EARLY END OF WAR

Grey River Argus, 15 December 1943, Page 2

EARLY END OF WAR

German Feeling

N.Z. PRISONER'S IMPRESSIONS

P.A. WELLINGTON, Dec. 14. A New Zealander who recently returned to New Zealand after being repatriated from a German prison camp said that Germans are convinced they cannot win the war, and many German soldiers believe it will end early next year. Three months ago, just before he lert Germany, German soldiers themselves gave the war six months. The Germans were very scared of the Russians. They would do what they could to keep the Russians off German, territory. He added: “A lot of us believe Germany will let the Allied Army through into Germany from the west without much opposition, rather than let the Russians get to Berlin first.” He said the Germans had every reason to be scared of the Russians, apart from the way they had overrun and wiped out Russian towns and villages. They treated Russian prisoners cruelly, starving and flogging them at the slightest provocation. On one occasion sixty thousand Russian prisoners were herded back from the Leningrad front to German prison camps in cattle trucks, about eighty to a truck. When they arrived only twenty thousand were alive. The others according to authentic reports, died of starvation and malnutrition. The New Zealander said that after El Alamein and Stalingrad, when the Germans realised things were not going too well for them, conditions in the prison camps improved somewhat. The most feared guards were young S.S. fanatics, the Hitler youtn, who were “pretty tough” at times. Germans compelled many Czechs and Poles to do prison guard duty, and these men were more human and understanding than the Germans, This New Zealander was at a Silesian prison camp wjth other British personnel when some of the Canadians were shackled. They naturally did not like it, but had to get used to it, and it did have the effect of causing the guards to relax a Utile. New Zealanders were not. shackled. Before he left, a large number oi New Zealanders who were prisoners of war in Northern Italy were transferred to Germany at the time of Italyfs capitulation'.