The Polish Government-in-exile reported today that the Nazi authorities in Poland had shipped large numbers of Jewish military prisoners to the Lublin “reservation,” Lubartow and Chelm, 430 being shot dead on the way.
Escorted by a German military convoy, the first group of 2,000 Jewish members of the Polish Army reached Lublin in rags, without shoes and in pitiful condition, the report said. Another group of 800 was said to have been taken on foot from Lublin to Lubartow.
The prisoners were so exhausted that many collapsed on the road, it was stated. Those who dropped were shot by members of the German convoy. The bodies of 430 were left in the ditches. Thirty prisoners of a third group convoyed from Lublin to Chelm met a similar fate, the report asserted.
The Polish report estimated the number of Polish war prisoners as 700,000 and said that there had been an exchange of large numbers between the German and Soviet authorities, on the basis of the part of Poland from which they came. The Nazis were especially interested in obtaining physicians, it was said. Seventy of these prisoners who were transferred from Jaroslaw, Galicia, into Nazi-held Poland died on the way, it was reported.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
