TRAGIC STORIES.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 63, Issue 310, 11 October 1943, Page 3

TRAGIC STORIES.

GERMAN ATROCITIES IN ITALY. WOMEN AND CHILDREN VICTIMS. (Rec. 9.40 a.m.) LONDON, Oct. 10. As British troops have advanced toward the Volturno tragic stories are being told by the populations of the villages beyond Naples, says a war correspondent. “I spoke to-day to a doctor who had been treating a young mother who was shot in the right hand (says the correspondent). She told him that the Germans had taken her into their officers’ mess, shot her through the hand with a revolver and- killed her child. The Italians sent their womenfolk away to the hills: because of the demands the Germans were making on them. In one village I heard of two women raped by German soldiers who afterwards cut their throats. “Such stories of German brutality abound. There is one well authenticated case of 20 Italians being buried up to their waists and their hands cut off before they were shot. There is another of a child’s hands being severed.

“In one village through which I passed a German soldier, complaining about the food he had been given, burned down the house of his host.

“It is small wonder that these peasants, who had little enough sympathy with Fascism, are now helping all they can to rid the country of the enemy.”— British Official Wireless.