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‘gestapo Courts’ Range Poland

December 11, 1939
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The Manchester Guardian reports that the Nazis have created special “Gestapo courts” in Poland which travel from town to town investigating the behavior of the Jewish population and ordering frequent executions.

Commenting editorially on the reports of savage persecution of the Jews by the Gestapo in Poland, the Guardian declares that nobody, knowing what the Gestapo has done to the Jews in Germany, can have difficulty envisaging the still more extensive campaign of “synagogue-burning and brutality in Poland.”

“The terrible case of that people both there and in all places where the Nazis are supreme,” the newspaper states, “makes one wonder how the doctrine that force is no remedy can be made to apply. The Jews as Jews have no threatening alliances, no armaments, no Sudetenland, strong points or barbed wire. They have done nothing to provoke attack or reprisal, and in Germany itself their only course was submission, which some say is a better way than force; in return they have been beaten, robbed, executed, imprisoned or expelled, have seen their synagogues in flames. So it was in Germany. It is with swifter, wider ferocity in Poland. What else but force can make effective answer to savagery that has so replied to submission.”

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