HEAVY PRESSURE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 20 February 1942, Page 4

HEAVY PRESSURE

BEING EXERTED BV RUSSIANS BERLIN ADMISSION. BIG BATTLE ON LENINGRAD FRONT. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) Received This Day, 1.15 p.m.) LONDON, February 19. The Berlin radio reports that the Russians are exerting heavy pressure against the Germans encircling Leningrad, and says the Russians yesterday, after extensive artillery and air bombardment, launched a particularly violent attack and employed very heavy tanks. The battle swayed back and forth as the desperately stubborn Germans repulsed the attacks. The battle is still continuing. KRESTY LIBERATED MOST WESTERLY RUSSIAN TOWN. SO FAR MENTIONED BY SOVIET. (Received This Day, 1.15 p.m.) LONDON, February 19. The Russians have- liberated Kresty, in the Velij district, reports a Moscow despatch. Kresty is the most westerly town the Russians so far have mentioned as having been liberated. Another Moscow message reports that Dutch soldiers taken to Germany, as “volunteers” for war work in factories, have been captured on the Leningrad front. GERMAN APPEAL TO OVERTHROW HITLER REGIME. STORIES OF NAZI ATROCITIES. (Received This Day, 1.15 p.m.) NEW YORK, February 19. The “New York Times” has received photostatic copies of an appeal by German prisoners in Russia to their comrades in Germany to overthrow the Hitler regime and build a free Germany. The photostat bears the original signatures of the prisoners. The “Herald-Tribune’s” Moscow correspondent, after visiting the reoccupied districts, tells a heartrending story of inhuman German atrocities against civilians. He describes how the Nazis in one Russian village shot, hanged or forced to freeze to death 4.949 men, women and children. The correspondent found documentary proof that the Nazis in fifty-nine inhabited places destroyed 2,886 houses also 1,700 farm buildings. In the village of Gorodishe the Germans shot all the 276 patients of an insane asylum. In another town they suffocated patients in a hospital. In some villages bodies were found still hanging on gallows, including numerous women.