Gareth wrote two final letters d

The letter from the German Consul in Kharkiv is very salutary.

Following Gareth visit he left Moscow, and on March 26, 1933, he arrived at Reinhardt Haferkorn’s home in Danzig, relieved to be at last in civilization and he wrote to his parents:

The Russian situation is absolutely terrible, famine almost everywhere, and millions are dying of starvation. I tramped for several days through villages in the (sic) Ukraine, and there was no bread, many children had swollen stomachs, nearly all the horses and cows had died and the people themselves were dying. The terror has increased tremendously and the G.P.U. has almost full control. The Russian situation is absolutely terrible. It was a disgrace to arrest the six engineers, two of whom I know.

Though many of those, who knew Gareth decried his exposure of the famine, he felt vindicated following a visit to his friends, the Haferkorns, in Danzig. There, he met the German Consul from Kharkiv and he wrote a letter to his parents on Sunday May 28, 1933.

The German Consul in Kharkoff and his wife thought that my Russian articles gave a wonderful picture, but that it was really much worse than I described it. Since March, it has got so much worse that it is horrible to be in Kharkoff. So many die, ill and beggars. They are dying off in the villages, he said, and the spring sowing campaign is catastrophic. The peasants have been eating the seed. To talk of a bumper crop, as Molotoff did, was a tragic farce, and he only said that to keep their spirits up, but nobody believed Molotoff. Many villages are empty. The fate of the German colonists is terrible, in some villages 25% have died off, and there will be more dying off until August. In August he said there would be an epidemic of deaths, because hungry peasants would suddenly eat so much as to kill themselves.

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