23 NOVEMBER 1945, Page 4

The Belsen executions will no doubt take place in due

course, but they present a problem on which it would hardly be seemly to touch more than lightly. The condemned men are to be hanged, not shot, and hanging is not a soldier's job. It is indeed no one's job except the public executioner's or his deputy's, and while such officials are prepared to cope with the occasional duties which fall to them in the ordinary course of justice at home, they do not, I gather, take kindly at all to the task which the numerous death sentences at Luneburg impose. How the matter has been settled I have not heard, but it has, I understand, been causing considerable exercise of mind among the authorities concerned.

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