Page 16

GRUESOME HARVEST
"Filthy, emaciated, and carrying their few remaining possessions
wrapped in bits of cloth, they shrank away crouching when one
approached them in the railway terminal, expecting to be beaten
or robbed or worse. That is what they have become accustomed to
expect.
"A nurse from Stettin, a young, good-looking blond, told how
her father had been stabbed to death by Russian soldiers who,
after raping her mother and sister, tried to break into her own
room. She escaped and hid in a haystack with four other women
for 4 days ...
"On the train to Berlin she was pillaged once by Russian troops
and twice by Poles. . . Women who resisted were shot dead, she
said, and on one occasion she saw a guard take an infant by the
legs and crush its skull against a post because the child cried while
the guard was raping its mother."
"An old peasant from Silesia said . . . victims were robbed of
everything they had, even their shoes. Infants were robbed of
their swaddling clothes so that they froze to death. All the healthy
girls and women, even those 65 years of age were raped in the
train and then robbed, the peasant said."lo
Precedent for these inhuman expulsions was set long before
Potsdam in Romania where, according to a diplomatic report
from Bucharest, 520,000 Romanian citizens of German an-
cestry, men between the ages of 17 and 45 and women be-
tween 18 and 30, were rounded up like slaves and deported
to Soviet Russia. The document said "there were heart-rend-
ing scenes and many preferred suicide to an unknown fate in
Soviet Russia." 'l
The United States had made its own direct contribution by
ousting more than 16,000 people of German extraction from
Latin American countries, obtaining permission to do so by
pressures of various kinds applied from Washington, extradit-
ing them without trial to this country, holding them here in
concentration camps incommunicado and still without trial,
and finally deporting them out of this hemisphere where many
of them have been impressed into slavery by England and
France. 12
These wholesale expulsions of native populations are as
reprehensible as anything the Nazis are accused of doing, and
have caused deep resentment among all classes of Germans.
Had America kept her skirts clear, and especially if she had
denounced them, as she should have done, German respect for