NAZI TORTURES

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 29, 3 February 1945, Page 5

NAZI TORTURES

LITHUANIA CRIMES Over 300,000 Civilians Killed And Burned Alive N.Z. Press Association—Copyright Rec. 10.30. WASHINGTON, Feb. 2. The Nazis killed 165,000 Russian prisoners of war and "shot, burned alive or tortured to death" over 300,000 civilians during their occupation of the Baltic Republic of Lithuania, says a Soviet information bulletin. The Germans stole everything of any value in Lithuania, destroyed universities and libraries and persecuted and murdered intellectuals. The bulletin says civilians were stripped naked, forced to dig ditches in bitterly cold weather and then shot down by tommy-guns. It was a common practice to make human bonfires of murder victims.

The bulletin lists the names of scores of German occupation officials, "who will be called to strict account."

A special investigation is uncovering secrets of the captured German murder factory at Oswiecim, in Poland, says Reuters Moscow correspondent. Five to eight trains arrived at Oswiecim daily from occupied regions. Prisoners were sorted on arrival and those fit for work, before going to the slaughter house, were separated from the invalids, the aged and the very young, who were destroyed immediately. The Germans, when they opened the camp in 1941, killed their victims by shooting them in the back of the head, afterwards carrying them to a mass grave They then introduced mechanised slaughter with gas chambers and electrically-charged conveyor belts, which killed the victims and delivered their bodies tu furnaces. The Red Army liberated thousands of prisoners. __