(See Cover)
To the sad people of Europe, preoccupied with news as near at hand as hunger and cold, Singapore seemed far away. But Singapore was cut from the same pattern of conquest with which the people of Europe had become sickeningly familiar, and there were men in Europe last week who could have told the people of Britain and the U.S. what it means to be conquered—what it costs in brutalization and degradation, what man-made famine is like, what it is to be regarded as slaves of a Herrenvolk. France after 1871 and Germany after 1918 were not like Europe last week. Those post-war French and Germans had been beaten, crippled, humiliated, but they had not been subjected to a blueprinted terror. Last week:
¶In The Hague, 30 Dutchmen were ordered shot unless the persons responsible for blowing up a munitions dump were caught in five days.
¶In Bergen, three Norwegians were shot on charges of possessing arms and attempting to escape to England. Total Norwegians shot to date: 39.
¶In Vichy, French officials tried to negotiate about a death sentence passed on 45 hostages for recent "outrages" at Tours, Rouen and Paris.
¶In Greece, the man-made famine was so dreadful that people died on the street like scorched bugs.
¶In Poland, where starvation was oldest, grotesquely emaciated bodies, like half-clothed skeletons, were picked up off the streets and carted away in heaps (see cut, p. 34). In two and a half years some 120,000 Poles have been hanged or shot.
In Europe food is manipulated as a penal and political weapon, to punish and to bribe. In many places food supplies have been withdrawn or restricted in reprisal for minor infractions of Nazi edicts. When students plastered a French town with De Gaullist placards, meat ration cards were canceled for 40 days. In certain areas marked for German colonization, the Nazis withhold vitamins from the population to foster a slave mentality.
In Europe one penalty of conquest is mass deportation to labor camps. Now working in Germany are some 2,500,000 imported workers, of which nearly 20% are women. Smuggled reports from Germany last week said that 150 such workers had been executed for complaining about long hours and harsh treatment, for undermining the allegiance of German workers.
In Europe the innocent are punished for the acts of invisible rebels, under the principle of "collective responsibility." Another weapon in the arsenal of terror is the deliberate snuffing out of scholars, on the theory that even nonpolitical scholarship breeds a thirst for freedom. Another is torture. When a German policeman was killed in the Czech mining town of Kladno, the Gestapo tortured the mayor and all members of the municipal council to sweat out the name of the killer. By the time it was learned that it was German soldiers who had killed the German policeman, the mayor had committed suicide in prison.
This was the victorious "New Order" in operation.