PROPAGANDA: White Paper, Black Deeds

Up to snuff are Great Britain's methods of putting her cause in its best light to the rest of the world. While the Germans stumble around with the horse-&-buggy propaganda technique of simple name-calling (Britain's diplomacy is "perfidious"; Churchill a "warmonger"), the British have developed a streamlined method which generally appears merely to put the clear eye of psychology on their foes. The British have so far branded Mr. Hitler nothing much worse than an interesting nut, the Germans as the victims of mass delusion. Last week the German and British methods met head on, to the former's disadvantage.

According to a recent German official broadcast, "British atrocities" during the Boer War some 40 years ago included mixing powdered glass in the food of Boer children penned in British prison camps. Last week His Majesty's Government cited "this shameless propaganda, which is wholly without foundation" as its reason for suddenly rebutting with much hotter and much fresher atrocity charges. Off official London presses rolled another White Paper, entitled Papers Concerning the Treatment of German Nationals in Germany, 1938-1939. It was filled with details of torture and sadism in contemporary Nazi prison camps.

"The Papers" were mostly excerpts from pre-War II depositions made to British consuls in Munich, Frankfort, elsewhere in Germany, by both Aryans and Jews who had survived terms in Nazi camps, mostly famed Dachau near Munich and Buchenwald near Weimar. The White Paper quotes "Herr X, a well-to-do Jewish businessman," released after six weeks in Buchenwald, as saying that "Jews were told that the Führer himself had given orders that Jews might receive up to sixty strokes" of the lash.

The usual punishment in Nazi prison camps, according to the White Paper, for even slight offenses, such as failure to salute promptly, is "twenty-five strokes on the seat, carried out by two guards standing at each side with riding whips. The prisoner is lashed to a board. If he cries out, the strokes are increased to thirty-five. Guards use all their force, sometimes springing into the air so as to bring down the arm with increased momentum."

Another reported Buchenwald flogging system: "Fixed on the ground were two footplates to which a man's feet were strapped. He was then bent over a pole and his head was secured between two horizontal bars. The men received up to fifty strokes. . . . Some went mad. They were then chained up and a sack was tied around their heads to stifle their shouts."

"Merry-Go-Round." The more inventive Nazi guards at Buchenwald, according to the White Paper, have a game they play with prisoners and trees: "If only a slight offense has been committed, the prisoners would be bound to a tree in such a way that they stood facing it and as if embracing it with their hands pinioned together. The straps that bound them would be pulled so tight that they could barely move. Guards would now 'play merry-go-round' with them. That is, they would force them to make their way round and round the tree. If they could not move quickly enough it was usual to help them by kicking their ankles."