“NAZI ARMY BEATEN.”

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 62, Issue 87, 23 January 1942, Page 3

“NAZI ARMY BEATEN.”

SOVIET OFFICIAL’S CLAIM.. DETAILS OF NAZI LOSSES. LONDON. January 21. “All that the braggart Hitler has achieved is the complete moral and physical exhaustion of his .Army. The German Army, in its plans to capture Moscow, is beaten. Its old offensive spirit lias gone. It will never be able to gather strength again. We shall win.”

This declaration was made by M. Sherbakov, secretary of the Communist Party, in a speech* to a meeting in Moscow to mark the 18th anniversary of Lenin’s death. He said that the Germans from December 6 to January To lost 300,000 killed. German equipment captured in the same period included 4800 guns, 3071 mortars, 8000 machine -. guns, 15,000 automatic rifles, 2760 tanks, 300 armoured cars, 33,600 motor vehicles, 6000 motor-cycles, 2,000,000 shells, 200,000 mines, 30.000.000 rifle cartridges, many thousands of cycles, carts and horses, and much other material. In the same period 110 German aeroplanes were destroyed. “There was an occasion near Moscow when 20 tanks attacked 29 Russian Guardsmen. One Guard put up his hands to surrender. His comrades shot him and then fought the tanks. They destroyed 18, but were themselves all killed. There was another occasion when a Russian soldier attacking a machine-gun threw himself on to the front of the gun so that liis comrades could advance. “How can anybody gain victory over a nation with men like that? \Yo must never forget that we are dealing with a treacherous, cruel enemy, hut it is more and more apparent that the German Army is worn out and is falling apart.” Colonel Gurov, writing in a Moscow newspaper, says that the' Red Army is making a clean sweep of the Germans in the immediate vicinity of Leningrad. German losses there in the last four weeks were 18.000 killed, 74 tanks, 184 guns, 247 mortars, 494 machine-guns, and a huge quantity of other equip-j meni. raptured. The Moscow radio quotes a report from Ankara that more than 150,000 frostbitten Germans have been sent to Bulgaria from the Russian front.