VILE RECORD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 December 1943, Page 3

VILE RECORD

OF GERMAN & JAPANESE ATROCITIES AGAINST WOMEN IN OCCUPIED COUNTRIES. METHODICAL BARBARITY. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, November 29. In 11 occupied countries the Germans and Japanese have reduced women to the level of slaves. Reports of deliberate cruelties that are swelling this wave of terror have been collected by representatives of the Allied Governments in London and are now issued by the International Information Committee in a pamphlet entitled “Woman under Axis Rule,” published in London. This record of methodical barbarity shows only too clearly what would happen to the woman of all nations if it were possible for the Germans and the Japanese to achieve victory. The material has been carefully selected from a mass of evidence based on eyewitness accounts and official pronouncements from enemy-controlled newspapers, broadcasts and similar sources. It proves beyond all doubt that their brutality is not just the temporary excess of all invading army but a deliberate policy under more settled conditions. of long-term occupation. The Gestapo never hesitates to use its expert tortures in an efforp to make women incriminate their menfolk. Girls in Yugoslovia have been flogged to death and otherwise tortured to force them to reveal secrets of the guerillas. Many Norwegian women have died in concentration camps, where even four-year-old children are among the prisoners because they refused to give information. Trifling offences are made an excuse for imprisonment, deportation and forced labour. Hundreds of women in occupied countries have been shot for "sabotage” and thousands more are dying daily in concentration camps. In Poland young girls are regularly abducted and sent to brothels for the soldiers. These abductions are not isolated incidents, but are clearly a systematic policy of the German authorities.

When the Germans do not need women for slave labour, they watch them die. Women in Greece, trudging miles with starving children, pleaded with the Germans for food. They were told: “Even if half of you die there will still be too many left.” Yet neither torture nor mental agony can conquer the magnificent spirit of resistance shown by these women. Even the wholesale murders that followed the shooting of Heydrich did not daunt the Czechs. Girls in Russia resist heroically in spite of sadistic persecution. Women teachers in Norway went to a concentration camp rather than teach their pupils the Nazi curriculum. The account is concentrated into 20 pages, but even so the evidence tells its own story of a system without respect to liberty, decency and common humanity. Women in occupied counties are today enduring the darkest hours womanhood has known in world history.

CONCEALMENT OF CRIMES GERMAN ATTEMPTS IN RUSSIA. LONDON, November 30. As the Germans retreat in White Russia they are attempting, as at Kiev, to cover up the traces of some of their crimes. Moscow roperts that the Method used at Kiev is being carried out on a smaller scale at Bobruisk and a nearby town, where the Germans are digging up the graves of Sovet citizens, burning the bodies, and shooting the Russians who have been forced to do the work.