HORROR IN RUSSIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25458, 12 February 1944, Page 5

HORROR IN RUSSIA

CHILDREN EXECUTED BY NAZIS GULLY FILLED WITH BODIES (Rec. 0.30 a.m.) LONDON, Feb. 11. The bodies of 128 children, aged from 2£ to 16 years, who had not only been shot but had had their skulls and bones broken, were discovered by Russian troops who reoccupied the village of Mikhailovka, near Dnepropetrovsk, reports the Moscow radio. A Russian boy, Mitya Kozub, the sole survivor of the local children’s home, declared that he witnessed the Germans shooting his companions. The boy took Russian soldiers to the scene of the execution, which is a gully beyond the village. Excavations were started, and in the cold light of a January day it was discovered that the whole gully was filled with the children’s bodies.' A protocol drawn up on the spot and signed by Mitya Kozub and leading guards officers, detailed the massacre. “ Sick and little children,” it stated, “were driven off in carts and the rest were taken on foot. The Germans snatched their victims, threw them into a ditch, and shot them with tommyfuns. We found the bodies piled up aphazardly.”