BELGRADE JEWS

Grey River Argus, 24 November 1944, Page 8

BELGRADE JEWS

EXTERMINATED BY NAZIS LONDON, November 19. A Reuter correspondent at Belgrade states: Of the 12,000 J'ews in Belgrade before the war, only twentv remain alive there to-day and only 1000 escaped elsewhere. Germans in July 1941 began a scientific extermination by calling a meeting of all Jews in the centre of the city. Jews were ordered to be ranged up according to their professions', and the fifth man from each group was then taken to a rifle range and shot. Every time a German was killed the Belgrade police called up' 200 and 300 ■Jews. Their clothes were sent home the next day. When men became scarce, women and children were called up and driven off in lorries to Zemun, where" 1000 women and children were shut up in buildings without food or fuel. They daily cleared the snow from the Zemun airfield. From fifty to sixty corpses were carried off from the camp every morning.' Drunken soldiers frequently entered the camp in the middle of the night, and made the women bow before the gallows and, say their prayers, and then told them: “We shan’t hang you to-night." Women and children were hanged on the leas! provocation. Many went mad. Germans later packed Jews into a sealed lorry with the exhaust pipe leading into it. When the doors were opened

the corpses fell out. Germans sent manv Jews to work in the copper mines- at Bor. Those who escaped are now arriving in Belgrade. They are starving, naked and covered with wounds from beatings.