THE HUN AT WORK

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 254, 24 July 1944, Page 4

THE HUN AT WORK

Butchery In Italian Village

SOME BLOWN TO PIECES (Official War Correspondent, N.Z.E.F.) NORTHERN ITALY, July 21. During this war, as during the last, there have been so many tales of atrocities committed by troops of combatant armies that any fresh reports are apt to be branded by the civilized mind as merely propaganda. During the years of warfare in Africa and Italy, I have been guilty of this form of escapism myself, and have preferred to give the German the benefit of the doubt wherever doubt has arisen. It wag what I saw in an olive-grove near the little village of Sanpolo that gave me the first clear glimnse of the decadent subdiumau savagery against which we are fighting. ‘ Sanpolo, an undistinguished collection of weathered stone buildings tucked away off the main road in rolling country a few kilometres north of Arezzo, was in a strange turmoil when British troops swept through it less than a week ago •in pursuit of retreating Germans. YVith wildly vocal grief the people of the village began digging. In a few minutes they had unearthed evidence of as. foul a crime as any which has been added to the record of Nazidom in Europe. In two shallow mass graves, scratched hurriedly by the victims themselves in the meagre ground between the olive trees, lay the remains of 47 Italians. The bodies lay blackened and festering in the morning sunlight—not the bodies of men killed in combat, but the pitiful corpses of people not knowing the meaning of war, butchered in a fit of maniac panic. . Some bore only marks of bullets. They were the lucky ones. Their deaths at least had been sudden. Alany were merely seared masses of riven flesh. Pieces of rope and human fragments spattered among the trees told only too clearly the manner of their murder. They had been lashed to the trees and blown to pieces with explosives which had been tied to their bodies and discharged by fuses. Buried Alive.

Of the remainder, some were without marks which would have caused death, indicating that they had been bludgeoned into unconsciousness and buried alive, and others had been fiendishly mutilated with knives. Just what strange freak of perversion precipitated this sadisticorgy of bestiality cannot be conceived by British troops. The victims were auti-Fascists, perhaps active partisans—that was the measure of their crimes against the YVehrinacht. Not long before the British advance they were taken from jails and marched to their doom in the olive-grove. The effect of the sight on the Eighth Army troops who saw it can be imagined. The British fightingman is first a citizen and then a soldier —in the aggregate he is a better soldier than the German because of that fact. He is certainly a better soldier also for knowing his enemy—not the coldly efficient fighting machine of Axis propaganda, but a creature of panic, sadism aud blood-lust. Our men were hounded from France, Greece and Crete by the bombs, shells and strafing of superior enemy forces, yet, tired as they were, they came through as human beings. Now the wheel has turned full circle, ours is the weight of material and the German is being driven steadily backward through Italy. But here the strain of constant bombing and unflagging pursuit is having a strange and terrible effect on the enemy. It has stripped the veneer of civilization from the Herrenvolk, so that here and there in deeds such as these the yellow, slant-eyed face of the Tartar and Hun peer forth on the world again. I looked at a group of English infantrymen who were inspecting the scene of the massacre. One pulled at a pipe and said to his comrades, “Those little yellow Japs have got some nice teammates, haven’t they?” The others were silent. They were all revising their opinions about the enemy.