◆ SpookStack

° ° Be thee ree wot ete te SS ES ee a a. Se mm COGSERUY growig number of eminent American Giizens are Taising their woices against the shame which is being brought upon their country. The recent letter to Pre- sident Truman by 40 prominent Americans, including Professor Theodor Roseberry, a director of United States Armed Forces germ warfare research during Worid War Il, calls for ratification by the United States Government of the 1925 Geneva Convention, which outlaws germ weapons and poisoncus gases. It says: — “As we recall the purposeful and planned destruction of the Korean coun- . - tryside, the command to ‘kill anything that moves’, the million casualties among - Korean civilians, the vast cums of money being spent by the U.S. on bacterio- logical warfare research med ohn Bh oti, — by a itary spoke: smen of our progress in this field, we can understand how the world can believe that those who would use burning gasoline would not hesitate to employ death - dealing bacteria.” Certainly the American mothers who have been called upon to “raise an generation of killers”, the American people who are being taught contemptuously to refer to the Korean as “gooks”, and whe have seen from year to year that the lynching of Negroes goes unpunished in their own country. can understand that a Government which pursues such 4 policy will not scruple to use germ weapons in its genocidal war against the Weeear nane le nea Pevpas. In the United States of America and throughout the world, millions of voices are raised demanding that the United States Government ratify the Geneva Convention of 1925, International organisations have joined in this demand, such as the International Leugue of Red Cross Societies at its Toronto Conference this summer. The United States Government, however, remains, together with Japan, the only major power to refuse to sign this Convention, brazenly stating that ratification would be “out of date”. Paced with the precise charges brought against it, the United States Government evades these by presenting unacceptable proposals. In proposing that the International Comunittee of the Red Cross investigate germ warfare charges, it tries, as even Walter Lipmann of the NEW YORK HERALD-TRIBUNE has stated, to “pick its own judges”. To propose this Committee, which is composed of 25 Swiss citizens — and which is not the same body as the International League of Red Cross Societies — is simply an attempt to prevent the settling up of an impartial body qualified to investigate the facts. In our organisation there are millions of women who lost their loved ones in Hitler's concentration camps and thousands who themselves will bear for the rest of their lives the ineffaceable scars and memories of their own sufferings in these camps. They wil! never forget that it was Dr. Otto Lehner, one of the senior delegates to the International Red Cross Committee, and other members of the Committee, who visited Hitler's concen- tration camps during World Wer 0, and who deliberately concealed from the world the barbaric atrocities committed there, at a time when millions were undergoing torture and dying in these very camps. No more acceptable is the proposal to entrust the World Health Organisation with the investigation. As a body of the United Nations Organisation — in whose name