RJEV WIPED OUT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 87, Issue 62, 16 March 1943, Page 5

RJEV WIPED OUT

POPULACE EXTERMINATED BY GERMANS Recd. 6 p.m. London, March 14. ‘The retreating German army is carrying out Hitler’s order to exterminate the Russian people," says the Daily Express’ Moscow correspondent. “I visited the Don stepper, Stalingrad, Kharkov and Rjev. It was the same everywhere. The smashed cities are ■empty except for a handful who survived the labour gangs, typhus, execution and starvation.

“The Soviet troops marching intc. Rjev might well have thought they were passing through the ruins of a forgotten civilisation. Nothing moved and nothing seemed alive. Then someone heard a man calling from a church to warn the soldiers that it was mined. After sappers had removed the mines the troops released 137 people locked in the church. They were all who remained from Rjev’s pre-war population of 65,000. Thousands had died of starvation or had been killed; others had been driven west. The retreating Germans took ail who were able to walk with them.” The correspondent says he visited the home of one Russian family which ignored a German order to report to the church. The mother, her sisters, two boys aged 14 and 11. and a girt aged four had all been shot and lay in grotesque, pathetic attitudes.