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EXTERMINATION BY OVERCROWDING
der where they would. Former German cities like Breslau are
described as almost depopulated of Germans, with Poles tak-
ing their place. The dispatch goes on to say:
"Hundreds of thousands of persons in Poland are constantly on
the move, restlessly seeking a spot where they can grub a living
out of the war ravaged land. In every rail station and junction
men, women, and children await transport. Clusters of human
beings, almost hidden under loads of parcels and cans and other
remnants of what must have been their homes, wait along the
roads or in blasted villages for any transport that will carry them
somewhere else. Life with its birth and death continues even in
these nomadic streams and everywhere you see womenfolk tend-
ing their sick or nursing babies." a
An eye-witness report of the arrival in Berlin of a train
which had left Poland with exactly 1,000 refugees aboard
reads:
"Nine hundred and nine men, women, and children dragged
themselves and their luggage from a Russian railway train at
Leherte station today, after 11 days travelling in boxcars from
Poland.
"Red Army soldiers lifted 91 corpses from the train, while rela-
tives shrieked and sobbed as their bodies were piled in American
lend-lease trucks and driven off for interment in a pit near a con-
centration camp."
"The refugee train was like a macabre Noah's ark. Every car
was jammed with Germans. . . . The families carry all their
earthly belongings in sacks, bags, and tin trunks.  Nursing
infants suffer the most, as their mothers are unable to feed them,
and frequently go insane as they watch their offspring slowly die
before their eyes. Today four screaming, violently insane mothers
were bound with rope to prevent them from clawing other pas-
sengers.
"'Many women try to carry off their dead babies with them,'
a Russian railway official said. 'We search the bundles whenever
we discover a weeping woman, to make sure she is not carrying
an infant corpse with her.' "'
New York Daily News Correspondent Donald Mackenzie
likewise reports from Berlin:
"In the windswept courtyard of the Stettiner Bahnhof, a cohort
of German refugees, part of 12,000,000 to 19,000,000 dispossessed
in East Prussia and Silesia, sat in groups under a drriwng rain and
told the story of their miserable pilgrimage, during which more
than 25 per cent died by the roadside and the remainder were so
starved they scarcely had strength to walk.