Britain Denounces ‘inhuman’ Removal of Jews to Lublin ‘reservation’

Foreign Undersecretary Richard A. Butler today denounced the “unparalleled inhumanity” of Germany’s removal of Jews to the Lublin district of Nazi Poland.

There is no reason to believe that the reports about concentration of Jews in the Lublin area are not substantially correct, the Government spokesman said in the House of Commons in reply to a question by Philip Noel Baker, Laborite. He added that the Government had drawn its own conclusion from the press statements regarding the unparalleled inhumanity with which these operations were being carried out.

Col. Josiah Wedgwood, Laborite, announced that he would ask Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain next Wednesday whether he has any information regarding the execution of 800 Jews in the Polish town of Przemysl by the Nazis before the arrival of the Russians and whether he will make further inquiries, since the Soviets are understood to have made a detailed inquiry. (The Przemysl massacre was reported by Mendel Mozes, chief of the former Warsaw bureau of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in a dispatch from Wilno, Lithuania, on Nov. 3.)

Prime Minister Chamberlain, in an address read by Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon at the Mansion House Luncheon today, declared that “I cherish the firm conviction that we shall live to see the foundation laid of a new world in which freedom and humanity will have superseded oppression and the rule of force.”

Butler also discussed in Commons the question of enlistment of Polish nationals in England. He said that the Polish Government was not exercising compulsory powers to require its nationals in England to join the Polish Legion, but Polish law provided for withdrawal of consular protection, possibly citizenship, in cases of evasion of conscription. Entry of aliens into the British forces is possible, he said, but applying Poles are encouraged to enlist with the Polish forces.