Retributive Justice
Representatives of nine Allied countries now in enemy occupa- tion met in London last Tuesday and resolved that enemies and quislings of any nationality shall be tried and punished after the war for crimes committed in violation of the Hague Convention of 1907. There is not one of the countries seized by the Axis— Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Luxemburg, Holland, Norway and Yugoslavia—which has not been the scene of brutal acts contrary to the legal usages of war. Only a small part of the long tale of outrages committed in Yugoslavia and Greece has yet reached the outside world. The whole story of what has happened in occupied areas of Russia still remains to be told in its full horror. But it is doubtful if any country has suffered more than or as much as Poland, the first to fall after the beginning of war. Its sufferings in September, 1939, have already been set forth in a Black Book published by the Polish Ministry of Information—The German Invasion of Poland. Its treatment by the Nazis in the subsequent period, down to the end of June, 1941, is now factually explained in a second volume, The German New Order in Poland, published for the Ministry by Messrs. Hutchinson (tos. 6d.). This carefully documented work, which tells of the shooting of 8o,000 Polish citizens, the death of tens of thousands in concentration camps and of hundreds of thousands from starvation, and the deportation of masses of the population to virtual slavery or worse, makes it clear that the Nazis from set policy have been seeking to realise a long-cherished German ambition to eliminate Poland and the Poles from the map of Europe and to turn western Poland at least into a German colony. These calculated atrocities have fallen with special severity on those who stood for Polish culture and the Polish religion. It is not unnatural that leaders who know what has been happening to their own countrymen should pledge themselves to a stern reckoning.
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