1940-04-22 — Page 16

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HONGKONG TELEGRAPH AND MApril 22, 1940.

10-HORSE THE NAZIS GOT ME

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Truth About 1918

HITLER, Goebbels, and their crew have so often asserted that the German Army was not defeated in 1918 that it is possible they may have come to believe their own story. Certain-

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But that is no reason why the truth should not be told time and again, for the benefit of the British people and the British Army, a very large number of whom were not alive in that: memorable year.

"It seems to me a pity," writes Major-General Sir John David- son, "that the British Army of to-day should not be told of what their fathers and kinsmen did 22 years ago."

Sir John then tells in detail what happened from the begin- ning of August till November, when, in a succession of great! attacks, they drove the Germans northward.

The sum of his account is that the morale of the German Army was completely broken, and in the early days of November its retreat was turned into a dis- organised rout.

It had lost to the Allies, from August to November; nearly 400,000 prisoners and over 6,000 guns. There is no parallel, he says, for such a defeat on such a scale, and so complete, in the whole of military history.

If Germany wishes to boast, aho can boast of sustaining a record defeat, and no words of] her professional lars can distort that fact.

The "invincibility" of the German Army, of which Hitler makes so much in his speeches, is nothing but an empty boast of a lying bully.

While visiting my wife's sister in Coblenz, I met an elderly woman who clicked her tonguo sym- pathetically when she heard that my wife and I planned to begin life over again in America. I had made good mency na bradio singer but recently the Goebbels

pro- paganda office had refused me un actor's permit-one of my grand- parents was so locking in foresight 76 years ago as to marry a Jew.

"It's too bad," sighed my sister- in-law's caller, "that you lost your job. You sung nicely-nothing but good German songs." She glanced ut the wall, then pointed with a halt-smile to a photograph of Hit- ler with Jutlus Streicher, Ger- many's most fanatical Jow-baiter. That actor!" Lexclaimed bit- terly. That was all.

✩ ✩ ✩

SIX days later and 400 miles away, in our home in Munich, my wife and I were awakened very early in the morning by insistent pound- ing on the door.

I opened it, and there stood two pinin-clothes men.

"Get dressed and come with us," they borked.

"Why?"

"None of your business!"

I tried to reassure my wife, tell- ing her I'd be back in an hour or so. But that's the last I saw of her for seven months,

At headquarters I discovered that the old woman who seemed so sorry for me was what we called a "200-percent Nazl." She had felt it her duty to tell the secret political police about my sneering remark.

During the next ten days I saw the cheerless inside of four of Munich's swarming Jails, prisons where cells meant for seven held 20. One day I voiced to my cell- mates the question that was con- stantly in my mind: when would I be brought to trial?

"Trial" repcated one man who looked like a ghost. "I've been here two years waiting for trial. I was unemployed for a year until I was carolled in a labour bat- talion. Then they said they found, a communist newspaper in my kit and sent me here. But I never saw that paper. I never had it, I tell you! Two years here without trial"

We had to sit on him. He was making too much noise.

✩ ☆ ☆

ANOTHER prisoner wore the black breeches of the Schutzstaffel, the most Nazi of Nazi units,

He had been a guard at Dachau, the dread concentration camp out. side Munich.

Those who were released from there were broken men with terror in their eyes, pledged on pain of further Imprisonment not to tell their experiences. -

The boy in the black breeches was in the Munich Jail for two years because he gave two cigar- oiles to n Dachau prisoner.

On the 11th day guards herded a dozen of us into a windowless omnibus.

A grim story of six months in a

German concentration camp

10 and 20, years old-young enough to have grown up in the cause, They are armed with guns and bayonets, but their real weapons are kicks,

I was assigned to a company of the most dismal, unhappy men I had ever seen. They had been lawyers, doctors, former officials-- men of education and among Ger- many's beat. Now, depressed and silent, without hope, they were 'walking dead, men without souls.

"How long have you been here?" I asked one of them. The man looked at me with expressionless eyes and turned away. I spoke to another. Again the expressionicas eyes and he, too, turned away with- out a word.

A third brushing by me mul- tered, "Watch yourself, boy! Talk- ing now means trouble and plenty of it. I'll see you later.".

