Nazis to shoot parachuting fliers
Fear Allied help for slave workers
By Nat A. Barrows
Stockholm, Sweden –
Home front German soldiers, the police, the SS (Elite Guard), and other armed persons have received orders to shoot parachuting Allied airmen on sight, either as they float down to earth or when they reach ground.
This latest edict supplements an earlier order, given shortly after D-Day, when the Germans were afraid that Allied parachutists might be bringing weapons and uprising orders to the two million foreign slave workers inside the Third Reich. This fear of the Nazis of a “Trojan Horse,” which is reportedly causing wholesale massacres on Heinrich Himmler’s orders, is coupled with the growing campaign of hatred against the British and Americans, with emphasis on the Americans (Himmler is now commander-in-chief of the German Army of the Interior).
A French refugee now safely in Sweden tells this correspondent how soldiers and other military guards in Hamburg boast that they are carrying out the nationwide order by shooting everything that drops from Allied planes.
“I got one American today as easy as picking off a balloon,” a German soldier had told this refugee.
All of which means that we cannot underestimate the fanatical hatred which still permeates the average German. As defeat becomes more apparent, the Germans’ diabolical lust for revenge becomes more primitive.