GERMAN ATROCITIES

Waikato Times, Volume 132, Issue 22137, 8 September 1943, Page 5

GERMAN ATROCITIES

TRAGEDY IN RUSSIA GREAT DESOLATION LONDON, Sept. 6 The Moscow correspondent of the Exchange Telegraph Company says the Nazi terror in the Donetz Basin equals the atrocities committed anvwnere in Russia. The Red Army on entering Voroshilovgrad found a huge stone well filled with men and women ever whom petrol had been poured and ignited. At Debaltsevo 700 citizens gathered for evacuation to Germany were mowed down with machine-guns when the Red Army entered a near by village. A war correspondent cf the British United Press, Mr Henry Shapirov, who is with the Red Army, writes that desolation and tiagedy pervade the cncc-l'ertiie soil of the Ukraine. Fifty per cent of the fields lie fallow. Wrecks of tanks and armoured cars and twisted and tortured heaps of rusting metal lie in fantastic shapes in deserted villages in the Bielgorod and Kharkov area. “There are no young men left in these villages,” the correspondent says. “I met only the merest handful cf old men and a sprinkling of invalids who were exempt from military service. All the young men—and the not so young, too—have gone to the war. Women in Dug-outs “For weeks past the women lived in dug-outs while the war ranged around, them. They are gathering a meagre harvest of corn and sunflower seeds. Seme, with children helping, are trying to mend the roads and give the villages real life again. Enormous tracts have been neglected owing to the lack of men and machines and the few remaining workers of what was once Russia’s most mechanised agricultural area have been reduced to the most primitive methods of cultivation.

“Tangied ruin lay along both sides of the road to Kharkov,” he continues, “and the human debris moved along the centre. Women and children pushed wheelbarrows or pulled 1 *ttie two-wheeled carts loaded with a few miserable belongings that they had salvaged from the ruins cf their homes. They were nearly all barefoot. “Bodies lay about in fields near by. A great tank battle had passed this way only two days before, and when we passed there were still warm hulks of shattered tanks by the roadside.”