Britain's Daily
Herald since 1964 known
as The Sun
The Daily Herald's archives are
not online, but an atrocity story it
printed in 1942 is covered in Douglas
Reed's 1943 book Lest We
Regret
The Daily Herald of December 16th gave an extract from a speech by the chief Rabbi 'as copied from the manuscript'. It was to the effect that on July 27th, 1942, 500 Jewish women of a town near Kieff were ordered with their babies to a stadium where ('an eye-witness declares') German soldiers dressed in football clothes snatched the infants from their mothers' arms and used them as footballs, bouncing and kicking them around the arena. Of this report, Mr. Hannen Swaffer said 'Never since the days of the martyrdom of Christians in the Colosseum by Nero has such a story been told'. A correspondent of the New Statesman, who signed a Jewish name, remarked, 'May I, with a full sense of responsibility and of the possible opprobrium involved, say that I do not believe this story, and regard it as a fabrication from beginning to end. If anyone on the strength of this ventures to accuse me of proFascism, or of any complacency in respect to the brutal manifestations of totalitarianism, I engage to flay his intellectual hide for him, however thick it may be'. (The New Statesman said, 'We agree with our correspondent in regarding this story as nonsense'.)
Douglas Reed's Lest We
Regret (1943) page 225
