Though little enough news manages to leak out of unhappy Poland, chiefly because the Nazis are probably ashamed of what they are doing, it is possible from statements made by leaders of the Reich themselves to obtain some fair idea of the crime which is being perpetrated against this victim of German aggression. In a.recent article in the "Berliner Bérsenzeitung," written by a high official of the German Ministry of Propaganda, there was a revelation of German plans with regard to Poland. The Reich, according to this authority, has no intention whatever of tolerating the existence of even the smallest Polish State: the Polish population of Pomorze, Poznan and Silesia, which have been incorporated in the Reich outright, is to be expelled, and settled on Polish territory administered by Governor-General Frank, and commonly spoken of by the Germans as the "remainder area." So far the Germans have incorporated 33,000 square miles of territory inhabited by 9,000,- 000 people. of whom only 460,000 were German. The foregoing area includes not only the above-mentioned provinces, but also considerable areas which were never before part of Germany. Throughout the whole area, which has thus been incorporated, the Poles represent from 92 to 97 per cent. of the population. The "remainder area" consisting of 36,000 square miles includes 8,000 square miles which have been reserved for the Jews around Lublin, so that the Polish reservation into which from eighteen to twenty millions of people are to be squeezed covers no more than 28,000 square miles, less in area than Latvia with a population of 2,000,000. It would be superfluous to point out the utter absurdity of the scheme if it were not for the fact that its successful operation and the driving of the Poles from their ancestral homeland is a crime which has never before been recorded in the history of the world. Over 100,000 Poles expelled from Gdynia and Orlowo are slowly dying in the region of Kielce and Radom, owing to lack of food and clothing, and yet countless trains are carrying tens of thousands of Poles from Poznan, Bydgoszcz and other Polish cities into the "remainder area" or taking them into Germany to put them to forced labour.
These homeless people of Poland are being abandoned anywhere, doomed to misery or death from starvation and cold. Either that, or they are reduced to a hideous helotry which only the perverted imagination of the Nazi leaders could possibly devise. Into the areas which are thus being cleared of the Poles are being dumped those Germans who have been repatriated from the Baltic States, from the Alto Adige (South Tyrol), Russia, Rumania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. The Reich to which they are going is the Poland which has temporarily been occupied by the German troops. And what are the Poles to do about it? The German answer has already been given: "The Vistula is big enough," suggesting that they can either drown or starve. Is it any wonder that Mr. Winston Churchill should have coined his by now famous phrase of the British: and French armies cleansing the Viking soil of Norway of the "filthy pollution of the Nazis?" The picture of millions of Poles crammed into a space which economically can never support them, there to be wiped out by slow starvation, or at any rate reduced to numbers which the aca in which they are imprisoned can support, must be held before the world as a threat of what will happen to other nations should Germany win this war. The Allies full well realize what awaits them should their arms fail The peace imposed in the last war upon Rumania, which was described as nothing to what would be meted out to Britain and France had Germany succeeded, was a foretaste of what was to be expected then. It is but a slight indication of what would occur in the event of Germany emerging the victor from this present struggle. That is an event which the Allies are determined shall never occur, and what is happening in Poland, on the confession of German leaders themselves is sufficient to confirm that determination. Is it any wonder that the Vatican should have sought to voice its protest at what is going on by means of the radio? Can it be at all astonishing that Berlin should protest and accuse the Roman Catholic Church of lying?
That the Church maintained a dignified silence, but proved its point by asking for permission for its Nuncio to Germany to visit Poland and receiving a refusal for a second time. is now a matter of record, and it stands now an uncontrovertible fact that the Reich dare not allow impartial observers into Poland to see for themselves what is going on. Were conditions not as black as they are now known to be, it would have been a simple matter for the German Government to have cleared itself by inviting a number of impartial, neutral observers to go through the areas in question and ascertain what it claims to be the facts. That it does not do so amounts to a plea of guilty, and, in this day and age when the Germans have not ceased from proclaiming their vastly superior culture, a crime of the greatest magnitude is being committed against an innocent and defenceless people, whose only offence was to seek to defend themselves against aggression, and to work out their own destiny in peace and freedom. The irony of the whole business is that this is being done by a nation which when subjected to the Allied blockade. naively complains of war being conducted against German women and children. There is a war being conducted against them. It is being waged by the German rulers in their withholding essential foodstuffs from their own people in order to devote them to the manufacture of munitions of war, and perhaps they find some justification in the fact that their maltreatment of the Poles is no more than that which they have inflicted upon their own nationals. It is a perverted reasoning, but something which can easily be expected from the crooked minds which have conceived of so vast and horrible a crime, and which will not hesitate from committing further brutalities should the opportunity and the inspiration occur. Poland is enduring the peace of the black jack, the rubber truncheon and the concentration camp. The world's sympathy goes out to her in her travail, while the Allies are rendered all the more determined that an end shall be put to these things, and the small nations saved from the horrors which threaten them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.