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Jews Left Without Food As Nazis Feed Poles, U.S. Agents Report

October 26, 1939
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The famine-stricken Jewish quarters of Warsaw are compelled to live on their own resources while the Nazi welfare organization is distributing 250,000 hot meals and 300,000 loaves of bread daily to Germans and Poles, two American relief agents were quoted as reporting today upon their return to Berlin from a five-day tour of the ruined Polish capital.

According to a United Press dispatch from Berlin, William MacDonald and Homer Morris, representatives of the Commission for Polish Relief, Inc., said that the worst famine had occurred in the “crowded tenements of the old city and in the Jewish quarter.”

The Americans said that thousands of bodies were still buried beneath the debris in the Jewish quarter, that some of the buildings are “merely heaps of bricks two stories high” and that the survivors have “neither homes nor money nor work.” They reported that gangs of workmen, mostly Polish prisoners and Jews, were cleaning the streets.

The relief agents estimated that 50,000 persons had been killed, hundreds of thousands wounded and 35 per cent of the buildings destroyed, with an additional 20 per cent badly damaged. They said that electricity service had been resumed in the city and that the water supply was normal.

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