MASS EXTERMINATIONS

Greymouth Evening Star, 27 December 1944, Page 8

MASS EXTERMINATIONS

GERMAN CRIMES REVEALED. RUGBY, December 24. “The Germans killed an undetermined number of Britons and Americans by slow torture at Ravarusskaya camp, near Lwow, Poland,” says a report of the Russian Atrocities Commission. “Himmler will be the chief war criminal at the trials expected to start at Lwow soon.” Himmler, according to the report, visited Lwow on several occasions to organise mass exterminations. “New accounts of German atrocities in Poland, Crete, and Hungary have reached London. The Polish Government, through underground channels, learns that 20,000 more Polish Jews have been murdered. One concentration camp, which held several thousand men, was liquidated, and at another camp only 600 were left alive. “A neutral diplomatic representative who was an eye-witness of events in Hungary until recently says that between March and July of this year 600,000 Jews, deported from the provinces, were killed in various annihilation camps. About 250,000 who remained in Budapest were concentrated in October in a ghetto near the Tabak Gasse synagogue, except for 14,000 possessing Palestine certificates or a similar protection. By mid-Nov-ember 100,000 had been deported to Germany and the rest massacred in groups of some hundreds daily. Roughly 150,000 Jews, men and women, were sent to construct defence works in Budapest suburbs, and. after the works were completed, they disappeared mysteriously. When the diplomat left there were only 75,000 Jews left alive in Budapest, and these were, dying of starvation, the Gestapo, having, wired off the ghetto on the pretext that there was a plague there, I thus preventing any help from reach-1 ing them.” The World Jewish Congress at Geneva has announced that 600,0001 Jews; have been deported from Hun- i gary in the last two months, some to I compulsory labour in 'Germany, but: the majority to Auschwitz extermina-l tion camp.