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THE LEAGUE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS |
511 Chester-Ninth Bldg. | |
E U R O P E s p e a k s Reliable inside material from Nazi-Europe |
[US-Ausgabe] No. 7, December 20, 1942 | |
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All non-German males between the ages of 18 and 60 in the General Government of Poland have been drafted for the so-called Building Service which is organized on military lines. Jews and Gypsies are excluded. Length of service and date of draft will be announced by the special chief of the service.
The Nazis, according to this order, will use the entire male population of Poland from now on for the building of houses, streets, bridges, fortifications and other constructions necessary for the continuance of the war. However, this is not the main purpose since the Nazis without this measure have already sent one million Poles to the Reich as forced labor and have not released the Polish prisoners of war. They can have as many Polish workers as they want through raids or by refusing to issue ration cards. The main purpose of the Building Service is to register the entire male population.
Why are the Nazis arresting a whole people? The answer is that the most important strategical war communication lines lead through Poland. Poland, however, is in open revolt. All attempts of the Nazis to pacify the Poles have failed. This outrageous measure is a last attempt to end the war behind the battlelines. It was preceded by some of the strangest episodes of this war.
Soon after the end of the Polish war, the Nazis tried to form a Polish Quisling government. They bargained with Russia for a Polish Prince who lived in his estate in that part of Poland which had been annexed by the Russians. This high aristocrat, on whose support the Nazis counted, refused.
They had a similar experience with the former Prime Minister of Poland, Professor Kasimir Bartel[1]. Bartel had been Mayor of Lemberg in 1939. When the Russians occupied the city, they left him in office in spite of his declaration that he would stay a liberal. When the Germans entered Lemberg, after the start of the Russo-German war, Bartel stayed in this city. The Nazis are bad psychologists. They were convinced that Bartel had no character because he had cooperated with the Russians. They were sure that he would also cooperate with them. They ordered him to Berlin and offered him the leadership in a Quisling government, but Bartel refused. He was sent back to Lemberg and finally killed in a concentration camp.
A third attempt died prematurely. The Nazis had counted on the former Polish Minister, Kozlowski[2], who had fled from the Russian occupied part of Poland to the one occupied by the Germans, but he was mentally deranged and even the Nazis did not
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dare to make him a leader. Meanwhile, the situation in Poland became more and more critical. Bombing of bridges and arsenals, derailing of trains, and guerilla activity coincided with the freezing of the German offensive. Hitler decided that something had to be done about Poland.
During a discussion of the situation in Berlin between Hitler , Frank[3], and others the former German ambassador to Poland, von Moltke[4], proposed that Alfred von Wysocki[5] be approached. Mr. von Wysocki, a man 70 years of age, is at present the head of a charitable organization in Warsaw. He had been born in Krakau and was an Austrian state official in 1900. During the last world war, he had been assigned Chief of the Civil Administration in Lublin, then capital of the Austrian occupied Russian-Poland. In 1918, he entered the foreign service of Poland, was cabinet chief during the Russian-Polish war, and later became Polish Minister in Stockholm. From 1932 to 1933, he was Polish Minister in Berlin, and until 1939, Polish Ambassador in Rome. This tall and lean fellow with glasses gave the impression of being the eternal loyal civil servant, - loyal to any authority. For this reason, Mr. Moltke recommended him as mediator. In January, 1942, von Wysocki was called to Frank and treated with extraordinary politeness. Then something happened which must have struck Wysocki like an hallucination after two years of a policy of annihilation. Frank asked him to make contacts with the Polish illegal movement, the members of which were on the list of the Gestapo, and make to them an offer of peace. Wysocki agreed and received a document which had been drafted by a commission composed of von Moltke, Secretary of State Buehler[6], and General Hartmann[7]. The document contained the following proposals:
- The illegal organizations of Poland are to discontinue illegality and form a united body which will act in an advisory capacity to the Governor.
- The General Government will be declared an autonomous economic unit and the harvest will stay in Poland.
- A partial amnesty will be declared and political prisoners in jail or concentration camp will be released. Questions of prisoners of war, the press, and other problems will be discussed with the above proposed body.
Wysocki went to Warsaw and succeeded in getting the proposals into the right hands. The illegal leaders convened. The decision made by the illegal leaders as a result of the discussion deserves to be listed among the most cherished documents of courage and pride, and should be known to the world. These men who had faced nothing but death and terror for two years, suddenly held in their hands the possibility of life and security, but they decided to refuse, and, in addition, to resolve that never in the future would they bargain with the forces of occupation. The illegal Polish press published this declaration:
"Discussions by persons not authorized by the Polish government (in exile) and any deals made by such persons will be considered void. Any Pole who dared to bargain the future of Poland will be considered guilty of high treason against the Polish people and the Polish State.
