TRAGIC STORIES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 11 October 1943, Page 3

TRAGIC STORIES

I J) OF GERMAN ATROCITIES IN ITALY • BESTIAL CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN AND CHILDREN. VICTIMS MAIMED & MURDERED. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 9.35 a.m.) RUGBY, October 10. As the British troops advance towards the Volturno River, tragic stories are being told by the populations of 'villages beyond Naples, says a war correspondent. “I spoke today to a doctor who had been treating a young mother who was shot in her right hand,” he continues. “She told me the Germans had taken her into their officers’, mess and shot her through the hand with a i revolver and killed her child. The Italians sent their womenfolk away to the hills because of the demands the Germans were making on them. In one village I heard of two women who had been raped by German soldiers who afterwards cut their throats. Such stories of German brutality abound. There is one well-authenticated case of 20 Italians being buried up to their waists and their hands, cut off before they were shot. There is another of a child’s hands being severed, while in one village through which I passed, a German soldier, complaining about food he had been given, burned down the house of his host. It is small wonder that these peasants, who had little enough sympathy with Fascism, are now helping all they can to rid the country of the enemy.”