☆

THAT was my welcome by my now comrades.

Before long I, too, shunned now- comers, suspicious that they might be stool pigeons. Most of us had landed in Duchou because a care- less remark, like mine, was re- peated.

The man who warned me not to talk was assigned to show me how to arrange my bedding and locker.

"Do everything exactly as you're told," he advised. "If you don't, they'll put you in the darkroom- solitary confinement; brend and water, in a room with no light, no hent and a guurd with a big whip."

at five Our day began Breakfast consisted of one cup of

a.m.

"coffee" and a little black bread. At 5:30 came roll call and assign- ment of the day's work. Invariably one of the three Jewish companies Was detailed to clean the camp

latrines.

A prisoner whose work did not please a guard might be kicked into one of the open privies.

Strange things, those Aryan laws; my one Jewish grandparent prevented me from caring my living in Germany as an Aryan, but, having only one quarter Jewish blood, I did not have to clean camp latrines.

The prisoners marched off to work at six-usually to stund knee- deep in mud clearing swamps, or to back-breaking labour on rock piles. It made no difference whether a political prisoner was 19 or 70; if the camp doctor found him -capable.of hard labour, he was..put. at it. Sometimes the older men dropped in their tracks. They were carried back to camp and we saw them no more.

.

✩ ☆

FIFTEEN armed guards watched each company.

If I didn't move fast enough to sult them a guard would go behind me, deliver a spine-rocking kick and roar "Marscht Marsch!" And I marched. How often did this happen? So many times, I can't remember. Had it been once, it would have been vivid memory, but I got used to it, and used to seeing others get the boot.

At noon we returned to camp for lunch. Watery vegetable stew and block bread. We heard that meat was in the slow. I never saw any.

to speak freely. We rarely knew the full names of our fellow pri- soners. It was not healthy to know them, or too much about anything that went on at Dachau. Men who serined to know much were taken away--where or for what we never learned. Spirits' crushed, living in constant dread, preyed upon by unknown fears, we hadn't much desire to talk.

FREE for two houral For what? Tobacco, books and, magazines were forbidden.

We had only Hitler's Volkischer Beobachter to read, the most pro- paganda-ridden of all Nazi house

organs.

Once a month we were given one sheet of notepaper on which to write a closely supervised leiter home. Once a month a censored letter was allowed in from outside. Long black streaks on my wife's letters blotted out reports of what aur fumilles were doing to get mo out of camp. For six months I never knew whether I had been condemned without trial, or how long I was to remain prisoner.

The unknown preyed upon my morale as it did upon the others". Here were 3,800 men, possessing some of the best Independent minds in Germany. Everything Brut might occupy those minds was calcu- Talingly withheld: We were treated

kce dumb, driven cattle; and to be broken to dumb, driven cattle'a spirit and reactions was what we were there for. Dachau meynt mental death. What ambition we had left was fixed upon one object: to be on our best behaviour in the hope of being released earlier.

And so, at seven, to bed. Ten -hours in bed may sound like luxury. In reality they were 1orture for most of us couldn't sleep. Night after night we lay in the dark thinking, whispering our hopes and fears to each other. The wildest rumours swept through the barracks. Goering hud committed suleide; tler was assassinated and we would be set at liberty next Saturday!

Some tortured souls managed to die by their own hands. Опе

prisoner on kitchen detail secreted a plece of tin, slashed his wrists and bled quletly and happily to death in his bunk.......Others knotted a few rags together, went out to the latrines and hung themselves in, the dark.

*

✩

☆

THUS six months dragged. by, day slowly following day with the same brutal routine, until the time when I was led from the barracks to the windowless omnibus that had brought me from Munich.

I was given neither reason nor destination and still no word about a trial. Finally a train took me to Coblenz where, after a month of solitary confinement, I was taken into court.

My grlovous crime against the German people was unfolded be- fore the judges by the State's Attorney and confirmed by the old woman who called upon my sister- In-law that afternoon ages before.

One of the courtroom doors was ajor, and there stood my wifet

They wouldn't let her come in. but during tho 45 minutes may lawyer addressed, the court we fooked at each other, shs' tense and drawn and I a mental wreck

of 95 pounds.

The judges found me guilty and sentenced me to four montha" im- prisonment, to be deducted from the the served while awaiting: trial.

