Hannah+Barrett

This is Matthew Halton of the CBC speaking from Germany. Within a radius of 30 miles of this north German town of Mepin there are six concentration and political prisons and several prisoner-of-war camps. In one prisoners-of-war camp there are two thousand Russians and most of them are dying. We came too late to save them. They’re diseased and starved and beaten. They’re skin and bones, quite literally there’s no flesh on them. They are just bags of bones with swollen ghastly heads. In another camp which I saw, there are twelve hundred Italians in the same condition. When Italy went out of the war these Italians soldiers were in Albania they came over to our side and were captured by the Germans. They’re not human beings any longer to, look at; they’re grotesque monsters who make your blood run cold. I saw a boy about 18 who had just died, there were bones sticking out of horrible holes in his skin. Then I saw some German civilians standing nearby; they looked like human beings and I wondered how was possible? It was early morning and all round were apple trees in blossom and a dozen kinds of birds were singing. How could birds sing here? It seemed impossible, almost a blasphemy that birds could sing in this country of such unspeakable evil. A young white faced little German woman came up to me and meekly asked a question. She said “My father a parson; and there’s one thing that he would like to know perhaps you could tell me.” “What does he want to know?” “Is Pastor De Merlar still alive?” she asked, “You know he was in Dachau.” Dachau, the worst of the concentration camps. Worse even then Buchenwald and Belsen. The revelation of whose horrors are now shocking the civilized world. I said, “I didn’t know if de Merlor was still alive.” I looked at this pathetic little German women and thought, that little creature can’t be a monster, all Germans aren’t monsters. At some length I described to her what we had found in Buchenwald and Belsen. “Do you believe me?” I asked, she shrugged her shoulders “I don’t know” she said. “Do you wonder that the world hates Germans?” I continued and she replied “The German people don’t do things like that, it’s the Nazi’s.” I walked down the street and saw three German police men now working for our military government. They were talking to a woman who was crying. One of the police officers was a handsome young man, the second was a pleasant faced middle aged man, and the third was a smiling old fellow wearing glasses the kind of police men that children love and trust. I took these three German police men into a house and questioned them for many hours. My first question was “Why was that woman crying?” “Because of one of those Polish devils” said the young police men eagerly “you know these Pol’s and Russians are acting like devils now that you’ve come. The women’s husband is a farmer, one of the Pols that worked for him hid a rifle in the farmer’s house then he went and told your military policemen that he was consoling arms and the farmer was arrested. Awful.” “But do blame the Pol?” I asked. They looked at me with surprise. “Of course we blame him it was a dirty thing to do.” “Listen,” I said, “you Germans have murdered millions of people and now you’re angry at one Pol for taking revenge.” They didn’t reply. I said to them “What do you think of Hitler now?” At once they replied “We have no more use for Hitler.” “Why?” “Because he lied to us he said there would be secret weapons that would win the war and now we know that he lied.” So that’s why they dislike Hitler, not for committing crimes that would make Caligula turn pale and draw away, but for failing to produce the goods. “Do you believe” I went on “that you Germans murdered millions of Russians and Pols in gigantic death factories?” “No,” they said “we naturally believed what we were told. We were told that the Russians were doing that to use.” Then once more I tried to describe what the Americans found in that hell hole of torture called Buchenwald. “Do you believe me?” I asked “It’s very hard to believe” said the old policeman gravely. I showed them photographs in an English paper. Pictures worse than anything in the illustrations of Dante’s Inferno. They stared at them and one said “Of course we didn’t know there were things like that.” I continued “Do you think it’s a good thing for German civilians to see these horrors themselves?” They thought it over and discussed it then said “You should put the Nazi’s in concentration camps.” “Hitler too?”I asked and that shook them, almost shocked them. “Not Hitler” they said “the little Nazi’s. They’re the worst of all, the //kreisleiter//; the local Nazi leaders.” “Do you believe me?” I perused “When I say that with my own eyes I’ve seen the bodies of boys and girls who have been tortured, defiled and murdered by Germans?” “I’d have to see it for myself” said the young policeman “Then you think that I’m lying?” I said. He shrugged and replied “No, I suppose that it could happen.” Later on I said “What do you think will happen to German now that she’s beaten?” “Ah” said the old man “it will be alright. We were told that you were going to exterminate us, but here you are and we are being left alone, another Nazi lie.” I said “Did you really believe it when the Nazi’s said that we would exterminate the German civilians?” “Not quite,” he relied “but we were afraid.” I took out a pack of cigarettes and I found I did not have enough moral courage to take a cigarette myself without offering it to the Germans. It’s very hard to be uncivilized, to be hard, and to be stern, severe even in the matter of not offering a German a cigarette in a case like this. I realized then how that how much moral courage we will need in the next few years if we are to make the Germans understand. Perhaps it will be impossible. The majority of the Germans; men and women who have committed no crime with their own hands don’t know why they are hated and are sorry about one thing alone, the fact that they lost the war and are suffering. They dislike the Nazi’s now simply because they failed. It is going to take an enormous amount of moral courage as well as energy to make the whole German people know what Germany has done. In Belsen concentration camp we found 30 thousand people dying. Great heaps of corpses covered acres and acres of ground. A pile of dead women was eighty yards long, and thirty yards wide and four or five feet deep. There was cannibalism under the eyes of the German guards there were bestialities of torture and sadism that can’t be decently told. The ordinary German didn’t see these they saw picture postcards of Hitler kissing children in idyllic Tyrolian settings they didn’t see the egomaniacal monster to whom these barrack rooms of abomination were deliberate instruments of policy. Hitler thought it good and proper that millions should be tortured and murdered to make him, to make him a greater than Napoleon. Never has there been such a phenomena of paranoia. But the Germans people worshipped it. Here were four Germans. A meek little preacher’s daughter and three country policemen. Four out of eighty million, they seemed like decent human beings but obviously there is something wrong with them. They don’t believe that Germany has committed unspeakable crimes and their only regret is that they have lost the war it is plain that the military defeat of Germany is only the first of our problems. The second problem is to make them understand. But there’s one last point, its well to remember the tens of thousands of people that the Nazi’s have tortured and murdered were Germans. Germans hero’s that would not repent and for whom the worst tortures were reserved. They are the proof that not all Germans are Nazi’s. This is Matthew Halton of the CBC speaking from Germany. “‘Unspeakable’ prisoner-of-war camps liberated” Broadcast Date: April 23rd, 1945 Matthew Halton __ Summary: __ Matthew Halton, a news reporter in the Second World War, explains the atrocities of the concentration and prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and relays a conversation that he had with a few German civilians from the surrounding town. This article is ironic because it explains the abomination in the first camps that were released saying that Dachau was the worst; not knowing that there were worse camps waiting to be liberated further into Germany. __ Bias: __ The highlighted sentences and phrases are some of the bias in this article. All though these statements are probably true the reporter is expressing his beliefs as a true statement and absolute, making it bias. When he says “their only regret is that they have lost the war” he is judging this from talking to four people out of the entire country. Also when he said “…apple trees in blossom and a dozen kinds of birds were singing. How could birds sing here? It seemed impossible, almost a blasphemy that birds could sing in this country of such unspeakable evil.” He is making assumptions that as a whole the Germans were evil not just the few that were part of the concentration and prisoner-of-war camps. In the beginning the Nazi party was a minority that became a dictatorship and if anyone opposed them they were sent to the concentration camps.