ATONOUOTOTOLOTETONIAEAVEAODTOG OETA OTE in the COCOA @ The Partisan cause is in line with the. century-old impulse of the Serbian, Croation and Slo- yvenian peoples to unite, whereas Mikhailoviteh stands for division- ism and separatism at its stupid- est. The Liberation Front includes all national and religious elements. It takes in perhaps between 80 and 90 percent of the people of Yugoslavia—Louis Adamic, noted author, in PM, New York. ITTV ENTE @ Having regard for the politi- eal record of Mosley, we feel there is no justification whatso- ever for his release, which will be regarded by the people*of this country as an indication that the government is wavering in its ad- herence to the principles for which we are fighting —Resolution passed by the Executive Council of the British Transport and Gen- eral Workers Union. BT @ The first steps in rallying to our side those elements in Japan who, with us, seek to rid them- selves of the fascist overlords, have yet to be taken. We know that organized anti-fascist groups operated inside Japan before the the war. We know that the mass of Japan’s people when they were not actively opposing the trend of internal events were no more than passively acquiescent to them. Such forces can and must be used in defeating Japan just as they are being used to defeat Germany. This holds true particularly for large numbers of Japanese and Japanese-Américans resident in the United States. -We should look forward to the organization and active employment of “Free Japan Committees,” especially in China where many anti-fascist Japanese livye——Editorial in New Masses. LTT © The Soviet Union sincerely desires a strong, consolidated fully. homogeneous Czechoslovak repub- lic which would be a truly good and strong friend and a collabor- ator with the Soviet people in the future defense of a lasting peace in Europe. The same wish also applies to the future Poland. —President Edouard Benes of Czechoslovakia. : Soviet Union Four Pay The Penalty ie the public square of Kharkov this week four men, three Ger- mans and a Russian, paid on the gallows for their appalling crimes against the Soviet people. As a penalty the death sentence im- posed by the military tribunal of the 4th Ukrainian Front could not be adequate—four miserable lives for the mass murder of thousands —but as a portent to the Axis war criminals, in high places and low, it conveyed its own stern message of the implacable justice they can expect. As at the Moscow trials in 1937 of the men who had plotted to betray the Soviet Union, the weight of evidence against the four men was so conclusive that ~they could only relate their own accounts of what was already known. “German hatred of Kharkoy is concretely expressed in the fol- lowing figures: in two pits in the Drobitsky yard, behind the tractor works, the bodies of between 16,000 and 17,000 Jews were ex- humed—most of them women and ehildren,” wrote Alexei Tolstoy, the famous Soviet author; who is a member of the Extraordinary State Committee appointed to in- vestigate the crimes of the Nazis. “On December 14, 1941, the Ger- man commandant of Kharkov issued an order to the effect that ‘the whole Jewish population of the town leave for the outskirts and take up their abode in some old barracks which remained from the time the tank works were built. Removals to be completed within two days under penalty of shooting.’ “Thousands of people carrying bundles and children moved along the streets. Traffic was permitted in the city streets only up to four o'clock. Therefore, with the ap- proach of darkness the ‘exodus’ was halted and the people had to sleep out in the open in the bitter cold. When the Jews moved on next morning, they left behind the bodies of those who had frozen to death. = “Arriving at the barracks, they. found that the windows had no glass, that the water pipes and stoves had been destroyed. The barracks had been built for about 50 to 70 people each, but the Germans crowded from 700 to 800 in them. It was - forbid- den to leave the barracks for water, food or other purposes, those who went out were shot. “Thus the people passed two weeks, standing, or at best sitting, in these horrible icy houses in this ghetto. They were forbidden to remove their dead. Each day German soldiers went through the barracks, demanding any warm clothing or yaluables the people had. Those who resisted were dragged into the yard and shot, and cast into a pit from which the groans of wounded came for a long time after the shootings end- ed and earth had been thrown over the bodies. : “Qn December 26 the Germans announced