WHOLESALE MURDER

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 March 1943, Page 3

WHOLESALE MURDER

ONLY 137 PEOPLE LEFT IN RZHEV OUT OF POPULATION OF 65,000 OTHERS MURDERED OR DRIVEN WEST. HORRORS OF NAZI SAVAGERY. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 9.45 a.m.) LONDON, March 14. “The retreating German army is carrying out Hitler’s order to exterminate the Russian people,” says the “Daily Express” Moscow correspondent, who has visited the Don steppes, Stalingrad, Kharkov and Rzhev. “It is the same everywhere —smashed cities are empty except for a handful who survived labour gangs, typhus, execution and starvation. “The Soviet troops marching into Rzhev might well have thought they were passing through the ruins of a forgotten civilisation. Nothing moved, nothing was alive. Then someone heard a man calling from a church, to warn the soldiers that it was mined. After sappers had removed the mines, the troops released 137 people locked in the church. They were all who remained from Rzhev’s pre-war population of 65,000. Thousands had died of starvation or been killed. Others had been driven west. The retreating Germans took all able to walk with them.” The correspondent says he visited the home of one Russian family, which ignored the German order to report to the church. The mother, her sisters, boys aged fourteen and eleven and a girl aged four had all been shot, and lay in grotesque, pathetic attitudes.