Executioner's Week

The volleys of firing squads beat like doom in the cities of Europe: 117 shot in Yugoslavia, 32 in Paris, 18 in Poland, five in Berlin, five in Belgium. These were deaths announced by the forces in occupation. How many more died unrecorded, only whispers told.

France was the leader of resistance. Firing squads riddled ten hostages for the wounding of three German soldiers. That evening a German soldier died of wounds received in a Paris subway attack (TIME, Sept. 22). The next day the Germans warned that "all classes" of Parisians were subject to reprisals. That night the Germans surprised Parisian saboteurs wrecking Army trucks in a garage. The saboteurs escaped. The next day the Germans shot ten "Communists," the following day twelve other men. France's limp, aged Marshal Henri Philippe Petain took to the air, urged his people to complete submission to Germany for their own good.

Norway and Yugoslavia, on the rim of the New Order, were the best-organized centers of resistance. Twenty thousand Chetniks (Serb revolutionaries) held the hills of their country, blew up strategic railways. In Norway mass arrests continued all week. Each dawn Gestapo trucks routed out sleepy citizens, took them to prisons already full to bursting. Courtrooms and reform schools were commandeered for the overflow.

Greece and Poland suffered most. Two million Greek children will lack goats' milk this winter; a quarter of the population faces death by famine. German soldiers, moving out of private homes in which they had been billeted, took away the beds, leaving carefully made-out receipts.

Poland festered with misery. Wrote the Reich's governor at Posen to two minor officials: "For us there are no good or bad Poles. We are against all that is Polish. . . ." Bare statistics from Warsaw's ghetto bore eloquent testimony to Poland's suffering. Normally twice as many persons are born in the ghetto as die there each year. In June of this year only 396 were born. Four thousand, two hundred and ninety died.

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