I was free! But before being re- leased I had, to sign a pledge: "Whatever I have seen in a con- centration camp or a prison I shall keep secret from the outside world, Violation of this pledge will be punished by imprisonment in a Reich penitentiary."

My wife and I moved to Bremer In order to lose no time after get- ting our passports for America.

Finally they were issued, on con- dition that I never seek to re-enter Germany,

*

EVEN now when my wife and I are with friends in a. restaurant. I am jumpy when anything is said about Nazi Germany and I lower my voice lost I be overheard.

I cannot yet realize that I ant In a country where I may say what I please.

TELLING GERMANY

THE

TRUTH

Extracts from a talk in a recent B.B.C. broadcast to Germany by The Rt.

W

: Hon. C. R. Attlee, M.P.

TE in Britain believe in freedom. We refuse to make a god

of any man..

·

One of the rights which we hold dear is that of saying just what we please about our Government. Would not you like to do the sume?

Would not you like to be able to say openly what you think about Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, just as the British worker can about Chamberlain, Simon and the rest? It would be good for Hitler.

Our Government knows what the people are thinking and has to pay regard to it. Week by week in the House of Com- mons the Ministers have to submit to be questioned by the The poorest person in the land can have his grievance brought forward in public. Hitler does not know what you think. Dictators only know what their servants: tell them.

Half an hour later came inspre-workers' representatives. tion. The slightest disarray usual- ly meant a day or two in the "dark- room."

That was our universal fear. Men who came back from it did not tale, but upon their bare backs I welts caused by learning National Socialism from o whip. Ignorance of what happened there Rave solitary confinement an even greater dread.

$3w Where were we going? Each prisoner Perhaps to trial? was locked in a tiny cell barely large enough in which to sit. Suits In the side gave ventilation and a chance to peep out. About an hour from the city I saw a road- sign flash by. Dachauf

The camp is surrounded by a high wall, studded with machine- gun towers. Within the wall is a with heavy wire fente charged high-voltage electrletty. Behind that are two wooden fences, the space between them being so-called neutral ground; to be seen there means death by 0 stream of machine-gun bullets.

Behind these escape-proof barri- cades are barracks lodging more than 3,000 political prisoners whose ages range from 19 to 70-Com- munists, Socialists, Jews, priests and back-alld Nazin. Segregated into companies of about 100 men, they are guarded by hard-boiled, 200-percent Nazis, mostly between

Afternoons until four werè de- veled to "exercise in the Prussian manner." Companies marched or half-trotted over the exercise Platz, and at the command "Down"! every man fell forward on his faco. "Marschi Up and over again. Marsch!"

During this pastime came lang intervals not for rest but for In- struction, while standing in rigid formation, in the virtues of National Socialism and how to behave in the Third Reich.

At four we were back in the bar- racks for supper: black bread and vegetable stew. At five came a free hour out of doors, followed by an- other inside. For two hours a day But conversation we could talk. was cautious. Weeks passed before occupants of neighbouring bunks and I had numelent mutunt confidence

British workers have long ago seen through all the catch- words about the glory of war and the destiny of particular races to rule because of their superiority. They have no belief in im- perialism and the domination by one nation over others.

1

We have worked steadily and successfully to extend to all peoples in the British Empire the same freedom which we enjoy ourselves. We know that the conquest of other peoples does not benefit the workers. You know it too. If Hitler becomes the master of Europe, it will only add more millions to those who are under the rule of the Gestapo. Wherever there is dictatorship there is always police rule, terrorism and espionage.

We of the Labour Party have put forward our peace aims. We want to see a world where all peoples enjoy freedom and co-operate together for the common good, We are asking nothing from other peoples that we are not ourselves. prepared to con- cede.

Germany can have peace now on honourable terms, which I am sure would meet all that any German working man or woman: wants, but your Government does not let you know this.

Your Government knows that it cannot win this war, but it. dares not tell you the truth. It has already surrendered in the East to the U.S.S.R.

•

Despite all the power of the Nazi Party and the Gestapo, you, the people of Germany, can, If you will, stop your boys being slaughtered,

We want to see Germany free and joining with free nations. to build a new world built on the foundations of social justice.