CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN GERMANY TO-DAY ARE AS GHASTLY AS UNDER NAZIS

Swiss Protestant Paper Accuses the Communists
Terror methods in some of the concentration camps in Germany to-day are as ghastly as they were under the Nazis.
This statement was made recently by the leading Swiss Protestant daily, the Basler Nachrichten. The paper added that the only difference was that to-day Communists rather than Nazis are in charge of these mass torture chambers.
the Protestant journal fully confirm accusations Cardinal von Preysing, Bishop of Berlin, made in a recent sermon. The paper, on the authority of the Protestant Bishop of Berlin, fully subscribes to the Cardinal's indictment of the present Communist regime in Germany.
The Basler Nachrichten refers to Cardinal von Preysing's sermon, which stressed the necessity that humanity and Christian justice be applied by the victors to the German people, even though the Germans themselves previously had committed terrible crimes not only against foreigners but against their own people as well.
The Protestant daily says that the concentration camps of Oranienhurg, Sachscnhauscn and Buchenwalde—originalty established by the Gestapo—are more crammed with political prisoners to-day than they were in the Nazi days.
In Buchenwalde alone, the paper continues, there are now 15,000 inmates, most of them members of the Social Democratic. the Chris1 tian Democratic, and the Liberal
Democratic ParI ties. who were arrested for no other reason than their political convictions, which are adverse to Communism.
Most of these men were arrested at the prompting of their COMMUM ist rivals. Many are detained because they had refused to be sent to Soviet Russia under forced contract. Others are kept in confinement because formerly they were landowners in what is now the Soviet zone of occupation.
Treatment in these camps, the paper says, is as bad to-day as it was under the Nazis.
Only prisoners who are seriously ill and near death are released. Before being returned to their families, inmates must sign a statement committing themselves to absolute silence in order that no information may leak out about conditions in these camps.
HUNDREDS DIE
Last winter, epidemics in Buchenwalde caused hundreds of deaths.
Cardinal von Preysing had pointed out that none of these prisoners are allowed to communicate with their families, and that priests have been refused permission to visit them. Many have been deported to Siberia.
Even a number of children, the Cardinal had said. and young people, were arrested on the streets of Berlin, with no trace of them left and no information given to their parents as to their present whereabouts.
In subscribing to these statements, Basler Nachrichten says that Dr. Otto Dibelitis, Protestant Bishop of Berlin, has fully confirmed Cardinal von Preysing's information, making it known at the same time that representations to the Soviet Military Administration have utterly failed to improve present conditions in the concentration camps.