FRENCH PRISONERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 November 1943, Page 4

FRENCH PRISONERS

VILELY TREATED IN GERMANY HIDEOUS & DELIBERATE PLOT A confidential, report on a prisoners of war camp in Germany where French soldiers are interned contains the admission that the prisoners look not to Vichy or Germany but to Britain and the United States. They want nothing of a New Europe. In the misery of their captivity, which has now dragged on for more than three years, they see no salvation except through an Allied victory, for which they long. For nearly all of them it is the only hope. It is hard to realise the intense misery and agony of their position. Far from home, far from mothers, sweethearts, wives, confined within a narrow space, the same wooden huts around them, the same line of posts and barbed wire, the same German sentinels, the same faces of comrades, except those who disappear, the same propaganda drummed into their ears, the same false solicitude of an aged Marshal who tells them to be patient, to have confidence, and the same unutterable cruelty of the German.

The medical section of the report tells of cases of tuberculosis too far gone to be cured, not because men did not complain, but because their butcher masters would not let them be treated until they fell from weakness. The same section records cases of men who have lost the sight of one eye through a brutal blow of a guard, and cases of men' suffering from a bayonet wound inflicted by guards, often in the head! The brutal guards' are as tired of the sight of these half starved men as their victims are tired of them. It is all part of a hideous, deliberate plot to ruin the youth of France, to reduce the birthrate forcibly, to make sure, as the Germans already boast, that if they lose this war they have already won the next.