NAZI ATROCITIES

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 24, 29 January 1943, Page 2

NAZI ATROCITIES

TRAIL OF HORROR APJ INEXPIABLE WAR In the Red Army Park in Moscow there is a photograph which always stirs violent emotions in me, writes Paul Winterton in a dispatch from Moscow .to the News Chronicle. It is the picture of a mutilated corpse of a beautiful girl—lS-year-old Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, whom the Nazis first tortured and then hanged because she was a guerilla fighter and would not betray her comrades. You can see the fearful marks of their butchers' work upon her body. You can see the end of the hangman's noose still trailing from her throttled neck. You can see how lovely she once was. Every time I pass this picture I make up my mind that I ought to write something about Nazi atrocities in Russia. I

For the Nazis in Russia terrorism is not a pastime but a policy. Indiscriminate murder and torture of the civilian population are not merely sanctioned, but encouraged. They are instruments of the war and the Government. There was rarely a more revealing order than- that issued to its troops by the Nazi Command on entering the Caucasus —an order which instructed the Nazi soldiery that they must no longer violate and kill local women, as the military task ahead was a 'difficult one and it was not desired to arouse the fierce Caucasian tribes.

It was si calculated cancellation for military ends. Wallow in Frightfulness Over a period of more,than fifteen months the Nazis in Russia, headed by the Gestapo, have given themselves over to the habit of unrestrained violence. They have no pity and apparently no feeling. They kill almost nonchalantly. Human cries, human agony mean nothing to them. Their senses have long been blunted by the sight of blood and sounds of pain. They have been taught that Russians do not matter, anyway. They carry photographs in their wallets of men and women swinging from the gallows. They take pictures with their movie cameras of the death agonies of their victims while they are hanging and choking to death. They gloat pictorially over public floggings. Most of the evidence of their vile crimes comes from their own pockets. They kill and mutilate the Avounded, torture prisoners and murder the local population, not in twos or threes, but in large groups. They steal the clothing of their victims and take photographs of mounds of naked corpses.

I have such a picture in front of me. They shovel dead and living into common graves and pile earth on top«pf them. This and so much more. They have no sense of shame, of crime, of horror. They have done it all so often that it is just routine now. Perverts and Torturers Perverts! Torturers! Beasts! Strong words, but not wild words. Just read this story: In a village in the Don Steppes a few weeks ago some Nazis were looking for guerillas. They came to one house where lived a 12-year-old girl named Nadya. She was a thin little girl with two plaits and a short schoolgirl frock, but she had the heart of a Cossack. Here was a guerilla. The Nazis asked her where her father was hiding, but she would not tell. One of these devils in human shape took a ring of hot metal and forced it round her face and head. She cried out in agony, but" still would not tell. Then another Nazi heated an iron hot in the stove until it was red hot and burned Nadya's inky schoolgirl fingers with it. Screaming, she slipped from their grasp and ran away into the street. One of them fired and she fell with a shot in her foot.

They left her lying. That night she was picked up by guerillas and finally reached Georgia in a hospital train. She told her story. As I write this I have her picture also in front of me—a ghost of a child, leaning on a crutch, with scars burned into her face and hands that will always be twisted and shapeless. May her memory haunt those Nazi fiends in hell! But there it is—what is the use of words? You don't get angry with a mad dog or a poisonous snake. You kill it. And that is all there is to be done with the Nazis. Purge This Callous Nation The Allied task is to know them for what they are, to do all we can as early as we can to bring Russia's long agony to an end and then to punish the perpetrators of these crimes - against humanity with cold and remorseless justice. Not to take fire and sword through civilian Germany—Russians, greatly though they have suffered, would never want to do that—but to seek out and destroy the Nazi leaders, the Gestapo, the miliary chiefs who have been Hitler's willing instruments, the rich industrialists who have backed Hitler with their gold: to purge and cleanse this wicked, selfish, callous nation. And then bring the world back to sanity, to happiness and to a true valuation of the inestimable gift of human life.