"Attempts of the German administration to split the integral unity of the Polish country with the aid of maps, in which the borders were falsified in order to limit Polish national interests to the district of the General Government and exclude other Polish territory, prove to the world that Germany tried to annihilate nine million Poles in the Western old Polish
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provinces and to confiscate their property and their soil. With an enemy who dares to disregard the obvious rights of the Polish people, no Pole may have any political contact."
So ended the Nazi attempts to form Quisling organizations in Poland. They failed because these illegal fighters prefer hell to capitulation. The immediate result of the refusal was the arrival of Himmler in Poland. One hundred hostages were shot at once in Anin near Warsaw. This shooting did not discourage the Poles. The introduction of the Building Service is the answer of the Germans. They are arresting a whole people.
The following report comes from a high official employed in the economic administration of the Third Reich. He confirms the analysis of German economy made by numerous American and British economists.
"The main bottleneck in the German war industry was, and still is, the shortage of manpower. In spite of the fact that Sauckel was relatively successful, there is still a shortage of about 500,000 workers in the armaments industry, 300,000 agricultural workers, and 60,000 miners. The civil administration has a shortage of about 150,000 persons. The reserves of female workers are exhausted, and even Sauckel's methods of combing out cannot materially alter the situation. It has become obvious that the foreign workers, prisoners of war as well as civilians, do not live up to the expectations placed upon the results of their labor.
"On the food front, again, the war has not taken the course which the authorities of the Third Reich had anticipated in their blueprints. Three grim winters stultified all calculations, and in order to keep up the present low level of food supply, the authorities have been forced to draw prematurely upon the reserves destined for the fourth winter of war. The shortage of fodder has become so acute that the peasants have been forced drastically to reduce their livestock. This is the reason why it has become possible to increase the meat rations a little. I want, however, to stress the point - in order to prevent people coming to the wrong conclusions - that the food situation is still better now than it was during the `turning winter' of the last war.
"The present coal production which has increased since the outbreak of the war by 2%, although 60,000 miners were called up, can be maintained at this level only by overtime and Sunday work. But all experts agree that the present pace of work cannot be kept up for long. Industry working for civilian consumption will receive only 27% of its coal allocation. The amount of coal exported will also lag far behind the figure fixed by the Plan. The general public is obviously not clear as to how far the consumption of coal has been increased by the production of substitutes. The annual production of synthetic oils and of synthetic rubber requires an amount of 32 million tons of bituminous coal and 41 million other coal.
"To satisfy the war requirements of the armament industry, German coal produc-
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tion would have to increase by 170 % as compared with the pre-war production; the production of magnesium would have to be increased by 200 %; an increase of 250 % would be required in the production of leather substitutes and of 1,200 % in the production of Buna. These, however, are all figures whose attainment not even the most optimistic Nazi planners dare to expect.
"Although further rationalization is still in process and although the main efforts are concentrated upon improving the production of fuel and machines, it is becoming increasingly obvious that German war industry has reached the limit of its productive capacity. It is hardly possible further, to cut down the allocation of raw materials and manpower for the needs of the civilian population. In the textile industry, for instance, the following schedule is operated: 30 % of the production goes to the armed forced; 30 % to the civilian needs; 40 % to technical and administrative purposes. Production of shoes is restricted to such a degree that hardly the amount needed by the civilian population is produced.
"The transport system is heading towards inevitable catastrophe. It is estimated that there is a shortage of 15,000 engines. Quality and quantity of rolling stock is becoming completely inadequate. One hundred thousand trucks are used in territories outside Germany, whereas only 20,000 foreign trucks are used in Germany. Only 2 to 4 % of the rolling stock is available for the transport of food. As long as the transport crisis is not solved, raw materials and food from the East cannot be made available in quantity for the German war economy. The German propaganda about the economic exploitation of the East is practically nothing but bluff. Just recently I read the report of an expert who expressed the opinion that it will take another two years before the Russian industrial centers in the conquered territories will be in a position to attain even 10 % of their normal production."
The Belgian Corporation for Agricultural and Food Supplies, an organization fashioned at the German "Reichsnaehrstand", has ordered the registration of cattle. Each farmer has to apply for a Livestock Card for which a tax is paid by him. He also has to deliver to the Germans each third cow he owns. The remaining cows are to be at the disposal of the Germans at a later date.
