Reich Women Held Hostages, Report Tells

A current news release of the National Committee to Aid the Victims of German Fascism, material for which has been gained through “underground channels of information” reports in detail cases of Hitler’s hostage-holding.

According to the report, Mrs. Hans Baimler, wife of the former deputy of the Bavarian State Legislature who escaped from the Dachau concentration camp, is being treated as a criminal in the Stadelheim prison.

“During the fourteen months of her imprisonment,” reads the report, she has been forced to perform the hardest physical labor and has not been permitted to know why she was jailed. Her two children, a daughter, 14, and a son, 13, have been sent to state reformatories.”

The report states that her sister is also under arrest and that her parents were freed after detention but are subject to frequent raids by the Secret Police.

Details of the arrest of Mrs. Else Steinfurth, which have been corroborated by Mrs. Anna Scheer, widow of the murdered Communist leader, is included in the report. Although her hair turned gray during prison incarceration, and although she has suffered physical and nervous collapse, she is still held, according to the report.

The report lists the cases of the following pregnant women now imprisoned in German concentration camps and prisons:

Mrs. Fanny Planck, a Jewess of Oberwisenfeld who bore a child while in the women’s jail at Eiach. Her child was secretly surrendered to foster-parents after five months;

Five other women, all pregnant, were held in the Hamburg jail; one of them suffered a premature birth the night she was arrested; another suffered an abortion.