registration of those who wished to go to the western Ukraine. On ‘the following day covered motor trucks came up to the barracks and the Germans. crowded the people into them. They realized they were being taken away for execution. As there were not enough trucks, the next day German officers came and drove away large groups on foot. “The truck-loads of victims and these huge crowds of people, hajf-dead from cold and hunger —inecluding women, children and the aged—were first sent for a distance of five kilometers along the highway, then across the fields to the Dobritsky yards and into a narrow winding gully at the end of which huge pits had been dug..... “The Jews who remained in Kharkoy—the aged, the infirm and the children who had been unable to go as far as the ghet- to—were herded into a synagogue by the Germans, who then nailed up the doors. died there of hunger and cold. “The Exertaordinary Commit- tee investigated the two pits at the Drobitsky yards and discov- ered 16,000 to 17,000 bodies in About 400 people them. lit is impossible to vie a more accurate figure. Five hun- dred of the bodies were exam- ined; almost all had gun-shots - wounds in the head. Among the dead bodies we found children’s toys, balls and dolls. “Such was the German rule in Kharkoy in their two years of occupation. The local people Were considered undesirables and were doomed to extinction, with the exception of those who could be temporarily used by the Ger- mans, who were condemned to Slavery. “Those guilty of the crimes com- mitted in Khark6yv are known and their names will be published in the findings of the Extraordinary State “Committee.” Of the four men executed in the first Soviet trial of war crim- “inals, one, Wilhelm Tangheld, was a captain in the Gestapo. He had, he told. the tribunal, taken part in the mass murder of Russians in concentration camps at Kharkov. Kiev, Poltaya, Bergachi and Ro- sosh, and he himself had killed “about a hundred.” Another, Hans Ritz, was a vice- commander of a Storm Troop company, who related how, on his commander’s orders to show him that he too “knew how,” he had taken a tommy gun and fired into ~ to death by carbon monox a mass of civilians in 4 near Kharkoy. : The third German was Ratzlaw, a corporal in the auxiliary police, who had wemen and beaten old nm, cause, in our training, y taught that the Russians ¢: to a lower race than the ( and ought to be extermi) The Russian, one of among the Soviet people j | ed the invaders © while fought them, was Mikhail ~ One of the means the Na devised for the extermin | Sivilians in the occupied | the gas truck, a mobile | chamber into which men, and children are herded See ibedl a sone en Bulanoy drove one of thes: “And how much did ¢ | mans pay you for this ¢- asked N. K. Dunaiey, | prosecutor of the justice ment. : “Ninety marks or 900 answered Bulanoy. “I ais” German soldier’s rations ai. of the clothes and posses” those executed—that is, a Germans had taken the }i_ All across Hurope Nazi, of such crimes heard fh ' penalty echoing in their ¢€} Response to Teheran Yy ORSERS throughout the Soy- iet Union this week greeted the decisions of the 3-power Te- heran conference by pledging in- ereased output of war materials. “We are deeply gratified by the agreement reached regarding simultaneous drives against the enemy from east, west and south,” workers at a machine-building plant in the Urals, meeting to dis- cuss the Teheran decisions, de- clared. “Qur response will be to complete our December produc- tion program by the 25th of the month.” At a meeting of workers at the Moscow junction of the Yaroslav railway line, mechanic Sorokoumoyv stated: “The dec- laration signed by Stalin, Roose- velt and Churchill is the death sentence pronounced on Germany.” . Addressing a mass me workers in the motor dep of a Moscow automobile Ivanoy Perekonov, chairma department's. union €¢0; ; Said: “Aside from ammuni — armaments, the Red Ar requires ever greater nun” automobiles. You and f are’ the heart of the automc motor. That is why we mu every effort to fulfill and our output quota. “Workers at the Kagane Oil Trust in Baku, having fulfilled their annual pr plan ahead of time, pledge tain additional tens of t of tonS=*5t oil above fhe the end of the year. Free Yugoslavia Recognition Of A Fact : iL month, the Nazi High €Com- mand, striving to regain control of strategic areas of Yugoslavia against an expected Allied invasion of the Balkans, launched ‘ campaign of “annihil Against the National Army eration and the guerrilla f G, 2, HUNGARY "SS RUMANIA @PLoeEsti BUCHAREST @ oe? ¢ OO YUGO%$