In many villages, the peasants rebelled against this robbery. The Brussel "Nouveau Journal"[8] described a scene from Longchamps, one of the villages in rebellion where the Germans sent thirty-two Nazis and 230 armed police. They were under orders to confiscate all cattle in the event the peasants should refuse the registration and the acceptance of Livestock Cards. When the police arrived, the paper states, the peasants had assembled on the steps of the Church. Their leader called the law to register, unconstitutional. There were 100 peasants against 260 armed men. Therefore, they had to surrender, but there would be a day of reckoning. After the war, those Belgian officials who had helped the Germans in their robbery would be hanged with the same ropes they brought to lead the cattle away.
In the village of Champs, the male population assembled in the yard of the peasants whose cattle would be taken first. They refused to leave and claimed to be the
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brother, or uncle, or father, or cousin, or brother-in-law of the peasant in question. They cheered the peasant not to give in. They called: "Do not accept the card, - fight, - don't give them your money; do not give in to these rats!" The peasant did not surrender and the confiscation of all his cattle was pronounced. The peasant locked the barndoor. The police, the newspaper states, had to grab the peasant and had to crush the barndoor. The peasant was ruined. This terrorism was successful and the other peasants surrendered their cattle. The police saw the peasants at a distance of 200 yards standing together in silence but with threatening looks. In the Belgian province of Luxemburg, more then 9,000 peasants were affected by this order.
From a letter sent in August.
"In spite of all these hardships, we hold on and endure because you have need of us, because we have confidence in you, and above all, in our wonderful Grand Duchess for whom the people feel a great affection and deep gratitude.
"On the occasion of Dr. Ley's visit, German soldiers were stationed all along the railway track between Wasserbillig and Luxemburg at intervals of one hundred metres. The Gauleiter and Dr. Ley noticed one of the workers there wearing a "Charlotte" brooch on his neckcloth. "What is that you are wearing?", Dr. Ley asked him. "A neckcloth", answered the worker. "No, but that medal, isn't it a Charlotte?" "Yes!" "Do you love her?" "Yes, I do love her", was the answer. "Take it off immediately; this time nothing will happen to you, but remember, Charlotte will never come back again."
In many houses in Luxemburg, the portrait of the Grand Duchess Charlotte can always be seen, but one has to be continually on one's guard against the Gestapo and so the Luxemburgers have camouflaged the portrait of their ruler behind another portrait or picture, as for example, a picture of the pope, or oftener, a picture of the Virgin Mary, the Consolation of the Afflicted.
The opposition of the working classes to every German has never been as great as it is to-day. Even orators as distinguished as Gauleiter Simon and Dr. Ley failed to find phrases attractive enough to win the support of the workers. Nevertheless, the sufferings and sacrifices of the good Luxemburgers are almost as much as they can bear. They are on the verge of nervous collapse.
As the period during which the district assembly was to meet at Echternach approached, repeated acts of sabotage took place on the Luxemburg-Wasserbillig Railway line near Manternach. In spite of the enormous sums offered in reward (1 Million Reichsmark) and the endless searches and arrests in the surrounding districts, the "Boches" found no trace of the culprits. In the course of the searches, especially at Echternach, they took possession of the food reserves of the population.
In their census on October 10, 1941, the Germans tried to force the Luxemburgers to declare that they were of German nationality. In addition, the Luxemburgers were required to admit on the census form that their active language was German.
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In spite of the fact that all sections of the population were subjected to the most extreme pressure, including the threat of imprisonment, concentration camp, and deportation to Poland or Russia, more than 95 % of the people refused to make these declarations. Then at the last moment, the Gauleiter announced that the census would not take place in the form originally intended. It was not long before the Luxemburgers felt the consequences of this plebiscite the most dramatic in their history. On the pretext of taking action against a secret Luxemburg organization, which had worked against the invader in every part of the Grand Duchy, the Germans arrested the Luxemburg patriots en masse. They were subjected to the most cruel treatment, as a result of which a number died. Thousands of people, both young and old (even men of sixty), were imprisoned in the S.S. concentration camp at Hinzert in the Hunsrueck region, where they suffered the most inhuman treatment until they collapsed from hunger, cold, and forced labor.
Thousands of young Luxemburgers are forced to join the "Arbeits-Dienst" (Labor Service) for six months or longer. There, they are under military discipline, but they refuse to submit to the German yoke. They resist, following in the footsteps of their elders and parents. When the day of departure comes, thousands of their compatriots assemble around the station at Luxemburg; then, in spite of the presence of hundreds of German police, they start singing their national songs, and to the sound of these songs, the train leaves Luxemburg.
On the occasion of the national day of celebration in January, the national flag of Luxemburg was flying on all the highest points, - for example, on the chimney stacks of the blast furnace at Esch and even on the buildings which had been taken over by the Nazis .
The workers of Petange refused to take part in a meeting at Rodange where the Gauleiter was speaking. They were deported with their families and later on separated from their wives and children who were also imprisoned in Germany. In their homes in Petange, German families were installed.
