GERMAN ATROCITIES

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 5 January 1945, Page 5

GERMAN ATROCITIES

ART OF TORTURE Rugby, Jan. 3. Perhaps the most revealing and complete document yet issued dealing with German atrocities during the occupation of Belgium, writes a correspondent, is published by 21st Army Group In a paper summarising evidence collected by a small number of British officers during three weeks’ investigation. • , . 4L . Many of the stories contained in the report would never have been obtained if two train-loads of prisoners on their wav from Brussels and Antwerp had not been left behind owing to the speed of the Allied advance and sabotage of the railway system. The report says the idea of torture and mutilation is so abhorrent to the British mind that it is not easy to believe that such practices can be carried out in the 20th century by Europeans. The atrocities were committed against Belgian civilians by four groups of individuals: First, the German .security police, of which the Gestapo forms part: secondly, the Flemish and Walloon S.S.; thirdly, the secret field police; and fourthly, German army guards at concentration camps. Most of the report deals with the situation at Breendonck concentration camp near Malines, on the Brussels-Antwerp road, where over 300 people were shot and some 15 hanged, according to a prisoner •whose testimony is included in the report, which covers the period between 1941 and 1944. METHODS OF PERSUASION The report says prisoners were Jiot normally interrogated till they had been in camp a month or two, on the principle ‘that their powers of resistance would have declined during that period. If a prisoner would, not talk and the Germans particularly wanted certain information from him he was taken to a torture chamber. There he was generally stripped naked, handcifflfed and subjected to one of the following tortures: He was either hit across the body , or face with a truncheon or cat-o’-nine tails, laid across a table and thrashed, hauled up to the ceiling by a pulley and thrashed while in mid-air, released from the ceiling so that he crashed on the sharp edges of wooden blocks, burned on the body with cigar ends, his body crushed in a press or burned with an instrument connected to an electric plug in a torture chamber. Women were not excused these tortures, and “Madame X,” whose name has to be kept secret, gives details of treatment she received in a torture i chamber. Another witness who worked in a dispensary gives details of how Belgian women were stripped and beaten. Executions by shooting were carried out at a range of 15 yards, and the prisoners hanged were made to construct their own gallows. The report deals in less detail with what happened at a torture chamber in Brussels. Victims were taken there from all parts of Belgium. There are two cemeteries, where some 300 victims were buried. The names of collaborators responsible for the apprehension of prisoners are given in an appendix to the report. The report is being forwarded to the Allied War Crimes Commission