NAZI HECATOMB

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 February 1943, Page 3

NAZI HECATOMB

SCENES IN STALINGRAD

CATASTROPHIC GERMAN DEFEAT.

SURRENDERS OF GENERALS

(By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, February 1. Columns of half-starved, tattered prisoners streaming across the snow—generals, colonels and privates—away from the hecatomb of ejrly a quarter of a million Axis soldiers is one picture coming from Stalingrad after the surrender of , Field-Marshal Paulus and his remnants in what “The limes” in an editorial describes as the most catastrophic German defeat since 1918. Correspondents describe the frozen countryside as being littered with thousands of German dead —many of whom are still uncounted —wrecked tanks, guns, planes and lorries, and skeletons of horses which the Germans ate after their supply broke down. A captive German staff officer who was gazing on this scene said to a general, “This is a road of shame for the German Army.” One of the grimmest scenes in the death-stricken land is the hill to the west of Stalingrad where occurred the greatest slaughter of the whole battle, scores of thousands of Germans being killed. Picked storm troops defended the hill to the last. The Russians reported that every one of the dead had two or three iron crosses pinned to the breast. The combatants here and elsewhere so intermingled that German bombers killed many of their own men mistaking them for Russians. The Moscow correspondent of “The Times” says that grey-haired MajorGeneral von Drebber, commanding the 297th Infantry Division, after surrendering with a small detachment, was asked by a Russian colonel, “Where are your soldiers?” Von Drebber replied, “They are all alive in your hands. I ordered a surrender, but they forestalled my command.” Then, in what a Russian eyewitness describes as an atmosphere of gaiety, von Drebber asked whether he was the first general to surrender at Stalingrad. He was told, “Yes; but not the last.” General Dubois, commanding the 44th Infantry Division, refused to talk, but his reserve broke down when he heard he was not the first to surrender. The Moscow radio states that General von Brethern, who surrendered with the 297th German Division at Stalingrad, said: “From the moment we were trapped many of' our generals

thought it was senseless and criminal to go on resisting, but the Fuehrer would not accept our opinion.” Till Paulus surrendered on the 70th day of the encirclement solitary German planes futilely flew over the small area of resistance dropping supplies, which often fell to the Russians. Thus, on the tenth anniversary of Hitler coming to. power, the Russians received parcels of chocolate from the Germans.