PRISONERS OF WAR

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 9 April 1945, Page 5

PRISONERS OF WAR

MORE LIBERATED IN GERMANY CAMPS BEING OVERRUN London, April 7. The War Office yesterday announced that it was officially confirmed that 4000 British and Commonwealth prisoners were liberated from Stalag 9C, Mulhausen. There is evidence that the British prisoners at two other Oflags were evacuated eastward before the arrival of the Allies at the camps. There is no information as to whether the Allies caught up with the prisoners from these two camps. An unofficial rpeort says that in addition to 4000 British prisoners who were liberated yesterday, another 4000 or 5000 were freed to-day from a camp near Hammelburg, which Seventh Army troops overran. The Third Army liberated 320 British officers and 60 men at Legenfeld, southwest of Mulhausen. The War Office reveals that Oflag 9 AZ (Rotenburg) and Oflag 9 AH (Spangenberg) were evacuated eastward before the Allies reached them. The Exchange Telegraph correspondent reports that the Eleventh Armoured Division liberated 46 Yugoslav generals—the entire general staff of the Yugoslav Army of 1941 —on the fourth anniversary of their capture at Sarajevo, which has just been recaptured by Marshal Tito’s Army. The generals, with 600 other Yugoslav officers, were sitting tired and disconsolate after marching eastward for five days from a prison camp at Osnabruck, when three British reconnaissance tanks passed a house in which they had their quarters. One general, risking being shot by the guards, leaped from a window and ran along the roadway waving. A corporal in the last tank spotted him, pulled up and disarmed the Germans. The generals said there were altogether 2600 Yugoslav officers at Osnabruck, of whom Allied air raids had killed 118. Seven hundred British and American soldiers—the first to be evacuated by air from Germany after being liberated by their comrades from the prison camps—are now in army leave camps near a French Channel port, says a correspondent at Supreme Headquarters (quoted by British Official Wireless). There they will remain till they are fit for the remainder of the journey home. They are happy but haggard, states the correspondent. The months of privation have left their marks on these men, five per cent of whom arrived too sick and worn to undertake further travel. In Germany they had been subsisting on half a bowl of water-soup a day and one loaf of bread for six men. Some had lost nearly seven stone.