Nazi Mass Executions, Tortures and Persecutions of Polish Jews Recorded in London

Documentary information on the mistreatment of Jews in Poland by the Nazi administration there is given in six chapters of a “Black Book” published by the Polish government here yesterday and submitted to the British government today.

While one of the chapters summarize the anti-Jewish laws issued by the Nazis, including the wearing of yellow badges and the restrictions on travel in street cars and railways, the other chapters are devoted to recording the massacres and terror against Jews carried out by the Nazis in all parts of Poland since 1939, when they occupied the country.

The chapter on the murder of Jewish civilians by Nazis starts with an account of how 53 Jews in a single house in Warsaw were executed by the Nazis in reprisal for the shooting of a Polish policeman in the neighborhood who acted as an informer for the Nazis. It then reports on the mass execution of 600 Jewish men and women in Ostrow-Mazowieck and on the massacre of 800 Jews in the city of Przemysl. It also reveals that 100 Jews were shot by the Nazis in Lask where the synagogue was razed to the ground, and that in Bendzin the entire Jewish quarter was set on fire after all the Jews of the city had been confined there by the Nazi military officials.

Terrible details of mass execution of Jews in Warsaw, Pabianice, Laskarszew and other Polish towns are given in the chapter on Nazi savagery. Some 180 Jews were tortured to death in Cracow in the course of an organized three-day pogrom soon after the Nazis occupied the city. Organized raping of Jewish girls amid orgies in confiscated Jewish houses in Warsaw is also reported in the official Polish “Black Book.”

JEWS FORCED BY NAZIS TO DESTROY POLISH RELIGIOUS AND NATIONAL MONUMENTS

The Jews, the document states, have been forced by the Nazis to destroy Polish religious and national memorials such as the Kosciuszko Monument in Lodz, the Polish Religious Seminary in Plock, and others. Among the favorite tortures of the Nazis mentioned in the Polish “Black Book” is driving naked Jews into the street, where they are sprinkled with water in temperatures as low as thirty degrees.

Enumerating the anti-Jewish economic measures and reviewing the effects of the compulsory labor which the Nazis have introduced for Jews in Poland, the document also devotes many of its pages to the Nazi expulsions of Jews from Polish cities, to the misery in the Jewish ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, Cracow and Lublin and to the demolition by the Nazis of synagogues in Pozen, Przemysl, Sosnowiec, Wloclawek and other towns. Quoting President Roosevelt’s comment on the pogrom against the Jews in Berlin in November, 1938, that “it could scarcely be believed that such things could occur in the twentieth century civilization,” the Polish “Black Book” says: “Yet such things occurred and are still occurring on a larger scale and with fiercer fury, and there is no sign of abatement until the perpetrators — Hitler and his confederates — are wiped off the face of the earth.”