GERMAN ATROCITY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25306, 17 August 1943, Page 3

GERMAN ATROCITY

MASS MURDER OF RUSSIANS PRISON GRAVES OPENED (Rec. 11.15 p.m.) LONDON. Aug. 16. British correspondents in Russia have just visited Orel, where they saw one of the most terrible sights of the war—the opening of one of Hitler’s mass graves in which the Germans have dumped the bodies of hundreds of nameless Russian soldiers and civilians of both sexes, whom the authorities declare were massmurdered in cold blood. “ I shall carry the horrible vision all my life,” says the British United Press correspondent. “ There is something stupefying about mass murder, but before our eyes lay the first results of the exhumations. This grave behind the central prison in Orel is 70 yards long, of which only 35 yards has so far been dug up. The Russians from this section exhumed the bodies of about 300 Russian soldiers as well as a number of women.”

The correspondent of the Exchange Telegraph says that, according to the German register in the prison hospital, 1800 people are buried in this prison, but, judged by. the length of the 10 graves, the real number is believed to be about 5000. The Gestapo converted the entire exercise yard into a cemetery for their victims. The graves were so full that the outlines of the top layers of corpses were vaguely visible like the limbs of sleepers under blankets.

Professor Dmitry Voropayev, of the Soviet Atrocities Commission,' carried out the exhumations with a team of assistants wearing rubber gloves and aprons. Professor Voropayev, explaining the procedure of the Gestapo executions, said the Germans stood the Russian men against a wall and shot them through the head. The women were forced to lie down facing the ground, after which they were shot through the base of the skull. The correspondents agree that the graves outside the city contain the bodies of Russians murdered as recently as June, and those in the prison contain last year’s victims. The Russians are exhuming the bodies, hoping to establish the identity of the victims and how they were killed, and also the names of the murderers.