ROTTERDAM HORRORS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 July 1940, Page 5

ROTTERDAM HORRORS

THIRTY THOUSAND KILLED DESTRUCTION OF CITY BY NAZIS. NUMBER OF GIRLS SURVIVE IN CELLAR. (By Telegraph—Press Association —Copyright) LONDON, July 11. More than three weeks after the German bombardment of Rotterdam on May 14, in which 30,000 civilians were killed and 20,000 injured, rescuers discovered a number of girls in the cellar of a chocolate factory, where they subsisted on chocolates, biscuits and lemonade.

Information from Dutch circles in London confirm previous reports of the destruction of Rotterdam. For three hours scores of German dive bombers systematically rained heavy bombs on the unprotected open city. Only three buildings were left standing in nearly two square miles. Three weeks after the bombardment corpses were still being recovered from the ruins at the rate of 300 a day. Thirteen hundred lorries are still employed daily in clearing away wreckage. The Germans issued a statement in which they said that only 300 were killed. In this connection a Dutch clergyman at a commemoration service said: "I commemorate Rotterdam’s 300 dead, of whom 800 fell in my parish alone.”