VILE SAVAGERY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 January 1944, Page 3

VILE SAVAGERY

/ — OF UNVADING GERMAN HORDES TERRIBLE DETAILS OF MASSACRE & TORTURE. MANY VILLAGERS BURNT IN THEIR MOMES. (By Telegraph—Press Association— Copyright) LONDON, January 6. “Whole colonies of Russians have been reduced to stone-age conditions since the Germans swept over their areas,” says an “Izvestia” war correspondent following upon a tour of the ravaged territories which are now being liberated. The correspondent relates that in three days of horse riding in the Novograd Volynsk area he did not see a single person, house or village, as dozens of villages had been systematically burnt down and their inhabitants burnt in batches. In the village of Cheltnets the inhabitants were locked in large stables, which were set on fire, and at Domanovich 250 children were herded into the school and burnt to death. A memorial mound has already been erected to the children, reading “Cursed, forever be the German butchers.” Peasants were driven into their own wooden houses, the doors nailed up and the buildings set on fire. Whole families perished, from a 100-year-old grandfather to a few days’ old baby. Bedridden and sick people were pinned to their beds by German bayonets before their homes were set on fire.. Those who escaped the systematic terror are now living in huge undergrounds burrows. The correspondent met a man whose tongue had been cut out and a girl whose eyes had been put out with needles.