The Enslavement of Europe
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| Labor office staff register the forced laborers at a transit camp in December 1942 (source) |
Hitler Drives 3 Million from Their Homes⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯"Master Plan" to Enslave Europe's Peoples Launched in Effort to Make Impossible any Internal Assistance to Second Front Invasion⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯By WILLIAM DOWNSUnited Press Staff Correspondent
London. — (UP) Adolf Hitler has launched a "master plan" to break the resistance of occupied Europe by deporting hundreds of thousands of enslaved peoples from their homelands, a United Press survey of information reaching refugee governments indicated today.
The primary purpose, of course, is to undermine and weaken the available help to an Allied second front army.
The refugee governments estimated that at least 3 million persons already had been deported from their homelands, most of them to Germany, and that thousands are being carted off daily from Holland, Belgium, France, Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, and Greece.
In recent weeks the Germans were said to have accelerated the enforced migration as resistance and sabotage increased, and Nazi fears mounted that the Allies would open a second front soon.
A secondary purpose, it was believed, was to provide slave labor for Nazi war factories for construction gangs hastily erecting fortifications.
One refugee spokesman was confident that Hitler planned to take all the men from the troublesome areas and perhaps all the Jewish men, women, and children from Western Europe.
Denuding the troublesome or potentially troublesome areas of all their men would uproot potential leaders and paralyze further organized resistance.
Apparently Holland, which has been carrying on underground warfare almost continuously since the occupation, is to feel the most powerful effects of Hitler's master plan which reportedly involves the transportation of 3 million Dutch away from Netherlands, practically all of them males between the ages of 16 and 60.
