Nazi Executions of Jews in Occupied Russia; Propagandists Posing As Priests

Reports of mass executions of Jews by German military forces in Nazi-occupied Russia are confirmed today in the Angriff, the personal organ of Goebbels, by the managing editor of that paper who is now on the Soviet-German front acting as war correspondent there. The Nazi editor reports that Jews in the occupied territory are being “punished on the spot with the sharpest measures” for offenses allegedly committed against the German army.

Reliable information reaching here today from Nazi-occupied Russia reveal that the Nazis, in their effort to stir up anti-Jewish animosity among the Russians and the Ukrainians in the occupied territory, are transporting from Berlin large numbers of Nazi agitators dressed in garbs of Russian priests into the occupied towns, and villages. The propagandists, speaking Russian and Ukrainian, pose as members of the Russian church who allegedly escaped from Russia to Germany after the Communist revolution. They appear in local churches under the pretext of “bringing back God’s word to the Russian people” and utilize their sermons for furious anti-Jewish propaganda. Their efforts to impress the local population with the idea that “Hitler has come to Russia to save the people there from Jewish communism,” are however without success.

The report also tells of the horrible conditions under which the Jews in Nazi occupied Soviet territory live. While the Jewish male population has retreated with the Soviet army, joining the Russian defense forces, aged Jews and thousands of Jewish women are now entirely at the mercy of the German military authorities who drive them from the smaller towns into barbed-wire ghettos in the larger cities. Cautious not to antagonize the Russian and Ukrainian population, the Nazi military authorities are attributing every act of sabotage to Jews and are executing hundreds of Jews “as measures of retaliation for misbehavior.”