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Polish Jews in Reich Suffer in Concentration Camps

January 3, 1940
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Unimpeachable sources told this correspondent today that 35,000 Jews were being held in three Nazi concentration camps, where they were suffering from hunger and cold and were subjected to the most inhuman treatment.

Separated from their wives and children, who were permitted to remain at liberty but who had no means of livelihood, the prisoners consisted mostly of Polish born Jews who had resided in Germany and Austria since the last war. They were being held as civil prisoners because of the Polish war. Among them were several thousand German-born Jews.

In both categories, not a day passes without several families receiving boxes of ashes from the Gestapo. Notes attached to the boxes described the contents. The three concentration camps where they are interned are Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Dachau. Kept on a starvation diet, the prisoners were not permitted to receive food from the outside and were forbidden visitors even once a week.

One of the tortures to which the prisoners were subjected, according to this writer’s informants, was being forced to stand in the open while water was poured over them. They were forbidden to move about and the water froze on their heads and bodies.

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