AUSTRIAN BARBARITY.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 14596, 4 May 1918, Page 10

AUSTRIAN BARBARITY.

SEMI-STARVATION OF ITALIAN PRISONERS.

MILAN, February 12. Put>Kc feeling m Italy has been deeply stirred at the terrible state of the Italian prisoners who are reaching , this country again from Austrian camps. Several thousands have already arrived, all of them physical wrecks, while nearly every m'au among the 480 composing the last convoy of a few days ago whs found to be m an advanced stage of consumption. , They fully confirm the horrible accounts publ.shed. from time to time of the humiliations, ill-treatment and semistarvation to which the Italian captives were subjected m the centration camps, and tell how at Mauthausen, which accommodates 60,000, and is generally shown to visitors as a model of efficient organisation,, there were actually 3000 sick m hospital, with a daily average of mortality' at the rate of 40 cases from tuberculosis alone. . . '

They further narrate that immediately after they themselves were .taken prisoners they were stripped naked under a pretence of disinfection and made to don old clothes, seemingly ripped off the corpses of the slain. Afterwards they were marched, down 'a long road on either side of which were lined 'with museum-like precision all the dead bodies of Italian soldiers collected from the neighboring fields*

The Italian press demands reprisals, and is loud m its condemnation of the excessive indulgence shown here towards interned enemy prisoners. . '