MARTYRED CITY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 31, 6 February 1945, Page 6

MARTYRED CITY

"HITLER'S MONUMENT"

DEVASTATION IN WARSAW

(By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright.) Rec. \ p.m. LONDON, February 5. British and American correspondents, who are hardened to the sight of obliterated cities, found Warsaw in a worse state than Stalingrad, says a British United Press correspondent who was among the first non-Russian correspondents allowed to visit Warsaw. "This is Hitler's monument— dozens of square miles of blood-stain-ed ruins and debris, and tens of thousands of family graveyards. The grass was growing last summer on the levelled ghetto compound behind grey brick walls. Now wild dogs lurking in the ruins are feeding on bodies only partly buried under the smashed masonry.

"Never since the Mongol hordes swept across Europe can a European city have been subjected to such wanton destruction. Street by street, block by block, Warsaw was depopulated and razed —very little in the course of actual fighting. The medieval part of the city, all the churches and monasteries, and the museum have simply vanished. The quarter where the Polish patriots held out longest was the first to be blown up; and the destruction of the rest of the city followed. ALL ACCORDING TO PLAN. It was all done according to plan, but the Germans had not time enough before the city was liberated to destroy completely Lotovsky .Street, which was reserved for Nazi officials. The Soviet Embassy, strangely enough, stands: but it is roped off from the surrounding ruins, because there is reason to believe that it is stacked with explosives, time bombs, and booby-traps.

After the first flash of joy at their liberation, thousands of people rushed across the ice on the Vistula from Praga and from the prison camps from which they had been released by the Red Army, and began to search the ruins of their former homes or for the bodies of relatives and friends; but the authorities had to check them, because ■;there were tens of thousands of mines throughout the city.. There was also the danger of an epidemic. Volunteers were chosen to> lift the mines and remove debris. It is a heartbreaking task, which will take months. •

The Mayor of Warsaw said that when the warm weather comes the danger of an epidemic will become acute. He also said that the first shipment of 60,000 tons of wheat has arrived from Russia.