GRIM SCENES

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 28, 3 February 1943, Page 5

GRIM SCENES

"ROAD OF SHAME" FOR THE GERMANS

LONDON, February 1. Columns of half-starved, tattered prisoners streaming across the snow— generals, colonels, and privates—away from the hecatomb of nearly a quarter of a million Axis soldiers is one Sicture coming from Stalingrad after le surrender of Field-Marshal Paulus and his remnants in what "The Times" in art editorial describes as the most catastrophic German defeat since 1918. Correspondents describe the frozen countryside as being littered with thousands of German dead—many of whom are still uncounted—wrecked tanks, guns, planes, and lorries, and skeletons of horses which the Germans ate after their supply broke down. A captive German staff officer who was gazing on the scene said to a general: "This is a road of shame for the German army." One of the grimmest scenes in this death-stricken land is the hill west of Stalingrad where occurred the greatest slaughter of the whole battle, scores of thousands of Germans being killed. Picked storm troops defended the hill to the last. The Russians reported that every one of the dead had two or three iron

crosses pinned to the breast. The combatants here and elsewhere were so intermingled that German bombers killed many of their own men, mistaking them for Russians. The Moscow correspondent of "The Times" says that grey-haired MajorGeneral yon Drebber, commanding the 207 th Infantry Division, after.surrendering, with a small jaetaphjijent, was asked by a Russian cblonel: "Where are your soldiers?" Yon Drebher replied: "They are all alive in your hands, I ordered surrender, but they forestalled my command." Then, in what a Russian eye-witness, describes as an atmosphere of gaiety, yon Drebber asked whether he was the first general to surrender at, Stalingrad. He was told "Yes, but not the last." .

General Dubois, commanding the 44th Infantry Division, refused to talk, but his reserve broke down when he heard he was not the first to surrender.

Till Field-Marshal Paulus surrendered on the 70th day of the encirclement, solitary German planes futilely flew over the small area of resistance dropping supplies, which often fell to the Russians. Thus, on the tenth anniversary of Hitler coming to power, the Russians received parcels of chocolate from the Germans.