The announcement that Great Britain and France will shortly issue a declaration to the world denouncing German atrocities in Poland again draws attention to the ghastly thing which is happening in that unfortunate country. Ever since the beginning of December there has been a regular flood of reports showing that what amounts to a veritable campaign of extermination is being energetically prosecuted agains the Poles, On December 7, the "Daily Mail" published an interview with a young Polish woman, wife of an officer who had escaped from Poland, in which she said: "The streets of Warsaw are lined with starving children pleading for scraps. The Germans have cut off all food supplies, and their soldiers say they don't see why the Poles should eat, while their own families are starving." "We came," she added, "to regard the Nazis' policy since the fall of Warsaw as one of deliberate extermination."
Havas reports that between 2,000,000 and 5,000,000 Poles have already died in German-occupied regions from hunger, cold, epidemics and punitive action by the German Army. Death penalties are being meted out to men who took part in the insurrections of twenty-two years ago, down to men who directly or indirectly took part in Poland's military operations in resistance to the German invasion. If that means anything at all it means that prisoners of war are now being executed, the hideousness of the whole business being the enthusiasm with which minor officials are carrying out the policies of their superiors. The British Foreign Office announced on December 6 that the Polish Ambassador had informed Lord Halifax that millions of Poles had been turned out of their homes and deprived of their possessions and that in the last few days many of the better known citizens had been executed "to break the spirit of the population." It is Belgium of 1914 all over again, but om a terrificly larger scale and it is to be anticipated that when the Allied charges are made, the Germans will reply with the same old franc tireur story with which they sought to justify the killing of so many innocent civilians then. On that occasion as on this it was all done with the set purpose of endeavouring to strike terror in the hearts of the enemy. It will succeed no more now than it did then, and the Germans should by now have realized it, unless these present atrocities are really designed to secure for the German people that much-discussed lebensraum by the elimination of the people whose country they have invaded and wrecked.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.