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Jews, Emigres Trapped in Paris Reported ‘in Mortal Terror’

June 20, 1940
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Jews and foreign political refugees who were unable to escape from Paris before the Nazi occupation “are in mortal terror,” it was reported by the United Press today in a dispatch from Frederick C. Oechsner, correspondent with the German army an route from the conquered French capital.

Oechsner reported that thousands of refugees from Nazi rule in Poland, Csechoslovakia and Austria were caught in Paris and that some were hiding in the woods around the capital or in cities to the south, with the Germans “closing in on them.”

A Paris dispatch from the United Press reported that Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler was understood to have arrived to assume police supervision of the capital. The dispatch added “thousands of Jews and political emigres were in panic.”

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