BRUTAL TO THE LAST

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 12 May 1945, Page 5

BRUTAL TO THE LAST

GERMANS IN PRAGUE SLAUGHTER OF CIVILIANS London, May 10. After seven years under Hitler’s cruellest gauleiters, “Heydrich the Hangman,” and Frank, all Prague donned holiday garb and rushed outdoors tc-day, says the “Daily Telegraph’s’’ Prague correspondent in a dispatch dated Bth May. The red, blue and white banner of Czechoslovakia rose over the city, ending the four-day street battles that cost more than 5000-civilian lives. On the final day of the war the enemy discreetly left by the western route where they surrendered to Americans while Russian vanguards simultaneously burst into the city from the east. Patriots told how SS troops killed 60 civilians in a furious half-day battle last Saturday around Prague radio station. When the professor of literature at Prague University led an underground rising the Germans forced women and children to walk in front of their tanks. One German grenadier walked down the pavement with his machinegun blazing with two Czech children tied to his belt so that the Czechs could not return his fire. The Germans slaughtered all residents in the streets in which firing occurred, and when they finally retreated under the surrender armistice drunken SS troops fired indiscriminately into the crowd.