SEVERE HARDSHIPS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 July 1941, Page 5

SEVERE HARDSHIPS

SUFFERED BY GERMANS WATER AND OIL SHORTAGE. ALLEGED NAZI SHOOTING OF PRISONERS. LONDON, July 30. According to a “Times” correspondent on the German 'frontier, letters from German soldiers paint a harrowing picture of the unprecedented demands on their endurance imposed by the swamps in the northern sector and the parched, sunbaked plains of the central sector, where they suffer a torturing thirst which human .ingenuity so far has been unable to combat. The waterholes, soldiers say, are undrinkable because of germs, and the wells, where they exist at farmhouses, are only family-size and are inadequate for the hundreds of thousands of parched soldiers. Buckets, ropes and pumps have invariably been destroyed, and well water has been rendered undrinkable. It is too impure even .for washing, cooking or shaving. One soldier said: “The enemy is destroying' everything, even clothing, to prevent anything useful falling into our hands. • This accursed thirst plagues one to death, and everywhere there is the nauseating stench of burnt flesh, animal and human.” The Moscow radio says that the Red Air Force has scattered passes along the German lines permitting the German troops to give themselves up to the Russians. One deserter said that discontent among the Germans is growing as their losses become heavier. His battalion has already had its third commander, the other two having been killed. The Moscow radio added that more and more of the passes were being found on prisoners and German dead. It is officially announced in Moscow that documents captured from a German infantry regiment reveal the Germans’ difficulties in bringing up provisions for the soldiers. Other documents reveal that secret orders have been issued to officers to shoot all Russian prisoners except young and highly-skilled ones, who will be sent to Germany to work in the factories. “Germany is using oil at the rate of 2,000,000 tons a month, and only 20 per cent of this can be produced internally,” says the Russian Army newspaper, “Red Star.” “The destruction of Ploesti

and the Rumanian communications is expediting the Nazi collapse. Germany’s oil reserves will very soon be exhausted.”