NAZI BRUTALITY

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21196, 20 August 1940, Page 7

NAZI BRUTALITY

BOMBING OF REFUGEES RIDE OVER BODIES STORY BY EYE-WITNESS (United Press Assn.—Elec. Tel. Copyright) LONDON. August 18 The horrors of the calculated German brutality to refugees during the advance through Belgium and France were vividly portrayed by the war correspondent. Mr Gregory Clark, in a broadcast talk. Describing, from his own personal experience, in pathetic detail, the bombing of crowds of refugees in Enghien by Stukas bombers, and in Toumai by a fleet of Heinkels, Mr Clark said: “The fact that we have to face is that this supremest of all brutalities was not by any stretch of imagination an incident, an accident, or a local and ill-advised course, but part of the strategy of the German High Command, a fully considered and carefully calculated feature of a programme plotted months, possibly years, in advance. The civilian population of Belgium, Holland and Flanders was used by the German military genius precisely as women and children were used by savage tribes, and driven ahead of the advancing troops. Panic-Stricken People “With a complete and contemptuous understanding of the humane spirit of the French and British, the Germans so bombed certain towns that the highways which the Allied armies most needed were suddenly thronged with one-way traffic so dense, so panic-stricken, so beyond any human control, that movement of the Allied a.mies was rendered hopeless. “Beyond human control, but not beyond inhuman control. Those roads the Germans wished to use they simply cleared with the mach-ine-gun, and those on the roads they required who were panic-stricken they swept methodically with bombing and machine-gunning aeroplanes. The army traffic which followed simply rode over the dead bodies of people who had not had enough sense to get out into the fields and stay there.”