referred to their repatriation. One man said a hospital where he was working in Crete was captured by the Germans on the first day of the invasion, but that night they were released by New Zealanders. He and others were recaptured on July 1 this year. “The German food given us was simply spuds and bread,” he said. “Once three of us had to live for a day on 3 and ,p third pounds of bread, consisting largely of wood shavings and sawdust. The Germans realty fear the Russians and are treating them very badly. In the winter of 1941 as many as 50 Russians were dying daily in a camp near ours.” The youngest of the repatriated prisoners is eleven weeks old. He returned with his mother, but his father remained behind in a prison camp in the Vosges, where the baby was born. The eldest member of the party is 73. He was captured in 1940, at Le Havre, where he was working for an American business firm.